Understanding “The Others” in Northern Ireland

Julie Taggart, an educator from Northern Ireland, found that working with Facing History helped her break through a lifetime of distrust as she explored both her own and her country’s history. Julie spoke at the 2011 New England Benefit about how Facing History’s approach is creating change in her community.

“It’s creating a thousand small leaks in the dam of silence, and maybe, with your help, that small leak can one day become a torrent of tolerance.”

Julie Taggart at the 2011 Facing History and Ourselves New England Spring Benefit

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Julie Taggart, and for more than 20 years, I’ve been an educator in Northern Ireland.

Seven years ago when I participated in the first Facing History training offered in Northern Ireland, I saw a photograph. It was a picture of a man, lying in a hospital bed. His wife stood beside him. It was clear that he had suffered some kind of attack. Perhaps a bomb blast. The instant I saw it, I realized that man might have been a stranger, but his suffering was not. I had seen images of suffering just like it all my life. It was only then, seeing it in that setting, that I realized how pernicious the silence I had been raised in was, the silence that the poet Seamus Heaney once described as “that famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place.”

I was born just a few years before the beginning of what we in Ireland euphemistically call “The Troubles.” The Troubles were the most recent outbreak of the centuries-long legacy of hatred and mistrust and violence between neighbors in my country. Most people think that it’s about religion. On the face of it, it seems that way. But it isn’t. It’s about turning one another into “the Other.” It’s about silence—silence in the face of brutality, and making that silence part of us.

I grew up in a republican town about 20 miles from Belfast, called Downpatrick. We lived in a housing estate—what you in the States call “the projects”—and it was very mixed. I was raised a Protestant. I had friends who were Catholic, Protestant, everything, and nothing. Like kids everywhere, we’d pretend we were someone else. We’d pretend we were Charlie’s Angels.

But there were limits to what we could share with each other, even as children. My father was a police officer, a big man who served with the Royal Ulster Constabulary—my friends knew but we didn’t talk about it. Among them were those who saw the unionist police as the enemy. If anybody else asked me what he did, I would just say, “he’s a civil servant.” When I was a young girl, a specific threat was made against my father’s life. We didn’t talk about it. We had to go and stay with friends. The rest of the time, he just got up every morning and checked under his car to make sure that there wasn’t a bomb in it before heading off to work. 

Once, I walked into the kitchen and my father was crying.  It was the only time I have ever seen my father cry.  At the time my parents didn’t try to explain. They just shooed me out of the room, until the silence returned. As I was coming here, I asked my mother about that time—she told me that a young man, who had a young family, had told my father where a bomb was. It was defused, but the organization who had planted it had taken this young man and tortured and killed him. It wasn’t until decades later that my father’s “Northern reticence” and his fear of speaking out broke. He was lying in an American hospital bed recovering from a stroke; he had just retired from the police and was on holiday. He finally talked about the horror of seeing body parts scattered along a roadside after a bombing.

In the world I grew up in, the violence and the hatred was normal, it was a fact of life. When you’d go into Belfast, you knew you’d pass through security barriers, and if you wanted to park your car in any town centre, you’d have to leave someone in it prove that the car wasn’t wired to blow up. We didn’t see this as anything out of the ordinary or wrong—it was just how it was, what my generation grew up with and was used to. I remember as a teen, some of my friends visited a local hotel near Belfast for a night out. There was a bombing. Several people were killed and injured. My friends were not among them. And when they got back to school it was just a matter of, “well, you’re okay.”

When I was 15, my Uncle John was shot. He wasn’t political. He and his wife ran a small post office adjacent to their home in a border town. He was a lovely man, a man who simply loved his family and his dogs, Labradors. It was 15th June, 1980. Some guys—I don’t know if they were IRA or INLA, all I know is that they were in a terrorist organization—came in to rob the post office to get money for weapons. They ordered my uncle and my aunt to lie on the floor. They didn’t shoot my aunt. They shot my uncle six times. He suffered—just like the man in the photo—languishing in a hospital bed for six months before he died. He was unable to speak or move but you could see from his eyes that he was totally aware of everything. We used to bring in cassettes of Johnny Cash for him to listen to.

And during those six months, my family never talked about what had happened. We’d talk about how ill he was—ill, not injured—and when or whether he might recover. Looking back, I know how deeply affected I was by it. Now, I can see the rage I felt that anybody could have been so brutal to someone so lovely. Even after the fighting stopped—or nearly stopped, there are still the rare shootings or bombings—even after my countrymen and I began to realize that things could be different, we remained largely silent.

Beyond the silence, I had told myself that I didn’t have any of the prejudices that had wracked my country. I had always thought that I was a lovely liberal person.  I never looked at it more closely because the feelings that I would have needed to examine were bottled up. I kept them bottled up until that first day I took the Facing History training. That was when I saw the picture of that man, that man who looked so like my uncle, and it all poured out of me.

There was another woman there, and she was as moved by the picture as I was. She was from one of those neighborhoods that I had, in my mind, imagined as the place where “the Others” lived. We left the room together sobbing, sat down and talked about our experiences and the prejudices that we both had. I had always thought that whatever “the Others” had endured in their neighborhoods, they deserved.

But that day, I came to understand two things, first that those people who I had dismissed as the Others had suffered just as I had, and I also understood that I, in my silence, was not blameless either. As a direct result of the Facing History training, I was able to recognize the common bond she and I and all of the rest of us who had grown up during the Troubles shared, and now we could stop being silent.

During the Facing History training in London last year, a Holocaust survivor told me something I’ll never forget. She said, “The tools developed through Facing History allow you to understand why people do such terrible things, and maybe, as a result, you can help prevent these atrocities from occurring again. But it doesn’t mean that you have to forgive them.” I doubt if I will ever be able to forgive what happened to my uncle and to all the victims of the Troubles from whichever backgrounds or political mindset, but now I can talk about it, to you, to my fellow teachers, and they can talk about it with their pupils.

I referred to a poem by Seamus Heaney. It’s called “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.” In it, he writes:

Religion’s never mentioned here, of course.
You know them by their eyes and hold your tongue.
One side’s as bad as the other, never worse.
Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung
In the great dykes the Dutchman made
To dam the dangerous tide.

That is what Facing History did for me and for my Catholic friend and for our pupils. In our own classrooms in Northern Ireland, I had feared that students and parents would resent breaking that famed Northern reticence. I was wrong. I’ve had parents tell me that they want their children to grow up to be open-minded. I’m sure that’s the case, not only in Northern Ireland, but everywhere. And I can tell you from experience that Facing History is a critical tool to that end.  As we speak, it’s creating a thousand small leaks in the dam of silence, and maybe, with your help, that small leak can one day become a torrent of tolerance.