Adventures in Correspondentland (7 page)

Catholic protesters, carrying placards featuring the silhouette of an Orangeman with a no-entry sign superimposed, would have assembled at the other end of the main street, or have been
hemmed in on side roads so they could not assault the marchers.

Playing their own part in this pageantry, the police would be occupying the middle ground, clad in black riot gear and standing alongside their battleship-grey Land Rovers parked bumper to bumper to form a barrier. Then, at the appointed hour, the bands would strike up to the pounding beat of a huge Lambeg drum, while the protesters would hurl abuse and missiles. In one country village, it was Lucozade bottles. In another, at the sound of a high-pitched whistle, protesters hurled hundreds of golf balls, most of which were eagerly scooped up by the policemen, who presumably planned to tee off with them as soon as the marching season was over, and with it their ban on leave. Along the most contentious parade routes, it was Molotov cocktails and occasionally gunfire.

Of all the sectarian interfaces, none was angrier than Drumcree. Contentious parade routes normally skirted predominantly Catholic neighbourhoods, but here it passed right through the middle. Held on the Sunday before the traditional 12 July celebrations, which marked King William's victory at the Battle of the Boyne, Orangemen set out from their fortress-like lodge in the centre of nearby Portadown. Then they marched out of town to the steepled church at Drumcree set in rolling hills that evoked the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams rather than the high-pitched squeal of the piccolos and flutes.

After holding a service to commemorate the Battle of the Somme, the Orangemen returned to the centre of town via the Garvaghy Road, which was lined on either side by Catholic housing estates. It was there that trouble usually flared, and by the mid-1990s the Garvaghy Road had become Northern Ireland's most active sectarian fault line. In 1995, the police banned the parade, only to back down when thousands of Orangemen amassed on
the hills around Drumcree and threatened to hammer through the army barricades using a bulldozer and petrol tankers.

My own Drumcree initiation came two years later, in 1997, shortly after Tony Blair had taken office, when the new Labour government indicated to the local Catholic residents' group that the parade would again be banned. With another stand-off certain to ensue, BBC safety advisers issued us with hard-hats, protective goggles, fire extinguishers and even flameproof underwear. For fear of identifying any of our Irish colleagues as Protestant or Catholic, we were also warned not to use their Christian names. A careless ‘Seamus' or ‘Billy' uttered on the wrong side of the battlelines could put them in real danger.

That weekend, we all expected serious trouble, but there was still something shocking about the outburst of violent fury from local residents when police Land Rovers screamed onto the Garvaghy Road in the pre-dawn hours to pave the way for Orangemen and formed an impregnable phalanx of armoured vehicles on either side of the parade route. Calling it the ‘least worst option', the government and security forces had decided the Portadown Orangemen should be allowed to march, whatever the backlash from the local Catholic community.

It was fearsome. After the parade passed by, and the police and soldiers beat a hurried retreat, they were chased down the Garvaghy Road by hundreds of youths hurling rocks, petrol bombs and what we later found out were bottles filled with sulphuric acid. One of our cameramen thought he was standing in a puddle of water. Then his shoes started to melt. Through the melee of exploding Molotov cocktails and fizzing baton rounds, the Orangemen could be seen in the mid-distance marching beneath a ceremonial archway bedecked with Loyalist colours
that marked the line of demarcation between Catholic Portadown and Protestant Portadown. The raucous cheers that greeted them could just be heard above the din.

True to the fault-line effect of Drumcree, aftershocks spread throughout the province. Still wearing our flameproof undies, we headed to Londonderry – in keeping with the BBC rule, I will call it Londonderry first, then Derry thereafter – where trouble was sure to flare. Parking a short walk from the Bogside, so as to avoid having our car hijacked by rioters, we walked down to a patch of land near the famed ‘Free Derry' sign, where Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin's chief negotiator and an IRA leader in Derry on Bloody Sunday, was addressing a crowd of supporters. ‘The place to be demanding justice is on the streets confronting your opponents,' he yelled, which was an invitation for absolute mayhem. A new Battle of the Bogside erupted soon after and raged through the night.

At the front, teenagers sprinted down the street like javelin throwers, straining for every extra yard, and hurled petrol bombs at the police and army. In the rear, small boys, some as young as nine or ten, carried milk crates full of ready-made Molotov cocktails up to the main battlelines. But the ringmasters were the IRA men disguised in woollen ski masks, with holes for the eyes and mouths, who turned the violence on and off like a stopcock.

Away from all the rioting, there was fun to be had during the marching season and especially at Drumcree. At times, it took on the feel of a journalistic folk festival, a sort of Glastonbury for trouble-seeking correspondents, who set up camp on the nationalist side of the barbed-wire fences erected by the Royal Engineers, close to the local Gaelic football club. Knowing they could end up there for a week or so, news teams arrived in campervans or pulling caravans, well stocked with beer, whisky and other, more
illicit, forms of recreational entertainment. Though Portadown became for weeks the focus of a massive security clampdown, from the journalists' mobile homes it was common to hear the sound of laughter and sniff the faint whiff of hash.

Long into the night, reporters would trade marching-season war stories. The Northern Ireland veterans had the best yarns and were also gifted anecdotalists. But at least I could tell of once being confronted by an irate Orangeman who threatened to spear me with a ceremonial pike, and also of coming close to having my posterior peppered with bullets. We had been filming a paramilitary show of force on a Loyalist estate off the Shankill Road, another ritual of the marching season, where a teenage honour guard fired a volley into the air to the delight of a baying crowd. On this occasion, however, the sub-machine gun proved way too heavy for the young Loyalist doing the firing, and, rather like a weightlifter struggling under the load of a giant barbell, his knees started to buckle. With each stumble and stagger, the trajectory of the bullets got lower and lower, and we got closer and closer to the ground, rueing our decision to film from directly in front of the firing squad.

Then part of the global conflict circuit, Drumcree attracted the world's big-name, international war correspondents, such as Christiane Amanpour of CNN, which added a certain frisson. But by far my favourite international blow-in was an Australian reporter who worked for Downtown Radio, one of the commercial stations in Belfast. His hourly updates, delivered in a thick Waltzing Matilda twang, made the Garvaghy Road sound like a side street in Broken Hill. What else could we call him but ‘Crocodile Drumcree'?

However violent, what was always remarkable about the
marching season was how quickly Northern Ireland rebounded. Although many journalists saw in the rubble of burnt-out buildings and the charred carcasses of hijacked buses images that illustrated perfectly the sorry state of the peace process, it was another overused cliché, ‘It's always darkest before the dawn', that often had the ring of truth. Just 15 days after my first Drumcree in 1997, the IRA announced its second ceasefire. Soon after, Sinn Féin entered a fresh round of peace talks.

In October, politicians of all shades, from the representatives of the IRA to the spokesmen of the Loyalist paramilitaries, from Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party to John Hume's nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), met at Stormont for the first all-party talks in 25 years. Then, in November, Gerry Adams led a Sinn Féin delegation to Downing Street, the first time that a Republican leader had gone through the door of Number 10 since the days of Michael Collins and David Lloyd George. Just six years earlier, the IRA had fired mortar bombs that exploded in the back garden. Now, Gerry Adams, who was still a member of the IRA's Army Council, entered in a tie, a suit and a dark woollen overcoat, the bland attire that a visiting Belgian finance minister might wear.

By the following Easter, 1998, a peace deal had been hammered out, and in a corner of Britain where dark adjectives such as ‘black' or ‘bloody' had attached themselves to the gloomiest days of the Troubles, there was finally a Friday that could truly be described as ‘good'. On the night of the Good Friday Agreement, few things were more touching than the sight of a long line of swooning journalists, men as well as women, waiting for Senator George Mitchell, Bill Clinton's peace envoy and the chairman of the talks, to autograph copies of the peace
deal. The most self-effacing of men, Mitchell was embarrassed by the fuss and wanted nothing more, after months of fraught negotiations, than to head back to America to see his young son. But his fingerprints were all over Northern Ireland's historic compromise, and before he could make a dash for the airport everybody wanted his signature on it, too.

Normally at Easter, the darkness of Christ's crucifixion on the Friday gives way to the celebration of his resurrection on the Sunday, but in parts of Northern Ireland that weekend this holy liturgy was turned on its head. The optimism of Friday was followed by uncertainty and resentment. On Easter morning in Crossmaglen, in the heart of IRA bandit country, the talk was of betrayal, with Gerry Adams cast as Judas.

Hundreds of dissident Republicans, many of them active IRA volunteers from the feared County Armagh Brigade, gathered in St Patrick's churchyard for their annual commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising. There, amidst tombstones etched with the names of dead IRA men, they vowed to continue their armed struggle. Marching briskly to the centre of the graveyard, a man dressed in a combat jacket, balaclava and black beret appeared out of nowhere to address the crowd. ‘There will be no settlement,' he shouted into a microphone as a British Army Lynx helicopter circled overhead. ‘There'll be no peace for this country until those people up there leave this country.'

Another dissident Republican put it even more bluntly: ‘To say this deal is transitional towards a united Ireland is bollocks.'

The British Army watchtowers of County Armagh; the IRA warning signs at the side of the country roads reading ‘Sniper at Work'; newly painted murals on the gables in the Loyalist areas of Belfast that now included slogans such as ‘Compromise and
conflict' alongside the usual imagery of gun-toting paramilitaries; former prisoners who spoke eloquently of ‘new paradigms' and genuinely seemed to mean it: all this formed the backdrop to the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, which would essentially decide the question asked intermittently since Partition in 1921 – could the people of Northern Ireland ever peacefully co-exist, and was that truly their desire?

The temptation was to cover the referendum campaign as if it were a straightforward choice between the future and the past, of reformers against rejectionists. However, in a country where history was ever present, it was far more convoluted. As one would expect, the high priest of the ‘No' campaign was the Reverend Ian Paisley, whose most famous political catchphrase, delivered in a thunderous voice at maximum volume, was ‘ULSTER SAYS NO'. (At a press conference in the lead-up to the vote, I asked the Big Man, as Reverend Paisley was known, some smart-arse question. ‘Where are you from?' he bellowed. ‘The BBC,' I timidly replied. ‘I THOUGHT SO,' he roared back.) Yet it also included more quietly spoken victims of the Troubles – mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters – who detested the idea of watching the murderers of their relatives released from prison under the terms of the peace deal.

The ‘Yes' campaign, meanwhile, was run with the help of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising executives dressed in Paul Smith suits, although its strongest advocates included some of Northern Ireland's most psychotic murderers and thugs. The poster boy for former Loyalist paramilitaries, for instance, was Michael Stone, a Charles Manson lookalike and notorious assassin. The last time most people in Northern Ireland had seen him was in some of the most infamous television footage from the Troubles,
which showed him mounting a lone gun and grenade attack at the funeral in Milltown cemetery of three IRA members shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.

In the final week of campaigning, however, Stone was allowed out on day release from Maze Prison to appear at a ‘Yes' rally organised by former paramilitaries at the Ulster Hall. To cries of ‘We want Michael! We want Michael!' and with a banner draped from the balcony declaring that ‘Michael Says Yes', Stone was greeted with such rapture that it made a mockery of the claim that a ‘Yes' vote equated automatically with progress.

Days before the Good Friday Agreement, Tony Blair had declared it was no time for soundbites, then revealed that he could feel the ‘hand of history' virtually massaging his shoulders. But although a prime architect of the agreement, his ‘Hi, guys' trendy vicar routine always grated on the unionist leaders, who were men of Victorian manners and sensibilities. A member of the band Ugly Rumours at college, who strummed on his electric guitar in his upstairs flat in Downing Street, Blair may have thought of himself as a politician with rock-star charisma. But in the final days of campaigning, he was completely blown away by a rock star with rock-star charisma.

Bono arrived in Belfast, with The Edge by his side, to perform at a concert intended to arrest a last-minute slump in support for the ‘Yes' campaign. Somehow, he also managed to persuade David Trimble, the buttoned-down leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, and John Hume of the SDLP to appear with him on stage. In choosing what to sing, Bono had considered the merits of John Lennon's ‘Give Peace a Chance' (too obvious), Bob Marley's ‘One Love' (too obscure), The Beatles' ‘We Can Work it Out' (too corny) and even Rolf Harris's ‘Two Little Boys' (too silly). Eventually, he
settled on the 1969 love song that Lennon had written for Yoko Ono, ‘Don't Let Me Down', with the lines of the chorus changed so they now read ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance'.