Ordinary People in Extraordinary Circumstances

My copy of the book mentioned in this entry.

In 1995, several years before I became a teacher, I spent part of my honeymoon in County Donegal. Curious about the North, my wife and I spent our last morning in the area wandering around Derry without any guide to help us interpret what we were seeing. A picture I took that day featured a graffiti stencil of a man aiming a machine gun. Next to it, someone had written, "Give Peace a Chance." At the border of that time, a military guard station still stood, but it was unoccupied. We came and went with ease.

Everyone we met around Donegal recommended books. There was a collection of short stories by young Northern Irish writers the name of which I no longer remember; there was a Colm Toibin book of travel writing about walking along the Northern Irish border; and there was the volume simply entitled "The Troubles" by Tim Pat Coogan.

When I got back to New York, stumbling through Mercer Street Books and the Strand looking for gently used copies of those three books, I found instead the then-new May the Lord in His Mercy Be Kind to Belfast by Tony Parker. The book lets ordinary citizens of Belfast tell their own stories. It became the book by which my own study of Northern Ireland began, and it has become a great teaching tool for me ever since the teaching of this history became a part of my life. In it, people of all ages relate the facts and stories about who they are. They often reveal more about themselves and their place and time by what they don't mean to even say, or by what they leave unsaid.

Alan McBride's Story

The front worksheet from a packet used to introduce students to the story of Alan McBride.

Facing History's Karen Murphy introduced us to the story of Alan McBride, and we have been teaching about him as long as we have been teaching about Northern Ireland. McBride is a Protestant whose wife was killed in the Shankill Road bombing in 1993. After working through the resulting anger and sadness, McBride dedicated his life to causes that support victims and family members of victims from both sides of the Troubles.

Here is what Facing History has to say about McBride and his work today:

"Today, McBride is a director of the North Belfast WAVE Trauma Centre and a board member for Healing Through Remembering, a nonsectarian organization dedicated to facing the past and finding a way for Northern Irish people to live together in light of what happened, not in spite of it. Despite all of McBride's work and his activism, he does not believe that he should forgive (bomber) Sean Kelly, or that he needs to."

Unlike the South African Truth-and-Reconciliation idea, where political justifications were a requirement for amnesty, McBride expresses the idea that apologies need to come without a "but you must understand." 

"I don't have to understand anything," he says of the bombing. "It was wrong."

Some of McBride's work with the WAVE Trauma Centre can be seen in the 2004 Showtime documentary What's Going On: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in Northern Ireland, narrated by Meg Ryan, which is available through Social Studies School Service. The documentary focuses especially on Protestant and Catholic youth, and on early 21st century attempts at neighborhood and educational integration in Belfast.

We are honored to say that--thanks to our Fund for Teachers grant--we will be meeting with McBride at the WAVE Trauma Centre in August.

Trying not to use the word "Terrorism"

"Both sides are right, but both sides murder.
I give up. Why can't they?
I must not think bad thoughts." -- X, "I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts"

Merriam Webster defines "Terrorism" as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion." By this definition, a government or an official army might be just as easily judged as "terrorist" as the non-governmental groups that more commonly get labelled as such.

In the last fifty years, the American press has been more apt to use the word if the perpetrators purport to be Islamic. This is in spite of the fact that no sane Muslim would see acts of random violence against civilians as in any way following the dictates of their religion. Nevertheless, an incident such as the San Bernardino attacks is easily labelled as terrorism in the U.S. press, while the equally barbaric recent murders in Portland perpetrated by an anti-Muslim attacker are less likely to be labelled "terrorism" despite the fact that they were clearly motivated by a man using intimidation as a means of coercion.

In Maurice Walsh's Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, Walsh quotes Dan Breen of the "old I.R.A." as saying that his companion Sean Treacy convinced him that murder was necessary if one wanted to start a war. And so the Irish War of Independence started with the ambush and murder of two Royal Irish Constabulary policemen in 1919. Walsh goes on to quote Breen's well-known regret that it had been only two murdered, and not the expected six. This action was condemned by the Catholic Church and by many fellow Nationalists, and yet it achieved Breen's and Treacy's aims. Do we call this action terrorism or war?

The provisional I.R.A. bombings of "Bloody Friday" in 1972 fit any definition of terrorism and were freely called as much in the press. But what about the actions of British paratroopers during the Civil Rights/Anti-Internment March earlier in that same year that came to be called "Bloody Sunday"? When the soldiers used real bullets on the protestors was that not "the systematic use of terror... as a means of coercion"? Too often, the word "terrorism" is only used when those not in power do terrible things, while terrible things done by the powerful are, at most, "crimes."

In Northern Ireland, even parades could be seen as a means to instill fear and coerce obedience, a notion that can be baffling to our students when they look at the negotiations before the Good Friday Agreement: "Parades? What's so bad about parades?"

In South Africa's Apartheid Period (which we teach just prior to teaching about the Troubles), police murders of protestors were seen as "police brutality" at most, while black paramilitaries were commonly referred to as "terrorists" as can be observed in the T.R.C. testimony of police officers documented in the Bill Moyers documentary Facing the Truth. The T.R.C. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) offered amnesty for previous crimes as long as the perpetrators told the truth about their crime and proved that the crime was "politically motivated" by the circumstances of the Apartheid system.

The 1980's Los Angeles punk band X was right to fret about murder by those who see themselves as "right." Murder is wrong. Murder is terrorism. We need to get out of the habit of ascribing that word only to certain types of murder and not to others.

In helping students look at the Irish situation both before and after partition, I try not to use the loaded word "terrorism" at all while at the same time supporting a message that the murder of civilians for any reason is wrong.

Gerrymandering and Unrest in Derry

The cannons along the 17th century Derry Walls, built to defend English and Scottish settlers from the Irish natives.

"(In the 1920's) an ingenious new arrangement (was) designed to ensure that around 7,500 Unionist voters returned twelve councillors while 10,000 nationalist voters returned only eight." -- from McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles.

One feature of troubled democracies is gerrymandering, where political districts are carved out in illogical shapes in order to disenfranchise one group of voters and empower another group of voters. In the United States, we have recently seen this system favor Republican representation in both Michigan and Pennsylvania despite the fact that both states have more Democratic voters than Republicans. More sinisterly, it has recently been shown that voting districts in Virginia, Alabama and North Carolina pack black voters together into oblong districts in order to limit the political power of an entire race in their state. Just this week, in a 5-4 decision where Justice Thomas uncharacteristically voted with the "liberal" wing, the Supreme Court struck down two districts in North Carolina for precisely this reason. 

I have taught my Civics students to look at voting maps in America for several years. And yet, when teaching about unrest in Northern Ireland's second largest city, I had overlooked this key piece of the puzzle. We in the U.S. tend to think of Northern Ireland as a majority Protestant country, carved out of the island in the 1920's partition for precisely this reason. But Derry--the city of the Derry Walls and The Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday--is a majority Catholic/Nationalist city that was carefully gerrymandered to secure a permanent Protestant/Unionist majority.

The lesson of Derry is that long-term gerrymandering, while securing political power for a few, leads to the sort of frustration, division and unrest that can cause rioting, bloodshed and disorder. When looking at the way that politicians "pack" and "crack" our own district maps in order to suppress democracy in their favor, the history of Derry should make us rightfully nervous.

Why teach about Northern Ireland in the U.S.A.?

In 2011, looking for a new historical case study to help 10th grade students examine difference, division, conflict and reconciliation, several teachers at New Haven Academy began to develop a unit on the Troubles Period and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Aided by Karen Murphy of Facing History & Ourselves, Program Director Meredith Gavrin worked with teachers Saul Fussiner, Joe Corsetti Hicks and David Senderoff to develop this brand new unit in an existing course dealing with issues of prejudice, injustice and judgment in South Africa and, previously, Rwanda. The Northern Ireland content replaced the section on Rwanda. This unit continued to develop after the departure of Corsetti Hicks and has since been expanded on and taught by teachers Peter Kazienko and Kirk Vamvakides as well.

The main focus of this extended unit is the so-called "Troubles" period in the Northern Irish conflict that is usually dated from the Catholic Civil Rights movement around 1968 through the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998.

Why teach about Northern Ireland in an urban school district in Connecticut? We do so because the Good Friday Agreement represents what author Penn Rhodeen has referred to as the most successful example of a political solution to a major conflict in our time. Through dialogue and compromise, Nationalists and Loyalists were able to bring an end to thirty years of police brutality, bombings, kidnappings, murders, gangsterism and riots to forge a lasting--if precarious--period of peace. The warring factions in America's own political system have been far less successful at dialogue and compromise, creating our current situation of mistrust of government and political institutions at home.

In the 2014-'15 school year, Northern Irish teachers Donal O'Hagan and Peter Rogan joined Sean Pettis of the peace organization Corrymeela on a Facing History grant to study at New Haven Academy, forming a strong bond with our staff and providing us with further insight and teaching materials for our developing unit. By the end of that school year, NHA's David Senderoff had secured a separate Facing History grant to connect NHA students with Northern Irish students through Google Hangouts using Chrome Books.

In 2017, Saul Fussiner and David Senderoff received a Fund for Teachers grant to travel to Ireland and Northern Ireland. Through this grant, we hope to gain deeper insight into the long historical background to the Northern Irish Troubles. We want to strengthen the course and help New Haven Academy students to better understand the context in which these events took place. This blog was created to help document our learning throughout this grant and beyond.