‘Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland’

Is there a life before death? That’s chalked up

In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, 
Coherent miseries, a bite and sup:
we hug our little destiny again.

(Seamus Heaney, ‘Whatever You Say, You Say Nothing’)

 

*

Watching Laura Kuenssberg’s State of Chaos on the BBC a few months ago was not good for the blood pressure. A selection of political talking heads - ministers, civil servants, and former politicians - breezily nattered about the chaos and fallout surrounding Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’s shambolic and irresponsible tenures leading the country. Despite being compulsive viewing, it left you astonished and angry. Many of those interviewed - Matt Hancock, Nigel Farage, Steve Baker, and knighted weasel and bully-in-chief Gavin Williamson - traded smirks, expressed faux-pity and failed to offer up even the merest hint of a mea culpa. Everyone else was to blame. Except the person speaking.  

Compare and contrast this with James Bluemel’s unflinching and devastating documentary Once Upon in Northern Ireland. Here we have five episodes that chronologically track ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The introspection, the confessions, the reflections of almost all of the talking heads - Protestant and Catholic; the British Army, Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries; mothers and fathers, sons and daughters - serve up some of the most powerful and moving television that you are ever likely to see. That some of those politicians featured in State of Chaos had treated the hard-won, and life-saving Good Friday agreement with such carelessness and contempt in the pursuit of their vapid and destructive Brexit deal, is an irony that I’m too angry to dwell upon. Instead I want to focus on the catharsis that may come about through the act of speaking.

Speaking is usually straightforward. But here it is anything but. The pauses, the silences, the use of humour as a defence mechanism, the requests for a cup of tea or a biscuit, all bravely betray the first rule of ‘The Troubles’, pithily put across by Seamus Heaney in the eponymous line at the heart of one of his most famous poems: ‘Whatever you say, you say nothing.’ Indeed, the beginning of that poem throws up the kind of force field intended to keep a documentary-maker like Bluemel at bay: 

     I'm writing just after an encounter 

     With an English journalist in search of 'views

     On the Irish thing.' 

‘The famous // Northern reticence, the tight gag of place / And times’. That was Northern Ireland in 1974, and it wasn’t just wise to adopt that approach: it may well save your life.

It is much to the credit of Heaney, a Northern Irish Catholic, that when approached by a member of Sinn Féin, demanding “When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write something for us?” he replies: “If I do write something, whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself”. It’s a pointed rebuke to absolute partisanship, a brave refusal to take up the laureate of any Republican cause. 

‘I’ll be writing for myself!’ And, leaving Heaney aside for a moment, that is essentially what the talking heads in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland are doing. They are ‘speaking’ for themselves. Time and distance and the Good Friday Agreement are the luxury that have allowed that. And over and over again we see - not reconciliation, certainly not forgiveness - but a begrudging, difficult and a hard won, ‘almost-stuck-in-the-throat’ empathy for the other. 

We hear from June, a Protestant who lived with her policeman husband in a County Derry village. We learn of their courtship and her memories of it. How Johnny, her husband-to-be, was so proud of his Lada car - “The Skip he called it” - and how the Troubles seemed like they were happening somewhere else. As the episode proceeds we gradually learn more, sensing that this story will - as do most of the stories in this documentary - contain tragedy. When the details of her husband’s brutal murder by the IRA are revealed, though, they still cause you to gasp. Immediately after visiting June and their newly born son, Johnny was gunned down from behind in the hospital car-park. The IRA had planned it methodically and knew exactly why he was at the hospital. June’s is a sad, quiet anger. There’s even a passing moment of pity for the Hunger Strikers. But for her husband’s killer, none. “My prayers at night - I could never say ‘Forgive those who trespass against us’. I can’t say that. Can’t say that in my prayer.”

Then there’s James Greer, a member of the UDF, a loyalist signing up to take on the IRA. He relates tales of his 17-year old self planting bombs - one of which ignites suddenly and leaves him and his colleague disabled. The interviewer - James Bluemel - presses and tries to find out more. “You’ve taken me to a bad place, James!” [A pause] And then ... 

“You don’t really feel comfortable with it. But at the same time, because you’re not comfortable with it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And I hate to ignore the things that make me uncomfortable. Because they are important. Are we going to get another cup of tea … I would kill you for a cup of tea.”

That last line causes a double-take. A laugh. A nervous laugh and then a grimace, like thunder following close behind lightning, as the irony hits home. James then goes on to relay a horrifying story that he was told in prison and how that made him vow to “never pick up a gun again.” And then he munches on his shortbread biscuit, and you realise that Adorno perhaps didn’t quite cover the whole scope of the banality of evil. Banality - and humour - are what people who have done evil reach for to keep that evil at bay.    

James Greer

One of the most moving contributions comes from comedian Patrick Kielty. 16-years old and putting up posters for the very first Comic Relief, he finds himself summoned to the headmaster’s office, thinking that he was in trouble for not asking permission to do this. Kielty pauses and then tells us his story:
 
“The headmaster said, ‘I think you need to sit down’. There was a weird slow motion, then a very quick exchange. He said ‘your father’s been shot’. I said ‘Is he dead?’ and he said ‘Yes’.”
 
His dad had been gunned down by two hooded gunmen, loyalist paramilitaries. He had refused to pay protection money and had gone to the police to let them know about the threats. Kielty would later admit to weeping on hearing that the Good Friday Agreement had been signed. “I think that week helped to force a change. Sometimes you need to stare into the abyss to realise that this cannot go on!”
 
We hear from Fiona, a former Miss Ireland, and the story of her murdered brother, and also of the Catholic girls who had ‘gone’ with British soldiers, and had been punished for fraternising with the enemy, tied up, tarred and then feathered. Here, for the first time, something about what Heaney would write for ‘himself’ and the Troubles, bubbled up into my mind: his majestic poems about the ‘bog bodies’ discovered in northern Europe, and the millennia-delayed autopsies that suggested that many of them were punishment killings. The ‘little adultress … flaxen haired, undernourished’ in his poem ‘Punishment’, chiding Heaney’s present-day silence from the grave.

 
     My poor scapegoat
 
     I almost love you
     but would have cast, I know,
     the stones of silence …
 
     […]
 
     I who have stood dumb
     when your betraying sisters,
     cauled in tar,
     wept by the railings …
 
‘Whatever you say, you say nothing’. And you address the guilt and horrific situation, either through the oblique methodology of poetry, or when the healing has had time to work its stuff. 

Yde Girl, a female bog body found in the Stijfveen peat bog in the Netherlands

 
We hear from Richard and Charles. Charles, a British soldier on Bloody Sunday, who had mistakenly shot a rubber bullet into the eye of Richard, just a child, leaving him blind. They share a sometimes awkward, yet still deeply moving reconciliation years later.  
 
And, perhaps, most heartbreaking of all, the story of Jean McConville and her son Michael. Early one morning, Jean was taken away from the council block where they lived and was ‘disappeared’ (murdered). Her crime? Merely trying to help an injured British soldier. Michael would never see his mother alive again, and it would be years before her body was recovered. 

Jean McConville and her family

 
That’s what sticks in your mind at first. The responsibility to the dead which must never be forgotten. But what this documentary shows is the thing that is infinitely more precious, the responsibility to the living. ‘Whatever you say, you say nothing’ is only adequate and practical in the heat of battle. Thereafter, it just won’t do. Heaney knew that all too well, and he’s fully aware and in absolute control of the irony of his title. Likewise, so is James Bluemel, his documentary honing in on the closing stanza of Heaney's poem, taking on the mocking ruefulness of a graffitied question, chalked up on a Ballymurphy wall - ‘Is there life before death?’ - and answering it in the affirmative. It’s no accident that his documentary is named after the opening to all of our founding stories: ‘Once Upon a Time’. It allows you, not only to remember and understand, but also to exorcise the darkness, to move it cautiously and - take note, politicians - precariously into the past where it belongs and must remain.