Sammy and Betty reared three boys during the time of The Troubles, when Northern Ireland saw fierce fighting during a protracted war. Paul’s friend through primary school, James McPhilemy, was shot in the head just down the road less than a mile from where the Blakelys now live on the border between the South of Ireland and the North. Looking out their windows, they can see the South of Ireland. In the late 1960s, British troops were deployed on the streets of Northern Ireland to bring civil unrest caused by poverty and discrimination of the Catholic population under control, but they only made it worse. They were very intolerant of Irish youth; because of harassment by the soldiers, a lot of the teenagers joined the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, or another Republican group called the INLA, Irish National Liberation Army. “That young lad McPhilemy was one of them” says Betty and was shot when he was sent on a mission to attack the heavily fortified army post right on the river in the tiny village of Clady, only five minutes’ drive from where Betty and Sammy live now. “A British sniper just shot him.”
A lot of nasty things happened. A family of five were coming home from a meal out, when the lady sitting in the middle of the backseat was shot dead as they approached that same outpost. Even the army acknowledged that should never have happened to people not doing anything, just out for the night and coming home again. The sentry said, for one reason or another, the gun went off. The result was that a woman, a mother in her fifties, was dead. But, say Sammy and Betty, she was only one of some 3,500 to die in the conflict that lasted over 30 years.
The beginning of the Troubles dates back to before the 1920s when the British took over the running of the island of Ireland, but the Irish fought to get free from the British. The Irish Republican Army had been fighting for years to get them out of Ireland. In 1916 there was an uprising, but the British quelled it by bringing in tanks and heavy armor. They blew apart the General Post Office in Dublin, in an effort to put down the uprising and overpower the people who had taken over the GPO. A group of people arrested by the British were lined up and shot dead. Even people who were badly wounded were put on chairs and shot.
Back around 1920, negotiations took place that were led by an Irish soldier called Michael Collins and it’s commonly known that when he agreed to six Irish counties in the North remaining in British hands, he thought he had just signed his own death warrant. True to form, within a year, he was shot dead and nobody ever knew who shot him, though most people understood it was the IRA.
Ireland remains split, where 26 of the original 32 counties belong to the Republic of Ireland. Although efforts continue to unite the whole island of Ireland, they are being done largely through peaceful, political means and not through the use of violence.
Many different people were involved in negotiations to find a solution to the fighting, but it was Derry’s own John Hume and his Unionist counterpart David Trimble who were most heavily involved in finding a peaceful path towards resolving things. In the mid-1990s, during another time of negotiations, the two sides still couldn’t agree, so the Americans sent over Senator George Mitchell to act as a mediator. Betty and Sammy agree that Mitchell was a scholar and a gentleman. He did a good job, and it was very successful. A final agreement was reached in 1998, called the Good Friday Agreement. Sammy and Betty say that while what was agreed was largely hard to fully determine, the result was a good outcome for the Nationalist and Unionist people alike, because it brought an end to the violence and a path to equality for everybody.
And all the while, Betty and Sammy were trying to rear their boys through these Troubles. It was a tough job keeping teenagers out of trouble, keeping them from getting involved in the IRA or INLA, when they were being constantly harassed by the young men the English were sending over as soldiers. On reflection those young soldiers were only teenagers too, so it was a bad situation for everyone involved.
From Sammy and Betty’s perspective they would want a united Ireland, a country where all 32 counties fell under Irish control, but not with violence—they are strongly anti-violence. They also understand that the Unionist people in the six counties of the North need to have their rights and wishes respected too. It is enough to have equality for all with no violence. Equality is important as Catholics were very badly discriminated against for decades. During elections in Derry, the owner of a business had one vote, and most businesses were owned by Protestants. Very few Catholics owned anything at all. The Catholics were discriminated against for years in housing, and there was no such thing as social housing and only minimal help from the government. That has all gone now, thankfully, and there’s not the same amount of discrimination. People realize that everybody’s equal to one another, and everyone gets to vote now.
The Blakely’s feel that American Presidents have always had a soft spot for Ireland and wanted to see it prosper. John Kennedy (who was himself Irish Catholic) did a lot for Ireland and Bill Clinton was helpful and supportive to the peace process that lead to The Good Friday Agreement. President Barack Obama came to visit Ireland in 2011. “He has family connections to a wee village called Moneygall in County Offaly in the South,” reports Betty. And now, with the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021, another Irish Catholic will be in the White House.
Other sad casualties of the Troubles included the hunger strikers who died in prison in 1981 when the British Prime Minister, Maggie Thatcher, wouldn’t give in to their demands to be seen as political prisoners, not criminals. Bobby Sands became the most well known of the ten men who died. He survived for 66 days without food before dying at the age of 27 in May of 1981.
There is growing interest in Irish tradition, especially in the Gaelic language, although most people in Ireland don’t have a linguistic clue about it. As an aside, Sammy was in a wheelchair with his arthritis so people suggested that electric gates be installed for him. The man who installed the gates for Sammy and Betty’s house spoke fluent Irish and even wrote all his checks in Irish. He always said that their, “…house wasn’t in the south of Northern Ireland, but in the north of all Ireland!” The family next door started up a Gael school (Gaelscoil in Gaelic), an Irish-speaking school for children; little four year olds pick it up easily. Their grown children, fluent in Irish, have all gone to university. Having the Irish language taught in a Gael school shows some of the great progress that’s been made, but they still have to consider the unionist people from the six counties, who are primarily Protestant and want to remain in the union with Britain. Everyone’s rights have to be respected.
While this account of The Troubles is chiefly from Sammy and Betty’s perspective, they acknowledge that those on the other side would, perhaps, have seen it differently. There was violence and intolerance on both sides.
