A Discussion with Two Students

Remsen and Jocelyn at New Haven Academy

The following is the transcript of a recorded conversation I had with two of the most vocal students from David Senderoff’s section of the sophomore Facing History class. They are both my own students in US History. I wanted to know what they felt they had learned in the class, and whether they felt it was the right pairing of case studies.

Did you guys know anything about Northern Ireland as a country, or as a place with problems, before this class?

Jocelyn: I knew like a very vague background, just because I’m Irish and it’s part of my family history so it comes up now and then, but none of the details, no.

Remsen: I had no prior knowledge of the Troubles, no. (Pause.) I mean we had friends that lived in Ireland. I don’t know where. We marched with County Sligo in the Irish Festival one time, but... (laughs.)

That’s in the Republic, but it’s very near the North. For instance, when Senderoff and I go, the night before we enter the North, we’re staying at the town of Sligo. It’s a fantastic place. That’s actually where William Butler Yeats, the famous Irish poet, is buried.

Remsen: (enthusiastically) Oooh.

Jocelyn: Oh, wow.

What would you say about what you’ve learned this semester? What are you going to take away from it?

Remsen: Well, there’s so much. It’s so interesting. We watched the documentary the other day about how children have coped with it… since. And just comparing it to South Africa and their efforts to reconcile with what they’ve done. It was really interesting. Just this tension that built up for no really good reason... and trying to come to terms with that afterwards was really interesting to hear about.

Jocelyn: I guess one of the biggest takeaways for me was how arbitrary prejudice can be. And how violence just erupts so easily when there’s a bigoted environment present. And I know that’s not new information, but this very much solidified it in my mind.

That’s well said. Maybe your answer would be the same to this, but how would you compare what you found out about South Africa… South Africa itself and also the Truth and Reconciliation Commission... to Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement? How do those things fit together for you?

Jocelyn: I guess the initial events are fundamentally the same. There’s a group in power that wants to claim more power by demonizing a minority group. And that’s present all over the world all the time. That’s just very human. But as far as the Truth and Reconciliation and the Good Friday Agreement… I think those are both outstanding examples of what a group of people are capable of when there’s an understanding that this place has been wronged and there needs to be a change in the environment. That seemed really specific to these two areas. I’ve never heard of anything else like that. Did that make any sense?

Remsen: Yes!

Yeah. Full Disclosure… I don’t know if you knew this... we used to teach South Africa and then Rwanda.

Jocelyn: I took a Yale class on the Rwandan Genocide!

Yes. And then we switched it to Northern Ireland for a number of reasons. Partly because the resolution in Rwanda, which was a thing called Gacaca… they took an ancient African court tradition and they re-started it to judge the crimes of the Rwandan Genocide and we were teaching that… but then a few things started happening for us. One thing was that it wasn’t working that well in Rwanda. We had some contacts in Rwanda who were saying bad things could happen again. This resolution hasn’t really worked out. And some other people were saying it had worked out. It was so complicated. We weren’t sure what to think. And then also, and this is a real thing: because we had done South Africa and then Rwanda, a lot of our black students felt like, “Why do we have to see all this suffering of black people in a row? We don’t see anyone else suffering.” So we said, how can we get this thing... like you enunciated… how can we get this thing of people where there’s been prejudice and now they try to resolve it, in a country where it’s not yet another African country.  That’s when we thought, “Maybe we should do Northern Ireland.”  I knew about Northern Ireland in a way that someone who knows about the world knows about a place, but I didn’t know it deeply at all. So we started looking at it, and that’s what it’s been built from. So I guess my question to you is… South Africa and then Northern Ireland… is this the right two case studies to have in a row?

Remsen: I really like the contrast but also the similarities between the two. Because I definitely recognized, once we started learning about the Troubles, I was like this is a lot like South Africa. And I saw what you were trying to get at, the overarching theme. I liked the contrast, the dichotomy.

Jocelyn: I agree. I think they work well together.

When you learn this history, is it hard for you to empathize with white people who happen to be South African, or with Protestant Unionists who happen to be from Northern Ireland? Is it hard to empathize with people on the side that has the power?

Jocelyn: For me, yes. And I wish it wasn’t. In society, we are taught to identify with the underdog, or the group that’s being discriminated against. And that makes absolute sense, because they’re grappling for the same things we all are. It’s easier to identify with. But it does get dangerous when the lesson is completely apathetic to the group in power, just because it other-izes them… if that’s a word... separates them… and it makes it really hard to look at the situation objectively.

Remsen: I found it harder to have empathy for the white South Africans more than the Protestant Irish people. I guess because the Protestants and Catholics, they both wanted something and they both were clashing, but the White South Africans just came in and overtook this country. But I definitely think there were similarities between how the two groups worked. The cycle of hatred.

It’s an interesting thing about history that the 1600’s were a time when… obviously... the English starting coming to America--Jamestown and all that--and the whites started coming to South Africa and the English--who were already ruling Ireland--were really cracking down in the 1600’s. There was a lot of fighting and there were a lot of things that are remembered in the memory of all Irish people. Because until 1922 and the partition, all of Ireland was ruled by the British. There was something about the 1600’s… people from the powerful countries were coming and taking over the less powerful countries, or they were cracking down on the less powerful countries they already owned. And then there’s a long history since then. Because the class is so short, and the unit is short, there’s a lot more depth that one could go into about what caused this Troubles period and what happened in the Troubles period. And I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to really get all that in, or if that’s even possible. It may be that this class just needs to scratch the surface of it. But there’s a lot of political stuff. I’m realizing more than ever that there are three sides in this. Because there’s the Catholics and there’s the Protestant Unionists and it’s easy to think of the Unionists as being very pro-United Kingdom, because that is what they are fighting for, to stay in the United Kingdom, but they’re not necessarily pro-British exactly. The British troops that came in… there’s a lot of resentment even from the Protestants. Sometimes the British take away control. And after the problems of 1972, we don’t really go into this… the British took power away from the Unionists and said we are going to control Northern Ireland from London, and the Protestants really did not like that, and they fought to take their power back.

Jocelyn: (to Remsen…) Is it easier to empathize with the Protestants because the British are portrayed as the bad guys in the class?

Remsen: Yes. Definitely. Yes.

Jocelyn: I felt the same way.

Oh, that’s interesting. So you perceive that the Protestants are not seen as all-powerful. Good point. They’re more powerful, but they still don’t have complete power. And power-sharing is an interesting thing, because Northern Ireland is a majority Protestant country. So they can say, we are the majority, it’s a democracy; we should have the most power. But if they are going to have peace, they need to share that power. So power-sharing became a thing Catholics were vying for, both in the 1970’s and then again in the Good Friday Agreement.

Jocelyn: Those nuances aren’t touched on at all. And then it becomes really black and white, and that’s dangerous.

It’s true. And another nuance is that Derry, the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland, is actually majority Catholic, but it’s gerrymandered. The Protestants designed the voting districts, so you have a population that has a third more Catholics, but there’s a third more Protestant MP’s… like American Congressmen… representing the city than Catholic MP’s. The Protestants created the districts to create a permanent majority. And we do that in this country as well; there was just this Supreme Court case about gerrymandering political districts in North Carolina…

Jocelyn: John Oliver had a good episode on that.

There’s so much to teach. But how do we fit all that in and still keep it a very dynamic course?

Remsen: I liked the discussions… that there were so many discussions, and not just writing. I love writing, writing is great, but I like how there were more discussions in this class, and they led us on a trek to relate this content to other topics.

What more would you want to know from this course?

Jocelyn: Oh, so much. From the overall course, or about Northern Ireland?

About Northern Ireland.

Jocelyn: I want to know more about the present day implications. How it sort of worked out. And I’m very biased, because my grandparents were ostracized from their little Illinois community because they were a different religion. Obviously, it’s still a present thing, and I want that touched upon I guess. When we learn about topics like this in a history class, it’s viewed through a lens as if it’s in the past, but there’s still so much bigotry left over from this event.

That’s a good note, and it gives me some purpose, because this summer--when I’m there--that’s one of my big questions too. I know from talking to people that it’s way better than it was in the time of the Troubles. But I read the papers from there from time to time, and it sometimes seems like very little has changed, except maybe the prevalence of the violence. But has anything really changed? There are some integrated schools… there are not very many… but you’ve seen that film (Breaking the Cycle of Violence in Northern Ireland) and you can read between the lines. You can see there is still prejudice, people still make these assumptions about one another.

Jocelyn: That film is great. It should stay in the curriculum in the future.

Yes. We’re going to meet that guy… Alan McBride (this is a reference to a person in that film, a Protestant whose wife was killed in the I.R.A.’s Shankill bombing and who went on to become a peace-worker for those traumatized by the Troubles from both sides).

Remsen: Oh, my God. I’m so jealous that we won’t get to take this class next year.

Jocelyn: Take us with you!

I know. It’s great to study a small country, because you get access to these people. The guy who is taking us on the Bloody Sunday tour and the Derry walls tour, his father was killed at Bloody Sunday. Everyone knows everyone else. And a friend that we’re staying with mentioned that his father was once in prison with Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein and earlier the I.R.A., talking about strategy.

Someone: Wow.

There’s also a film that I showed, that not all the sections got a chance to show, about Bloody Friday, when the I.R.A. got huge revenge for Bloody Sunday. You can see it on youtube. The I.R.A. ideal at that time was that they always gave warnings when they were going to bomb, so...

Jocelyn: Was that the tackle shop bombing?

You mean the fish shop? No. That was much later. That was 1993. Bloody Friday was… in ‘72, in the summer, the I.R.A. planted something like twenty-seven bombs in East Belfast.

Jocelyn: Oh, no!

And they gave warnings, because the I.R.A. ideal at that time was that you give warnings, so that you destroy buildings and disrupt commerce, but you try not to kill people. But there were too many bombs going off one after another, and many were hurt and many were killed. It’s a balance. The terrible violence of the Catholic backlash. That shows you the balance, because people were really scared. I lived in England in the late 1970’s and we were really scared of the I.R.A., because they were planting car bombs in London. Both sides have a lot of blood on their hands. And we could get that message across more, especially if we all showed Bloody Friday.

Jocelyn: I want to know more about the I.R.A., because in some of our readings and the films, they were portrayed as the protectors of the Catholic people, but in some they seemed like…

Remsen and Jocelyn: (together…) Terrorists!

Both of those things are true. Also they split, because there was the official I.R.A. and the provisional I.R.A., and the provisional I.R.A. was more violent. They disagreed...

Remsen: We didn’t get into any of this.

If you want a really nuanced picture of a lot of this stuff, there’s a BBC documentary I’ve been watching, called The Troubles from 1981. It was six parts, but it’s separated into eight parts on youtube, each about twenty-seven minutes long. The frustrating thing is that only seven of the eight parts still exist on youtube. Part eight is just gone. So it ends in the mid-1970’s, even though it was made in 1981. So it was made during the Troubles. It’s really in-depth about the period… there’s also background information… but it’s really in-depth about the period from 1968 to 1981. There’s so many new things I learned. For instance, I learned that event in 1969, where the Catholics were throwing the bottle bombs, the Battle of the Bogside, didn’t just happen that year. The Apprentice Boys parades kept happening past the Bogside and there was a riot every year on that day. They didn’t learn any lesson from that event; they just kept re-doing it every year. It was apparently so common that the news media stopped even reporting on it. Early in the documentary, they flash-forward to it going on in 1981, and it looks pretty similar to the violence of 1969.

Remsen: That’s the thing! Parades. We all said parades don’t seem so important in the peace agreement, but they obviously were.

Yes. And they never stopped. These kinds of parades are still happening today.