BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Robert McClenaghan bombed buildings for the Irish Republican Army. Now, he builds houses.
“You can’t believe the sense of accomplishment until you see something like this,” says McClenaghan, sitting on the unfinished floor of his nearly completed brick townhouse in a Roman Catholic neighborhood.
Eddie Kinner once planted a lethal bomb for a band of pro-British paramilitaries called the Ulster Volunteer Force. Now, he helps ex-prisoners get jobs and helps guide a local political party.
“As an ex-prisoner, you’re either potentially political or potentially redundant. I’m political. The majority are redundant,” says Kinner, tending to his ailing father and sleepy 5-year-old son in a house in a Protestant neighborhood.
McClenaghan and Kinner are veterans of Northern Ireland’s troubles, one-time urban guerrillas who fought on different sides of a conflict rooted in religion and who spent years locked inside the Maze prison, Britain’s main jail for terrorists.
Now, these men — war-weary 40-year-olds turned community activists — are looking to Northern Ireland’s future, where the ballot could replace the bomb, and where generations of bloodshed and mistrust could soon be bridged by the conclusion this week of a historic political agreement.
Neither says he will soon get entirely what he wants for his community. McClenaghan wants a united Ireland. Kinner wants a pledge that the six northern counties will remain forever a part of Britain, firmly under the political control of London.
But they are both sick of fighting.
For ex-combatants, and ex-prisoners like McClenaghan and Kinner, these are uncertain times. The goals they fought for as teen-agers may soon be decided as Northern Ireland’s long peace process reaches its end-game. Under the chairmanship of former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell, eight political parties and the British and Irish governments are trying to end two years of negotiations and hammer out a settlement by a Thursday deadline.
The potential deal — which must be approved by voters on both sides of the Irish border in a special referendum — could ultimately change the way Northern Ireland is ruled. But it is also intended to ensure that future generations of McClenaghans and Kinners do not take up arms and restart a cycle of violence that has brought so much bloodshed to so beautiful a land.
More than 3,200 people have died during Northern Ireland’s “troubles,” which have pitted minority Catholics against majority Protestants in a terror campaign that was ignited in 1969 but slowed dramatically after 1994 cease-fires.
The conflict goes back centuries, as the two sides have struggled over land and power.
For McClenaghan and Kinner, the struggle was far from theoretical. It was very personal, played out on the streets of Belfast, a city still scarred by the conflict, where police stations loom like Civil War ironclad ships, and where volatile Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods are divided by a so-called Peace Wall, a 30-foot-high barricade topped with razor-wire.
These men were raised in working-class families, a mile apart along corridors that have long defined the troubles. McClenaghan grew up off Falls Road, while Kinner lived on the Shankill Road. They know one another and have sporadically worked together behind the scenes on issues affecting ex-prisoners. Yet, each stays within his community.
“I guess we were forced to grow up much sooner than normal,” McClenaghan says. “At 16, most people are out playing cowboys and Indians. They’re not out there with real weapons, playing with real guns and bombs. But we were.”
Kinner says of his former foes, “I view people from the IRA as my mirror image. They are as dedicated to their cause as I am to mine.”
They were the children of 1969, the year that a civil rights movement for the minority Catholics ran into violence. Northern Ireland’s Catholics felt discriminated against by a Protestant majority that held the political power, dominated the local police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and grabbed hold of the better jobs and housing. When their differences could not be resolved peacefully and politically, terrorism took root, the British army moved in to control the streets.
By the early 1970s, McClenaghan and Kinner were part of the war. McClenaghan says he saw a neighbor gunned down by the RUC. He says he saw Protestant paramilitaries come into his neighborhood and try to burn the place down.
“I joined the republican youth movement at 14 in 1972,” McClenaghan says. “I went to demonstrations, got involved in riots. I fought the British with stones and petrol bombs. And then I took on a more direct military role. I joined the IRA at 17.”
Kinner seemed destined to join the fight, too, coming from a long line of men who served in the British army. His great-grandfather fought for the British in the Boer War. His grandfather died from injuries sustained at the Somme in World War I. His father served five years in Britain’s Royal Air Force.
Kinner and other members of his family became paramilitaries. He says four of his uncles were jailed — one for murder.
At 16, Kinner left school and began working as an apprentice plumber. But he had a dual life, accepting an invitation to join the junior wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force, because “it had the romance.”
As a teen-ager, he says, his political code was simple: “If they shot a Prod [a Protestant] on the Shankill Road, I’d have shot two Catholics on the Falls Road. Whatever damage they’d do, I’d double it. It was as crude as that.”
Eventually, the authorities nabbed them both.
McClenaghan says he was involved in a bombing campaign to destroy Northern Ireland’s economy and sow fear on the streets. His palm print was found near the scene of one bombing and, in January 1978, he received a 20-year jail sentence.
‘It was important that no civilians be injured or killed,” he says. “And I was thankful that didn’t happen. Would I have regretted military casualties? I would have said, ‘No.’ That would have been seen as a necessary part of the struggle. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”
Kinner’s luck ran out March 13, 1975. He was part of a team trying to bomb a local bar, thought to be a hangout for IRA men. But the bomb detonated early, killing two people at the bar, and leaving Kinner burned and wounded. For his actions, he received a life sentence.
“I was a soldier fighting a battle here, defending my community, taking it to the enemy,” Kinner says. “Do you show remorse? What soldier is asked to do that? How is that addressed?”
To McClenaghan and Kinner, the Maze prison was a university, the place where they grew to maturity, refined their political beliefs and charted their futures.
McClenaghan spent three years participating in the so-called dirty protest, an act of rebellion to force the British government to recognize the Irish nationalist paramilitaries as political prisoners not common thugs. He refused to wear prison uniform, refused to wash and, like others, he spread excrement over the cell walls. The campaign culminated in 1981 in hunger strikes in which 10 republican prisoners died. Eventually, the protesters were granted the right to wear their own clothes, along with other reforms.
“In the IRA, jail and death are occupational hazards,” McClenaghan says. “You try to turn imprisonment from a negative to a positive. If you can’t escape, you try to educate yourself to become a better republican, a better person.”
Kinner also educated himself in jail. The one-time dropout earned a university degree in mathematics and computer science. He began to question his own political motives, even his religion. Raised a Presbyterian, he now calls himself agnostic.
“I had been arrested by the RUC, abused by prison staff, sentenced by the British courts,” he says. “Why was I fighting to remain British when I was being abused by the crown?”
Eventually, both men gained releases in 1988. They realized they had more in common with fellow inmates than with people on the outside. They tried to forge new lives, away from violence, joining political parties that represented their former paramilitary organizations.
McClenaghan worked for Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing. Kinner rose in the ranks at the Progressive Unionist Party, the UVF’s political wing, and found work in the computer field, eventually landing with an organization that helps former prisoners get jobs. And each helped set up drop-in centers to cater to the needs of the ex-inmates coming back into the communities.
In September 1995, McClenaghan embarked on his most audacious project. With nothing more than a mortgage and a dream, he and nine other ex-prisoners broke ground on a building project of six townhouses in a Catholic neighborhood. They called the initiative the Belfast Self-Build Housing Association, and their aim was to show the community that ex-prisoners could work together, learn new skills and provide better housing.
Where once they picked up guns and bombs, men such as McClenaghan and his cohorts were picking up hammers and saws and learning a new trade.
“At the start, people laughed at us, they thought we were daft,” McClenaghan says. “When we put in the foundation, we were up to our waists in water. People would come by and say, ‘God help them.’ But we did it.”
McClenaghan will soon have a slice of a Northern Irish dream, a home where he and his girlfriend can live and gain a stake in the future.
But what future will it be?
That’s the question that looms over the all-party talks taking place at Stormont. The deal-makers are trying to come up with a new way to rule Northern Ireland, which is now under the control of Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam.
The British and Irish governments have signaled the outline of a deal, a compromise that would try to give every party a share of power in a new local assembly. The province’s ties to Britain would be maintained in a Council of the British Isles, which would bring together the new local governments from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland — possibly London and Dublin.
The most contentious issue, though, involves the establishment of political bodies linking the six counties of the north to the 26 counties of the Irish Republic to the south. Many Protestants fear that these cross-border bodies would amount to a fledgling all-Ireland government.
But without these ties, the Irish government has signaled it would be unwilling to abandon the territorial claim to the North contained in its constitution.
Even if the politicians can forge an agreement, voters of Northern Ireland and of the Irish Republic will have the final say on the deal in a referendum tentatively scheduled for May 22. If the referendum fails on either side of the border, the pact will likely collapse.
Neither McClenaghan nor Kinner is entirely satisfied with what’s being offered. But each says it’s a good first step to ensure that Northern Ireland is peaceful.
“I’m withholding judgment until I read the small print,” McClenaghan says. “But I’d also be cautiously optimistic that here’s the possibility for an historic deal between unionists and nationalists, and there is a bit of trepidation. I’m just fearful that narrow-minded politicians will destroy this. If we fail, we may condemn our children to a conflict that people can’t even imagine.”
Kinner is determined to keep his ties to Britain. But he’s equally determined to live in peace.
Sitting in his father’s house, he is surrounded by his family’s history. Pictures of his forebears in British army uniforms line the walls. His father, Eddie, frail after a stroke, sits in a chair, sipping whiskey.
Deep into the night, Kinner’s son, also named Eddie, wakes up and wanders bleary-eyed into the living room. After he tucks his son back into bed, Kinner is asked if he could imagine his child following his violent path.
“I want to prevent that,” he says, quietly. “That’s my sole objective. I’m sure my father didn’t want this for me.”
Pub Date: 4/05/98
