In 1995, Bill Clinton visited Derry, plunging the city into a kind of fervour. A ceasefire had been in place for more than a year, and now here was a US president addressing a changed, or certainly changing, place.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was 11 at the time, and remembers Clinton standing in front of sparkling Christmas lights, quoting Seamus Heaney, speaking of hope. “He spoke of peace,” ní Dochartaigh writes in her assured and affecting debut, “in language I had never heard before.”
Shortly before Clinton’s arrival, the home ní Dochartaigh shared with her mother and brothers was petrol-bombed as the family slept. They were forced to flee – to run from a burning building, to run from the Protestant housing estate where they lived. They were rehoused in a Catholic estate on the opposite bank of the river Foyle but faced violence and ostracisation there, too.
With parents from either side of the religious divide, the family was always considered other, even after her father left: “We had never been either of these things – Protestant or Catholic,” she writes, “and to live in Derry in the ’90s and to have neither of these words to fall back on left you in a harrowing hole of a place.”
It was a place where hope and peace, although promised and wished for, were hard to find. Ní Dochartaigh found a special kind of solace in nature. After the bombing, she searched the skies and saw a whooper swan for the first time.Years later, remembering its “ethereal beauty”, she recalls the silence left in its wake – and realises that silence can be be beautiful, that “silence does not always have to speak of things that cannot be said”.
Journey
Throughout her teens, 20s and 30s, as she attempted to make peace with a life scarred by trauma, she discovered “thin places” – places that, according to the ancient Celts, are awe-inspiring; places where the divine seems present, here on Earth; places where she knows that she is a thing worth saving. Weaving history, geography and politics around her own story, she takes the reader on a journey to Dublin, Cork, Edinburgh and Bristol, then back to Derry, as she unravels and puts herself back together.
This is a powerful, bracing memoir that asks what happens when a child grows up in a city that isn’t safe. Without sentimentality and with great generosity, ní Dochartaigh describes the alcohol dependency and suicidal thoughts that dogged most of her adult life.
Beyond Derry, there are other, awful traumas: a beloved friend is murdered; she undergoes medical treatment while in an emotionally abusive relationship. It is clear, though, that the trauma first took root in that unsafe home town. She writes: “The Troubles in Ireland were, for me, utterly categorised by the loss of safe spaces.”
She is not alone: the violence has left a legacy of mental illness. The suicide rate in Northern Ireland is twice what it is in England and more people have died through suicide since the Belfast Agreement than were killed in political violence during the Troubles.
There is a clear-eyed rage to the writing when the subject of Brexit arises. The book was completed before the UK’s deal with the EU was finalised but the anger isn’t about the fine print. To ní Dochartaigh, the whole idea of Brexit and the meanings it will confer on the invisible Border that separates Northern Ireland from the Republic is ludicrously, wilfully destructive.
Did the Brexiteers consider the fragile peace in Northern Ireland when they campaigned for the UK to leave the EU? Or did they forget about the violence that once defined the region, the lives that were lost and the complex compromises that led to the signing of the Belfast Agreement. Did they even care?
Hard border
Brexit brought an uncertainty to Derry: during the years between the referendum result and the deal, no one was sure what would happen and whether there would be a hard border on the island of Ireland. And in Derry – where things still feel unsafe, where journalist Lyra McKee was killed in 2019 – uncertainty is toxic.
This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.
It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.
In her 30s, Kerri ní Dochartaigh began to study Irish and learned to say “to hope”: dóigh. Then she learned to hope. Eventually, she found some peace. The reader finishes Thin Places in no doubt of how hard-won – and how precarious – peace is.
