This story uses pseudonyms, some of which are taken after leaders in the 1916 Rising.
Liam told me, when I visited him during a research trip to Belfast, that he knew a place we should stop for a drink. Walking with him around the city, it was clear he knew a few. Our first stop was the Sunflower, whose entrance is guarded by a chain-link security cage. This kind of measure was necessary in the ’80s when the pub’s proximity to a Catholic housing project made it an easy target for loyalist paramilitaries. Over the last decades of the 1900s, about 3,500 people were killed in Northern Ireland—1,500 in Belfast alone—during the sectarian conflict euphemistically called “the Troubles.” In ’88, three were killed and six more injured during a shooting at this very bar, which, at the time, was called “The Avenue.”
Enter the Sunflower, though, and if not for the bartender’s thick brogue or the “up the ’RA” graffiti etched into the bathroom stall door, you’d be excused for forgetting the Troubles had ever happened. The crowd is young, the music Top 40, the beers IPA. Scanning the room, I wondered how many people at the bar could tell me the kinds of stories I had come to Belfast searching for. As we finished our pints, I asked Liam, and he said probably more than I’d expect. Belfast is a small city, and even those too young to remember the conflict find it hard to forget.
Liam is older—old enough for stories of his own. He grew up just past that invisible line in West Belfast where the buses begin to announce their stops in Irish instead of English. When he was six, his father, an IRA officer, died while planting a bomb that detonated prematurely. Now, Liam is just past fifty, with children of his own. He’s happy that they grew up in a different Belfast than he did, that they’d have trouble recognizing the sound of a gunshot, that they’re still surprised each time they see a helicopter. As he drove me around, Liam made clear that an end to the violence did not mean an end to the city’s divisions. He took me past the peace walls—the twenty-or-so-foot tall barricades built to separate the city’s Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods—and pointed out where fading portraits of Irish republican figures began giving way to murals of Palestinian activists and calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. On the other side of the city, along the Shankill Road, clotheslines strung with Union Jacks featured the occasional Israeli flag. The conflict might have ended in Belfast, but the city could still look elsewhere for sides to take.
Our next stop was Maddens, the facade of which repeats the pub’s name in Irish—Tí Madháin—above a suggestion to visitors: “Broken Irish is better than clever English.” I followed their advice and let Liam order for us. In the corner, a man scraped a slow, lilting tune from a fiddle. Most of the seats were empty, but the tables surrounding were not. Every five feet or so, an older man sat alone, guarding his solitude with a wall of Guinness. At the table closest to the bar, a man smiled while he sang under his breath. He tapped his foot to the beat of the folk band that had now gathered around the fiddle player and joined in his song. With nowhere else to sit, Liam and I asked if we could join him.
He introduced himself as “Mac,” which he quickly elaborated was short for “Seán Mac Diarmada,” an homage to one of the Irish leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising. Liam introduced me, telling Mac I was American and here to write a thesis about the Troubles. Mac turned in his seat, leaned low over the table, and told me I’d come to the right man. For hours, the drinks kept flowing and Mac kept talking. He told us about the “gang” he ran with his childhood friends at school, how, at nine, he’d accidentally shot another kid with a bow and arrow, about the bar fights he’d gotten into with loyalists as a teenager, about how the only night he’d ever spent in jail was for forgetting to pay his TV license, about his first kiss and his first night with a woman, about his first child and his first marriage. He told us his wife had died in 2002, after forty years of marriage, and that two of their five kids had since passed as well. He’d tried to keep in touch with the other three, he said, but found it wasn’t easy.
Mac never said he was involved with the IRA, but when Liam mentioned his father’s death, Mac gave him a wink, bought us a round to lift in his memory, and left the reason unspoken. When he’d drunk enough to remember, he told us about the time he’d gone to McGurk’s. He and a friend had stopped into the pub for a moment, but thought the crowd there seemed too old for them and left. A few moments later, from across the street, they’d watched the building burst into flames and splinters and hands and legs. He’d wiped away the thick red mist covering his face and watched a nearby car race away from the sirens in the distance. Fifteen people died at McGurk’s that day. It was the deadliest bombing in Belfast during the conflict, and it was a mistake: the bomb’s intended target was across the street. Mac and Liam knew this, and told me all they could make of that fact was to laugh, drink. Far too many lives were taken by mistake back then for the word to mean much now.
I came to Belfast to write a story. I spent most of my time there in the archives, thinking I could get what I wanted from the records of diplomats and ministers, or microfilm and newsreel. By the time I met up with Liam, I thought I had the story down well enough. As we drove around, he’d explain this or that street, and I’d chime in with what I’d learned to show him I knew my stuff. That night, after perhaps a round too many, Liam and I said goodbye to Mac and stumbled out of Maddens. Walking through the streets, I noticed, for the first time, a limp in Liam’s step. He’d later tell me it was partly inherited and partly received, a souvenir of his own run-in on the wrong side of the walls. There, on the cobblestones, I realized I could never fully own the story I had come here to tell. I could put a picture together with onion skin and telex tape, but here in Belfast, there would always be another conflict that could only ever exist in memory.
