The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

by William F. Kelleher

Overview

Why are the political polarities of Northern Ireland so intractable? Why, in a society riven by class division, do Northern Ireland's people identify most strongly with the nationalist and religious groupings of British Protestant versus Irish Catholic? Why, after over thirty years of violence and death, is dialogue about the future so difficult to create and sustain?

In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William F. Kelleher Jr. examines the patterns of avoidance and engagement deployed by people in the western region of Northern Ireland and compares them to colonial patterns of settlement and retreat. The book shows how social memories inform and are strengthened by mundane aspects of daily life—the paths people use to move through communal spaces, the bodily movements involved in informal social encounters that mark political identities, and the "holiday" marches that displace citizens for the day and divide cross-community friendships.

The Troubles in Ballybogoin is the story of Ireland, its historical conundrums, its violence. It details the location of historical memory in the politics of the everyday and the colonial modernities that so often nurture long-term conflict.

". . . Bill Kelleher brings the reader in to the heart of Northern Ireland and its long, tragic conflict. Northern Ireland, in all its complexity, is authentically rendered."
-Robert Connolly, writer and co-director, The Road to Reconciliation

". . . this exemplary ethnography is among the best books on Northern Ireland, and one of the very few that makes human sense of daily sectarian life."
-Lawrence Taylor, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

"More than a tour-a moving narrative."
-David Stark, Columbia University

"This is a wonderful contribution to Irish studies, postcolonial studies, and anthropology."
-Begoña Arétxaga, University of Texas, Austin

"It is a book that will be widely read and greatly appreciated."
--David Lloyd, Scripps College

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472026364
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	02/09/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	445 KB

About the Author

William F. Kelleher Jr. is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Criticism and Interpretative Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Read an Excerpt

The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

---

By William F. Kelleher

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 William F. Kelleher
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472111698

---

Introduction - Telling Identities and the Work of Memory in Northern Ireland

I remember the baker O'Donnell blushing as usual, telling me:

Ye know what they say about Ballybogoin, Bill. "When ye pull down yer zip to piss off'a Elizabeth Street, they're talkin' about it up on the square before it touches the ground."

Back then, in 1985, in the context of a conversation aroused by my surprise at how much of my recent private life the baker and several of his friends knew, this enunciation indicated that I should not be bothered by the local knowledge accumulating about me, that stories moved fast and furiously in Ballybogoin, and that there would be, as one of my interlocutors said, "no harm done" by them.

Now, writing here, having put this statement in a frozen position far away from that pub just off Ballybogoin Square where it was uttered, a place patronized at different times by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and their declared enemy, the British security forces, a place where local Catholics said "we watch ourselves," I give this conversation piece a different meaning. There and then I was taught how to "watch myself," especially how to guard my words; how to disengage myself, by subtle deflections and inflections, from conversations going too far; how to play the game by telling partial truths; how to tell "wee white ones" (little lies) and not get caught out; how to read and interpret the language and body movements of others; and how to relate words, bodies, and worlds.

Here and now I remember representations of the type of talk that we discussed in the pub that night and reflect upon the anthropological texts that have inscribed Ireland, particularly that of Nancy Scheper-Hughes. She writes:

Yes, the Irish lie and lie they do with admirable touches of wit and ingenuity. Add to the normal defensiveness of the peasant, a folk Catholic moral code that is quite "soft" on lying, and a lack of tolerance for overt acts of aggression, and you have a very strong propensity to "cod" (sometimes rather cruelly) the outsider. Beyond crosschecking information, the only safeguard the fieldworker has against "converting the lies of peasants into scientific data" (as one critic of the participant-observation method commented) is simply getting to know the villagers well enough to read the nonverbal cues that signal evasiveness or lying. (Scheper-Hughes 1982, 12)

In Scheper-Hughes's view, the talk of those Ballybogoin Catholics could not be relied upon. She submitted speakers to her gaze, read them, and distinguished between truth and lying. She realized the world must be read yet readily provided the last word. For Scheper-Hughes, it was the eye of the ethnographer that constituted the ethnographic ground, and she could discern a lie. Arriving on terra firma, she peopled it with composite individuals, a scriptural method that provoked this response from a village reader of Scheper-Hughes's text.

Nonsense! You know us for better than that. You think we didn't, each of us, sit down poring over every page until we had recognized the bits and pieces of ourselves strewn about here and there. You turned us into amputees with hooks for fingers and some other black-guard's heart beating inside our own chest. How do you think I felt reading my words come out of some Tom-O or Pat-O or some publican's mouth. Recognize ourselves, indeed! I've gone on to memorize some of my best lines. (Scheper-Hughes 1982, 10)

Talk, truth, and lying pose problems for the ethnography of modern Ireland. So do places like the other major component of the baker's utterance, "the square." Often, anthropologists depict such town centers as functional/historical wholes and emphasize their role in the "development" and integration of local economies and public spheres. The organizational pull of towns, especially their nuclei, places like the square, receives emphasis. Development occurs, and center domesticates periphery. Commercial functions change, but they persist and often dominate description.

Through the ethnography in this book I try to trip up these two representations of the "other": the Irish "other" as liar, a trope of a colonizing narrative, and the "other" as ordered from center to periphery, an element of a modernizing, teleological one. I disagree with Scheper-Hughes's contention that the ethnographer's sole or primary job is to differentiate between the true and not true. Instead, I shall argue that the so-called lies must be taken into ethnographic accounts, that their effects ought to be tracked. I prefer to follow the lead of Zora Neale Hurston, who perceives the difficulties of both teller and ethnographer in revealing "that which the soul lives by" (1979, 83), the words that make up worlds.

Hurston understands that the fibs and fabulations that the dominated construct are part and parcel of social relations. She discusses the proclivity of African Americans in 1920s and 1930s Florida to tell more powerfully positioned whites what they believed those people wanted to hear. Hurston calls these practices "a featherbed resistance." From her threshold position, the inside/outside position of the ethnographer that Hurston's writing never lets us forget, she imagines the desire that works these so-called lies. She represents her consultants' wishes with these words: "I'll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away. Then I'll say my say and sing my song" (1979, 83).

Hurston alludes to the fact that words, signifiers, can deflect the definitions and practices of the dominant and make the places of the powerful subject to resistance. Hurston represents what Michel de Certeau theorizes when he questions the depiction of central places as social centers of gravity. De Certeau differentiates between places and spaces and describes how people make one into the other. In de Certeau's terms, places are the sites of power, the territories marked out and controlled by subjects of will and power who make them their own. Spaces are those same places submitted to the practices of everyday life--speech, the discourses of family, neighborhood, and community--that consume the places and disorder the assumed order. De Certeau calls such cultural practices "tactics." They utilize time and open up the possibility of resistance (see de Certeau 1984, 29-42).

Ballybogoin Catholics, almost all of whom called themselves Irish nationalists, juxtaposed such spaces and places, and its people articulated them, joined the differences, and disarticulated them through stories and their moving bodies, signifiers in their social world. For example, Elizabeth Street, the place invoked by the blushing baker, served as a site that transported and transformed meanings. Elizabeth Street connected the Catholic, Irish nationalist, residential side of Ballybogoin, its west side, to Irish Street, the Catholic commercial street that led into the square, a place that inscribed order. The residential units on both sides of Elizabeth Street were razed in 1984 to make way for a proposed commercial development, a project whose plans, never mind concrete structures, failed to appear until the late 1990s. The muddy, unpaved lots that remained functioned as parking lots for the Catholics who left their cars there in crisscrossed patterns and made the easy walk from this disorder to Irish Street or on to the square. On these journeys, from Catholic, Irish nationalist residences to the square, both space and time came into coalition. To the west, Elizabeth Street's pedestrian path ended at the gateway to an old manse, "the big house" Ballybogoin Catholics called it. At this juncture Drumcoo Road veered off to the northwest and led to the Catholic housing estates and out toward "the hill country" identified by many contemporary Catholic townspeople as their ancestral home places. The names of these "wee places," anglicized on British maps over 150 years ago and represented in less detail in early-seventeenth-century ones, memorialized the loss of a living language. They also provided an index to what Irish nationalists perceived as their social and political positioning in both their colonial past and their present: the position of excluded outsider.

These social spaces--Cornamucklagh, round hill of the piggeries; Culnagor, hill back of the cranes or herons; Knocknaclogha, the stony hill; Munderrydoe, the bog of the black oak wood; Aughagranna, the ugly or bushy field--were populated in the majority if not wholly by Catholics. They signified not only the poor terrain local Irish nationalists and their ancestors have inhabited but also the events--the sixteenth-century Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland and the seventeenth-century plantation settlement--that led to their settling in those hills. In making these places organized by the colonial state into spaces, in vivifying these written places in speech, Catholics in these localities said of their more richly situated, lowland, Protestant neighbors, "They got the land, we got the view." Then they would add, "We were pushed here over three hundred years ago."

In similar ways, spatial stories made Ballybogoin, one of the first provincial towns created by the seventeenth-century early modern, colonial state, into a people's place. A lord who oversaw the area for the English Crown at the end of that century named Elizabeth Street after his daughter. It served as a passageway between the square (the site of managing the "other"--the descendants of the natives) and "bandit country" (the home of the "other") to its west. But Elizabeth Street domesticated the natives incompletely. The Stewart family, who accumulated its wealth in the area's nineteenth- and twentieth-century linen industry, owned "the big house" at Elizabeth Street's western end. Catholics remembered that family, its discriminatory employment practices, and the exclusively Protestant ownership of that industry, through stories of Margaret, the last Stewart heir to people the place.

Margaret's story was told to me by a group of Catholics who grew up on Irish Street in the 1940s and 1950s. They were trying to tell me what life was like then for Catholics before the civil rights movement and the start of the long-enduring political violence that had marked their lives in more recent years. They remembered that Margaret used to make her daily trip to the square by walking smack dab in the middle of Elizabeth and Irish Streets. Sturdy and staunch, she stared straight ahead, they recalled, not looking either left or right. If a vehicle of any sort trailed her, that car would have to wait. She would not step into the shuck, the gutter that flowed with the refuse from the sidewalk sweepings of these entirely Catholic thoroughfares, nor would she walk on the "pavements," the sidewalks on which these people's homes and shops abutted. She certainly would not talk.

In this Catholic, Irish nationalist story, Margaret's territorial practices represented the whole--the state, the Protestant people, and its institutions. She bore a metonymic relation to that whole, but, more important for the purposes here, the story indicated that these streets were made into the social spaces of the natives, as does a second story attached to memories of Margaret.

Margaret's family's will stipulated that "the big house" be sold only to a Protestant. When Margaret died, her heirs intended to carry that desire out. The trouble was that the Protestant man to whom they sold the place did not intend to keep it. A local Catholic, "part businessman, part gangster, a man who will stick the arm into ye," Catholics said, had arranged for a Protestant business associate from the Republic of Ireland to make the purchase and then sell it to him. When the heirs had their estate sale, this Catholic man, well known in the area, walked in, announced he was the new homeowner, and said he would buy everything in the place. The inheritors were stunned.

Irish Street is an uphill climb from Elizabeth Street, and when Margaret reached the top, she was at the square (see map 1). Running perpendicular to its center and running due west is Scots Street, duly named by His Lordship to mark a space for the Scots dissenters who came in the seventeenth century to populate the planned settler colony. This street entered the square from the west. Both Catholics and Protestants shopped and drank in establishments on this street. To the southeast lay Church Street, named by the lord because some of the town's Protestant churches were located on it. Both Catholics and Protestants bestowed their custom on its shops during the daytime. At night, most Catholics did not dare to go there. Only Protestants patronized its Catholic-owned pubs. To the northwest lay Irish Street. Named by the lord and designated as the place for the descendants of the natives, only Catholics shopped and, besides the rare exception, drank in Irish street establishments.

Robert Street, named by the lord after himself, exited to the north. At the corner of Robert Street and the square stood a deserted hotel, previously owned by Catholics. It was the only edifice on the square owned by that "side of the house" until the 1960s, when Catholics purchased one other building. Carved onto the outside window of that hotel were the initials TB. Catholics said Tom Barry, a famous IRA fighter of the 1920s who went on the run for a number of years, had stayed in the hotel while the police and army searched for him. He left his mark there before his escape, people said. He and his exploits were sometimes sung in the pubs on Irish Street.

Like the Catholic-owned pub on Scots Street where the baker uttered the sentences that are the point of departure for this introduction, a place that local Catholics told me had been bombed twenty-eight times since 1971, the square was a place where people watched themselves. It was also a space where people were watched: a control zone.

Drivers could only enter the town's center via one of two roads, and you could not leave your car parked in the few spaces available. Too many car bombs had gone off in emptied vehicles. In the mid-1980s a police car or two usually sat in the square, and heavily armed police sentries manned the checkpoints at the two entries. Yet, for the Catholics, this did not necessarily mean that this territory was under another's control. Their storytelling tactics, some may call them lies, transformed this ground and, if we adhere to de Certeau's terms, made these places into their social spaces.

No Catholic political or religious demonstration had ever penetrated the square. It was considered the place of both the Protestant community and the local state. In the 1960s, a local movement for social justice, entirely Catholic, had tried to organize homeless mothers to march into it, but they were stopped by what one participant remembered as "Orangemen who were off from their lunch hours and spat on us." A few years later, the nonviolent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), a primarily Catholic group, tried to march into it, but the combination of a police barricade and the rumored threat of a loyalist paramilitary attack kept them on the town's outskirts.

At the east end of the square stands a memorial to local men who died in the twentieth century's two great wars and to British state struggles in Ireland to keep the island British. It is the ritual center of the local state and its Ulster unionist community. Behind this, farther up the hill, stands the outdated police barracks, over a hundred years old but still used. It was rumored to house a variety of security force members in the 1980s. A light brown, oddly designed building, it looks out of place among the gray sandstone buildings of Ballybogoin town. Local Irish nationalists said, "It's a mistake. It was intended for Bengal, but the plans were mixed up in the colonial office and Bengal got Ballybogoin's building, while Ballybogoin got Bengal's." Official historians and the Protestant people called this story "a lie."

Behind the old police barracks is the modern British army lookout post, cameras clearly visible, high above the square. Local Catholics believe that under the ground on which these two military edifices lie are the remains of Hugh O'Neill's fort.

O'Neill was the last Gaelic leader to oversee the Ballybogoin area. The rule of his lineage ended when he fled Ireland in 1607. O'Neill's Gaelic forces had fallen to Elizabeth I's armies, and he had submitted to Lord Mountjoy, the lord deputy of Ireland in 1603. The prolonged negotiations for a settlement failed: O'Neill and his associates were declared traitors and their lands forfeited. They fled to Spain, and O'Neill died in Rome in 1616. Ballybogoin's Irish nationalist people remembered him when they dreamed of the future. Their talk had it that when Ireland becomes "free," they would erect a historical park at the top of the hill, excavate the old fort and the older druid one that, they believe, is under that one, and tell their history, Irish history.

Ballybogoin's Irish nationalists said that under those forts are the tunnels that their Gaelic forebears used to escape the Elizabethan forces back in that sixteenth-century war. Outgunned by the English soldiers, O'Neill's men would incinerate the fort, and a few of those fighters would stay back as decoys. Once Elizabeth's troops charged, O'Neill's men would escape through the underground tunnels dug for these maneuvers and join their comrades, who would attack the English army from the rear. No one knew, however, if those tunnels really existed. They were said to exit underneath the headquarters of the local Ulster Defense Regiment (the UDR), the almost entirely Protestant, locally recruited unit of the British army whose regional headquarters was located less than a mile from the top of the square.



Continues...

---

Excerpted from The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland by William F. Kelleher Copyright © 2003 by William F. Kelleher. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Mapping Moves 2 Dividing Space and Making “Race” 3 Writing Ireland 4 Living the Limit 5 Organizing against History 6 Working Memories 7 Struggling Masculinities 8 Rendering Accounts Notes Glossary References Index