Thousands of Northern nationalists who fled over the Border during the violence still feel isolated and unable to return. Kate Holmquist reports
When Mary Ellen heard that Pope John Paul II had died, her first instinct was to go to Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral in her native Armagh. But she didn't dare. She believes the risk of returning to the North, which she left in the 1970s at the age of 17 after becoming swept up in Republican political activities, is still too great. She has reared a family in the Republic since but still feels like a displaced person among her Southern neigbours, unable to talk about her own roots.
She is one of tens of thousands of Northern Irish Catholics who have sought safety in the State since 1969, when the first wave fled the Troubles. These "displaced persons" think of themselves as Irish, yet many strongly identify with asylum seekers and refugees with whom they share feelings of rejection and isolation.
Many ran away from traumatic situations in which family members had been killed, or they had themselves been made homeless, received death threats, been harassed by security forces or threatened with internment. Children were uprooted from schools and social networks and extended families were split.
"We need the opportunity to tell our stories and be heard, if we are going to have closure," says Mary Ellen.
They did not expect to be met with high levels of tension, hostility and suspicion south of the Border. To this day, many "displaced persons" maintain secrecy about their origins due to fear of harassment and prejudice. In the view of one such woman, "If I had been black and experienced the same, liberal Ireland would be out campaigning for me". The misconception that all "displaced persons" are combatants "on the run" has cast a veil of suspicion over all who have tried to make homes in the South, says a new report, All Over the Place: People Displaced to and from the Southern Border Counties as a Result of the Conflict, 1969-1994, to be published this month.
Pauline, who moved to the South 30 years ago, is one of 22,290 Northern-born people living in a southern Border county. She told The Irish Times, "We have never been acknowledged as victims of war. This contributes to people's negative view of us. If people were more aware of our experiences and why we were forced to leave our homes in the North, their attitudes would change. Anyone with a sense of humanity and justice would see us for what we are."
The former wife of a prisoner, Pauline left the North because security forces made her late for work several times a week, by stopping her car, searching her and subjecting her to humiliating and frightening "verbal sexual harassment". She worked in a mixed office and could not tell her employers why she was late so often. She moved to a southern Border county, where she found employment and got on well with her boss until, overnight, his attitude abruptly changed. She believes that he received a visit from the Special Branch, which coloured his view of her. Subsequently, she was refused promotion, even though her job performance was excellent, and she had to change jobs.
"I fled persecution and I received further persecution. The only difference about living in the South, was that I could get to work on time without being detained and sexually harassed. To this day there is prejudice and suspicion because I'm from the North. We have been treated very, very badly, like second-class citizens," she says.
The report, All Over the Place, gives evidence that mistrust of outsiders is typical of State and social attitudes going back at least half a century. For example, in 1956, harsh treatment was meted out to 500 Hungarian refugees who arrived in the State following the failure of the Hungarian uprising against Russian Communist rule. Some 35 Hungarian families of 161 people were housed in cold, remote huts at Knockalisheen Army camp in Co Limerick and were not allowed to seek work or otherwise blend in to Irish society. They went on a hunger strike which lasted three days before the Irish Red Cross Society and the Bishop of Limerick intervened. The majority obtained visas to leave Ireland and settled in the US.
Thirteen years later, in 1969, when the first northern Catholic nationalists arrived in the State, there was empathy with their homelessness. They were referred to as "refugees from strife-torn Northern Ireland" by politicians and media alike. Over the following three years, thousands were accommodated in cold, primitive huts with no running water, prompting some Dubliners to open their homes to them. Yet, sometime in 1972, the use of the term "refugee" disappeared from public policy and the refugees became invisible at national level.We entered a time of "public forgetfulness" about the issue, argues the report.
Such public amnesia is caused by "fear, intimidation, communal trauma, disinformation and communicative distortion in relation to individuals, groups and events. The counterpoint to this forgetfulness is critical memory, frequently allied with mourning". Highlighting what went on is one reason why the report was commissioned by the Area Development Management and Combat Poverty Agency within the European Union Peace II programme.
The silence about the issue of "displaced people" since 1972 has been partly due to political factors, such as the Offences Against the State Act, which allowed for exceptional treatment in law of persons suspected of crimes against the State, or suspected of being members of illegal organisations.
Public perception changed, as the inclusion of former prisoners and people "on the run" among the "displaced" effectively cast a veil of suspicion over all Northern migrants, whatever the reasons for leaving their homes.
A woman displaced to Louth remarks, "There's never a feeling that you belong . . . I was shocked at local people's attitude to me in my own country . . . local people resented people from the North getting housed, or getting work. Hence people from the North rarely got work. Then poverty set in, the status of the second-class citizen set in."
Many of the 32 interviewees in the report speak of still feeling "unsettled", while at the same time they no longer fit in to changed communities in the North, or are afraid to return. They have experienced grief over being separated from their extended families, and their children have missed out on having aunts, uncles and grandparents in their lives.
Ciaran told The Irish Times that economic migrants, such as those who go to the US, are making the choice to limit their contact with their families. The "displaced" had no choice, he argues. Ciaran left the North at the age of 21 when he heard that his name was being mentioned in interrogations. This was during the time of the "supergrasses", when all the evidence needed to imprison a person was someone else's word. It was a conveyor belt to prison for young Catholic men in republican hotbeds. Ciaran says he had done nothing wrong, but because he associated with people who were suspect, he feared internment if he remained on the family farm.
He lived in bedsits in a Border town, only a few fields away from his home. He could stand on a hill outside the town and see the farmhouse where he grew up. The eldest son, he had actively farmed and was due to inherit the land. After he left - in a time when there were no mobile phones and finding a functioning phone box was difficult - he had to give his younger brother instructions on how to manage the farm when they met in a pub on Sunday afternoons. Ciaran, who felt increasingly isolated, spent so much time in pubs, just waiting for people, that he developed a drink problem.
The report recommends medical support and assistance for displaced persons, many of whom have yet to process their trauma as a result of the Troubles. "Displaced persons have experienced or witnessed highly traumatic events and the most crippling of fears, some of which cannot be put to restand continue to impact on their lives and the lives of their households," it states.
Protestants, too, have experienced trauma, but the report's researchers had difficulty finding Protestants who had been displaced to the South and were willing to talk about it, although those they did talk to had similar insights to those of Catholics.
"I had to get out. I had to be here. I wondered was I going 'home' or 'leaving home'. I knew this area (in the South) - when you crossed over, you felt a relief. It used to be horrific."
Two women of a unionist background who moved to north Donegal say they are deeply disappointed in the outcome of the Belfast Agreement because, they believe, it forced individuals to campaign, vote and support members of a legislative assembly who were either Protestant (unionist) or Catholic (nationalist). The women don't identify with either camp.
The persistent labelling of not just "displaced people", but all people, as belonging to particular tribes has made it difficult to fit in to Southern communities, for some. One man told researchers that he would never belong, "even in 400 years".
Former prisoners have had the most difficult time. Many experience discrimination in the workplace, so that they have to remain labourers, even though they have potential to do more.
The research found that the majority of the displaced have never returned to their birthplaces in the North.
"In this context, there is a need for public recognition that displacement occurred as a consequence or legacy of the conflict," the report advises. It also recommends that people should be encouraged to express their "collective" feelings of trauma and dislocation through cultural activities such as novels, poetry, theatre and art, through cross-Border programmes operated jointly by the arts councils of the North and the South.
Some names have been changed.
