THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: GARY MITCHELL: THE WALLS of loyalist playwright Gary Mitchell's rented house are stark and bare. The family only arrived at this secret address one month ago, and they don't know how long they'll be staying.
They don’t put pictures up anymore because they know they will have to move again. It’s a tense, penurious existence for the couple and their three young children, aged 11, two and one. Since November 2005, when loyalist paramilitaries intimidated them out of their home in Rathcoole, a huge UDA-dominated housing estate in north Belfast, the Mitchells have had to move seven times. Nowhere feels safe to them now.
And the strangest thing of all is that no one seems to know or care. In 1989, Salman Rushdie was spirited off to fellow novelist Ian McEwan’s cosy cottage hideaway in the Cotswolds when the then spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against him. Mitchell, however – after a brief initial furore – has been left to manage alone for years on end. Cast out from the community he was born into, ignored by the police, by politicians and by the media, he’s been treated with scorn, suspicion or even bored indifference. Recently, his London theatrical agent told him that a fellow agent was surprised to hear that Mitchell is still alive. It’s hard to imagine the same thing happening to an oppressed writer from the nationalist tradition.
“If I was a Muslim writer whose work upset members of my community so much that some were threatening to kill me, then it would be a cause célèbre,” said Mitchell, not long after he was forced out of Rathcoole. “There would be questions in parliament, writers would stage protests and Salman Rushdie would write letters of support. But because this is Northern Ireland, what’s happening to my family isn’t part of the peace-process narrative.” The terrifying expulsion the Mitchells endured didn’t fit into the glossy, all-friends-together, post-conflict vision of the new North – a fact vividly illustrated when Peter Hain, the then Northern Ireland secretary, invited the Mitchells to a drinks reception at Hillsborough Castle, where they were horrified to bump into a number of senior loyalist paramilitary figures.
Critically feted as the authentic voice of working-class loyalism, Gary Mitchell, now 44, has always cut an unlikely figure as a playwright. He's a blunt-speaking man who is humorously contemptuous of anything "arty-farty". Leaving school at 15 with "no qualifications and no chance" – his careers officer pointed out the local dole office and courthouse as likely future points of reference – he surprised everyone in 1990 by entering and winning a BBC Radio 4 young playwright's award. A residency at the Royal National Theatre in London and a stream of award-winning plays followed. Audiences in Dublin, London and New York were thrilled with productions such as As the Beast Sleeps, which exposed the weird, unpredictable and violent world of loyalist paramilitaries, giving new insight into their petty power struggles and bitter internecine feuds, and the ruthless stranglehold they kept on their communities. There was no republican-style myth-making here, and Mitchell was unrepentant about that. "I depict them the way I see them. Maybe they want it more romantic. I don't find anything heroic in attacking 17-year-olds and pensioners," he says bullishly. But all the time the masked men were watching Gary Mitchell.
There’s no doubt that Mitchell is a brave man. But perhaps there was also a reckless naivety, born out of lifelong familiarity with the paramilitaries who controlled his community, that made him think he could get away with it. After all, simply to be a playwright is often considered suspicious and counter-cultural in working-class unionist circles. “Protestants don’t see the arts as belonging to them . . . plays are seen as silly things that can’t change people’s minds”, says Mitchell. “When I was growing up, the over-riding feeling was that everyone involved in the arts is gay or Catholic. There was no room for a heterosexual Protestant. Wanting to talk about plays or films, that was seen as completely gay. If you can get by that, and you establish you’re not gay, then you’re a taig, and you’ve changed, you’re a traitor. It’s that simple, it’s that black and white. I had that my whole life, and I still have that. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and I’m still the only one.”
The death threats began, and the police warned Mitchell to alter his routine, to avoid certain pubs and clubs. He dismissed it as playground bully behaviour, and refused to sit down and talk with the paramilitaries. “I have no interest in doing that because I don’t want to give people authority over my writing,” he says. “If I negotiated with them, I would be recognising their authority, which I don’t.”
IT WASN’T always that way. As a young man, caught up in the defensive fervour of a community that saw itself as under siege, Mitchell was desperate to sign up. “Once I was of a certain age I was very enthusiastic about joining an organisation to protect my community. But my dad and uncles had all been members of paramilitary organisations, and they left when it became more criminal. They told me how it had gone off the rails, degenerated into an amalgamation of criminal gangs. People who wanted to be law-abiding, to just protect their community, they fell away. Unfortunately, to keep it on track, you would have needed those people.”
One day, while he was working on a script at his desk, an attempt was made on Mitchell’s life. It’s something he has never spoken about publicly before. “I heard an odd noise. Guns don’t sound the way they do in movies, you know. I turned to look out the window and noticed a little hole in it, and another little hole in the ceiling.”
Mitchell can’t resist the shadow of a cocky swagger here, a bit of estate bravado: “To be totally honest, because I lived in Rathcoole, and this is the way it goes, I actually finished what I was writing before I phoned the police. I had no real confidence anyone would do anything about it anyway. That followed through because the policeman who turned up walked into my room and said ‘someone has put a shot through that window’.” He chuckles bleakly. “I said ‘hmm . . . I didn’t know they were going to send the force’s best’. I told him that if you looked out the back you could see that it came from that house there. It’s obviously a paramilitary house, we all knew who they were, we all knew what was going on. The policeman disappeared and was back 10 minutes later: ‘They said they don’t own a gun, so it couldn’t have been them.’” Mitchell shakes his head ruefully. “Let’s just say that’s an unsolved case.”
But the hostility wasn't universal. "I made a documentary – Red, White and Blue: A Protestant Experience– and we gave loyalists an opportunity to talk. Some people really loved it, some hated it. Every time I did a play, it was the same. Even paramilitary guys would meet you and say 'well done, I loved that, it's about time'. David Ervine [the late Progressive Unionist party leader] said a lot of people in the UDA and the UVF supported me, thought I was great. Others hated me. He said I was suffering from populism, because I was more popular than they were. They didn't like that. I can remember people confronting me, saying 'you've got no right to write plays', and it became really ugly and stupid."
Like the Protestant poet John Hewitt, who wrote of the fraught mixture of “rage and pity” he felt towards his countrymen, Mitchell is clearly caught between deeply-rooted loyalty to his own people and frustration with the suspicion and contempt that some feel for his work. For instance, he didn’t talk about the shooting at the time because “I didn’t want the press to use it as a weapon to beat my own community up, to say my community’s full of idiots. But in my head I had already decided I was going to leave Rathcoole.”
It was when Mitchell started speaking out on television, urging people to leave paramilitary organisations and find a better use for their energies, that the decisive attack came.
It was a November night, freezing cold and raining. “I was watching the Rangers match on the television,” says Mitchell. “It was an amazing game, I had to tear myself away when my wife started shouting. She was saying that people were jumping up and down on our car. I heard the pops of the tyres blowing out, and my was wife screaming. But then my wife screams when she sees a spider, and I just thought I will watch the match and see what happens. Of course, it was really much worse than that. The car was petrol bombed and exploded in the driveway.” As hooded men, some with Rangers scarves wrapped around their faces, hammered on the front door with sticks and baseball bats, Alison, Gary’s wife, ran to their son Harry’s room, scooped the sleeping seven-year-old up in his pyjamas, and ran out the back door. She threw him over the hedge and lay down on top of him. The child was terrified, shaking hard and convinced his father had been murdered.
It took the police three hours to arrive, even though the station was just around the corner.Mitchell remembers how one detective phoned him afterwards. “He said, ‘sorry Gary, mate, forgot to phone you to say your house was going to get attacked’.” Mitchell snorts incredulously. “I was upset he forgot, disturbed that he knew. Hold on a second, are they meeting somewhere where they decide these things? Some sort of police involvement where they say ‘you’re allowed to do that, but don’t go too far’? Another detective asked me, ‘why don’t you stop writing these things that annoy people?’ And when the police did arrive, and I said ‘what took you so long?’, they just said, ‘dealing with the rest of your family’.”
ALL OF THE MITCHELL family had to leave Rathcoole. “I have to carry that on my conscience,” says Gary. His parents, Sandra and Chuck Mitchell, had lived in their home for 50 years, but were given four hours to leave. Only Mitchell’s grandmother, Sadie, was permitted to stay on alone in her small flat. She died five months later. The family were informed that they could not return to Rathcoole for the funeral. With the assistance of a police escort, they defied the ban. “When they were taking the coffin out, a man shouted, ‘One Mitchell dead’. These are the sorts of things you don’t forget,” he recalls.
Their son, Harry, now 11, has not forgotten. He has moved school six times since 2005. Even today, Harry still says, ‘Mum, when I get older I’m going to find those men’. He is a quiet boy who used to be outgoing, but now will only go to sleep if he knows his dad’s up working, so he knows he’ll protect the house.
It’s clear that the couple’s children are the light of their lives, a source of delight in an otherwise difficult existence. Their toys aren’t stacked away in a corner; rather, each room is filled with brightly coloured baby-walkers and giant toy tigers and mini keyboards, enough garish flotsam and jetsam to fill a whole toyshop. There’s a tub of baby powder left on the mantelpiece in the living room, and a few crumbs from a recently munched biscuit on a toddler-sized table. Mitchell wears a gold signet ring in the shape of the word Dad.
Their two youngest children were born after they fled Rathcoole. "When you're on your own and in hiding in the middle of nowhere, there's not a lot else to do," Mitchell laughs. "Also, without being funny, we were trying to do something positive, something that brings so much happiness." How did the attack affect Mitchell's own writing? "I had to put a certain distance between myself and what happened. I didn't want a knee-jerk reaction in my work, didn't want to come out with this big anti-paramilitary gibberish. I wanted to be clear, so I took some time." In 2006, his new play, Remnants of Fear, which explored the dilemma of Tony, a teenager torn between joining a paramilitary organisation or finding another alternative, opened at Féile an Phobail, the west Belfast festival, performed by theatre company Dubbeljoint. Mitchell was invited to launch Féile, where he commented that, as a north Belfast Protestant, he felt safer on the Falls Road than in his own area. "I suppose I am a cause célèbre, in a way, but in the wrong community," he muses. "Writing Remnants was my reaction to the attack. I wanted [my attackers] to come and see it, to see the futility of their actions, to see how the world really views them." Mitchell ponders a moment, then adds, "You see, I benefit from this as well. The reality is that the confusion and disorganisation of the loyalist community is what helps my writing so much."
Today, Mitchell takes a more phlegmatic approach to it all. The raw, early outrage is gone, replaced by a sense of impatience with the familiar story of this itinerant existence, this nomadic half-life. Gary Mitchell doesn’t want to be a victim. “I don’t get up every day and think that I’m in hiding. I’m kind of ignoring it. Follow the rules: I’m not annoying anyone, nobody’s annoying me, everybody’s happy. Get on with your life.” Sitting on his battered mock-leather sofa, cup of tea in hand, Mitchell sounds like he’s reassuring himself as much as anyone else, striving to reclaim some kind of normality.
But the extraordinary financial cost of it bothers him, gets him riled up and animated again: “You have no idea, you could never explain how horrendous it is. It’s hard to actually get to the bottom of the cost. In Rathcoole, we had to sell quickly and get out, so we had to take a loss, then we were renting a property and paying a mortgage, and now we’ve had to move so many times. The cost goes up and up. In the beginning, we would always lose our deposit because we were leaving suddenly, or leaving early. BT [British Telecom] screws you every time – you have to settle your old bill to start a new bill, and to start that there’s a £160 activation fee. It’s the same with Sky – every time you move, there’s a £60 fee. It hits you everywhere: another new school, another new school uniform for Harry. After about two years, it’s not even about safety any more. It’s about money. Plus, every time we move, I have to take so much time off work. You can’t write a play or film when you’re in the middle of this. I’ve lost maybe two or three years’ worth of work. That’s how clever that organisation is.”
It is the sense of uncertainty, of being in limbo, cast adrift rather than under active threat, that seems to eat away at the Mitchells most. The only mediator they ever had was David Ervine, who helped them settle in a new area, after they got a call from the paramilitaries to say that the family had not moved far enough away. But that area is now long since left behind; it didn’t seem safe to stay there without Ervine’s patronage and protection. “Since David Ervine’s death, everything has been up in the air because we don’t know what’s really going on,” says Mitchell.
But there are signs of hope, signs of better days to come. Mitchell has just completed four radio plays, and has a new stage play destined for the Abbey. He’s finished one film script about the life of Ian Paisley, and another one exploring the Biblical themes of transgression and forgiveness. “I really feel I’m getting back on my feet after all this time,” he smiles. And despite moving around all those schools, young Harry has achieved an A grade in his 11-plus exam, a success that makes his parents beam with pride.
Gary Mitchell stares out the window at the back yard, where dandelion plants are pushing their way up through the cracked tarmac. “You know, after we left Rathcoole, some paramilitaries came to me and said, ‘we can take revenge on your behalf and get the people who did all this . . . we’ll kill these people for you’. But I didn’t want anything like that at all. I said, ‘I write plays mate, hopefully that will be my revenge’. The more I can convince people to stay away from these organisations . . . That’s how I win.”