that looked down at the impoverished
Catholics in the Bogside below. Protests
met with state violence, culminating in
the shooting dead of 13 civilians on Bloody
Sunday, 1972.
I checked into the Bishop’s Gate
Hotel, a former gentleman’s club. Next
door is a blue plaque to the philosopher
Bishop Berkeley, who with John Lennon
declared, “It’s all in the mind”. Then I
went out for a walking tour with Charlene McCrossan, starting
with the city walls, the best preserved and most complete in
Europe, going on to the “No surrender” Protestant murals
and the People’s Uprising Catholic ones (both funded by
the city council) and nishing at the Guildhall, a symbol of
Protestant hegemony where even Catholic cleaners weren’t
allowed. Now they hold céilís.I was often in Derry in the 1980s. Those who weren’t in
a fury were diplomatically mute, nervous of stirring the
sectarian cauldron. There isn’t a stone here that doesn’t
exhale a tortured political history. But Charlene McCrossan
and my guide the next morning at the Tower Museum spoke
with a candour and empathy that allowed them to inhabit
the minds of whatever sector of the population they were
speaking about. Derry was like a family suddenly relieved
of a rancorous secret.
Before I flew away, I drove to Bellaghy, where there is
a museum devoted to Seamus Heaney. His voice drifted
through the rooms. He’s known for his avuncular amiability
and caressive words. But you can see in the photographs of
his cattle-dealing father a canniness, a intiness, that were
smuggled to the son. Border qualities, I thought. As Heaney
wrote: “History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. /
But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of
justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme. / So hope
for a great sea-change / On the far side of revenge. / Believe
that a further shore / Is reachable from here. / Believe in
miracles / And cures and healing wells.”
More at Tourism Ireland (ireland.com).Derry stands with
Paris, Prague and Selma in the
annals of PROTEST
COUNTRY MILES
Above: a view of rural
County Donegal from
the top of Grianan of
Aileach, a sixth-century
hilltop fort.
Left: farm buildings on
the Northern Irish side
of the Middletown
border crossingTOUCH WOOD
Above: Barnesmore
Bog in County
Donegal.
Right: Favour Royal
and Derrygorry
Millennium forests
on the Republic of
Ireland side of the
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