It was summer 1975 when the chilling report filtered through to our suburban Dublin kitchen: there’d been another killing in Northern Ireland. Members of a well-known music group, the Miami Showband, had been driving home to Dublin after a gig in County Down. They were stopped at a false checkpoint 30 miles south of Belfast by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. As one of the terrorists tried to plant a bomb in the back of the band’s van, it exploded. In the confusion, three of the musicians who had been lined up along the side of the road were executed.
To a 10-year-old it was almost a glamorous massacre. The deaths were easy enough to conjure up in the imagination. A country road. The headlights spraying through the trees. The long-haired musicians in the back of the van: bright-eyed, smoking, laughing. The barrier across the road. The squeal of tires. Shouting, screaming, pleading. The explosion. A trumpet going up in the air as if making a final note to heaven. The brief moment of silence. The bullets sounding out. The thud of heads against muck. And then another sort of silence altogether.
My mother was from the North, my father from the South. I wanted desperately to know the “why” of Northern Ireland. My mother was raw and quiet with grief. “Ach, it’s just sad,” she said. My father told me that the answer was simple — all the murderers, hatemongers, kneecappers, bombers, were going to be herded onto a small floating island, and they would be pushed out to sea, whereupon they could kill and maim and tar-and-feather one another endlessly. The rest of us, he said, would be left in peace.
Visiting my mother’s family farm in Derry, I hated the sight of soldiers crouching in the hedges. Why were the postboxes red instead of green? Why was a soldier sliding a mirror under my cousin’s car? Why was the border so squiggly that, in school exercises, it made our tracing paper slip beneath our fingers? I searched for the Miami Showband’s music in the record shops of Dublin. I couldn’t find an album.
As I grew up and traveled, eventually to New York, I found that trying to explain the politics of Northern Ireland to others was nearly impossible. Whose God were these people fighting for? Why did justice sound like another word for revenge? Who would ever be able to make a virtue of old hatreds? Who was that distant child who wanted to travel north to a forest road and search for a piece of trumpet?
I still manage each year to take my children to Northern Ireland for a short holiday, but these days they are as likely to see as many armed soldiers in Grand Central Terminal, or on the Triborough Bridge, as I ever did on the back roads of Derry.
My children might ask me about the complexities of SWAT teams on Wall Street, or why there are traffic bolsters around the synagogue on East 87th Street, or why once a year there are extra flowers in the window of the fire station off Lexington Avenue.
One of the chores and joys of being a parent is answering questions. The most difficult ones slide a hand through our rib cages and turn our hearts a notch backward, sometimes toward our own childhoods.
If I am to take any solace from the troubles in Northern Ireland and the perplexing answers my own parents gave me, it is that — on occasion and sometimes against all expectations — a certain amount of endurance brings about a possibility of hope.
The questions about Northern Ireland are different this week. Today, the 108-member Assembly is scheduled to enter a historic power-sharing agreement between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party. In the past, the two parties sat at the province’s most distant extremes. The Democratic Unionist leader, the Rev. Ian Paisley, once said that he would be ready for talks only “when you marry Christ to Beelzebub.” So what happened? Did he and Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams just grow up? Were they able to understand the terror of fathers and grandfathers — that our children might one day become as bad, or as conflicted, or as confused, as us? Is today’s swearing-in ceremony the final, inevitable triumph of reason over hatred?
Hardly. The victories of peace aren’t as immediate as those of war. It is difficult to imagine the members of the Assembly’s opposing parties shaking hands and agreeing on the colors of the flowers for the Easter parade. It will be a long, rocky road. Parts of the North are still separated by 50-foot-high “peace” walls. More than 90 percent of public housing is segregated, and research has shown that even 3-year-olds still display sectarian instincts. But in the aftermath of so many decades of violence, children are out in East Belfast scrubbing the walls free of political graffiti. Fierce enemies are shaking hands. Prisons, like the infamous H-Block, have been torn down.
There is no greater moment in war than the end of it. The vague dream of getting older, for politicians and terrorists and even children, is that we can somehow still become better people. As much as anything, the move toward devolution is a glimmer of hope for the rest of the world — if it can happen in Northern Ireland, it’s possible that it can happen anywhere. Palestine. Sri Lanka. Iraq.
One of the reasons that center holds is that no one politician, or party, or popular figure is trying to own the peace. It is an international agreement that owes as much to the vision of political leaders as it does to the thousands of mothers and fathers who have brokered it from the inside.
The questions of this generation of children are yet to be shaped. With luck and vision, the “Why?” will be said with a bewildered look backward rather than with a horrified glance about.
For a nation that has shouldered so much for so long, the possibility of no more needless small white coffins is almost answer enough.
Colum McCann, a professor of creative writing at Hunter College, and the author, most recently, of the novel Zoli.