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- [00:01]
Anita Arnand
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
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- [00:50]
T-Mobile Host
Today at T Mobile, I'm joined by a special co anchor.
- [00:53]
Snoop Dogg
What up everybody? It's your boy. Big Snoop deal.
- [00:55]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Double G Snoop.
- [00:56]
T-Mobile Host
Where can people go to find great deals?
- [00:58]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Head to T mobile.com and get 4i with Apple Intelligence on us plus four lines for 25 bucks.
- [01:04]
T-Mobile Host
That's quite a deal, Snoop. And when you switch to T Mobile, you can save versus the other big guys. Comparable plans plus streaming respect.
- [01:12]
Patrick Radden Keefe
We up out of here.
- [01:13]
T-Mobile Host
See how you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys. @t mobile.com/apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later.
- [01:20]
Snoop Dogg
PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your dinner dates.
- [01:23]
Patrick Radden Keefe
How are we splitting the bill?
- [01:24]
McAfee Ad
Um, evenly.
- [01:26]
Snoop Dogg
Well, I only got soup. Let's Split it on PayPal based on what people ate. Get started. In the PayPal app, a PayPal account is required to send and receive money. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan and me, William Dalrymple. Now, every so often, William and I are called upon to read something that we are so utterly mesmerized by that we ring each other up multiple times a day to say, did you get to this bit yet? Oi, did you read this bit? And also variously. Bloody hell, he writes really well. I don't think I'll ever write anything again. Our very special guest, I'm delighted to say, is Patrick Radden Keefe. And if you have been watching Disney and if you've been listening to our podcast, both of these beautiful things come together because Patrick's marvellous book, say Nothing about the Troubles, has taken both TV and the literary world by storm. And it is a very fine work. Patrick, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for coming on.
- [02:35]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I'm so delighted to be with you.
- [02:36]
Snoop Dogg
We should sort of say what we have been talking about to lead us to this. So, I mean, if you have been following this podcast and if you haven't heard previous episodes, I urge you to do so. We have been starting from the very earliest point of the history of Ireland just to explain really where we are today, which is the Troubles. That's what we're going to be talking about. Because the trouble, you just have to say the Troubles, and everybody in Britain knows what you're talking about. But we started off with Tudor England, talking about the plantation system. We talked about the Easter Rising, the Civil War. And now we are in the bit that perhaps most of you remember or your parents remember and have talked about, a time when there was not just instability and violence in Ireland itself, but also in Britain, in England, in London more specifically as well. So this thing is going to be seared in your minds. And anyone who's grown up here, Patrick, will perhaps know that at one time, Gerry Adams was such a controversial figure that Margaret Thatcher ruled that his voice couldn't be used on the BBC. So we had this very strange situation where he would be interviewed. You could interview him, but it wouldn't be his voice. So, you know, all sorts of peculiar things were going on on that thought.
- [03:47]
Anita Arnand
I remember growing up in Scotland and my dad going on a business trip to Belfast in the middle of the bombings, right at the beginning in 1972, 73. And I remember begging him not to go. It was a big part of the news throughout all our childhood.
- [04:02]
Snoop Dogg
I mean, what. What drew you, Patrick? I mean, you've got a sort of Irish background, haven't you? But not in Ireland. You are an American through and through, aren't you?
- [04:10]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I mean, my mother's actually Australian, but my mother's from Melbo. But my father is Boston Irish, and his family had come a century ago. So I grew up in quite an Irish American enclave. The Troubles were very much the backdrop of my childhood in the 80s and the 1990s. And I remember vividly the Good Friday Agreement and the end of the Troubles and this kind of triumphalist sense that it was all over. I didn't come to this book for any of those reasons, though. I just happened to be reading an obituary in the New York Times in 2013 of a woman I know will talk about named Dolos Price, who had been a member of the ira. And I was just really intrigued by her life and everything that it suggested. And in this obituary, there was an indication that a lot of the kind of historical issues that I think In a kind of passive way, I had thought were resolved. Like, I sort of thought the troubles were done and dusted with the Good Friday Agreement, and it was all a bit in the rearview mirror. And this obituary of this woman suggested that, in fact, a lot of these issues remain deeply unsettled. And that was intriguing to me. Just the idea of events from half a century ago still feeling very dangerous today as a writer was. Was an intriguing notion.
- [05:28]
Snoop Dogg
Well, I mean, like you, most of my memories are also 80s, 90s, and I remember hearing a story about a bunch of kids who'd come over from Ireland to go to Hamley's and they saw the commissioner by the door and they immediately sort of line up to be frisked to go into Hamley's toy store in London. And just being deeply affected by that. Before we get on to that period that, you know, we all remember very clearly, can we talk about sort of Northern Irish politics in this period between the 1930s and the 1950s? So if we're talking about Northern Ireland at this time, we're talking about Catholics making up about one third of the population of Northern Ireland. And even the phraseology, I mean, you say it in your book. Catholics will say the north of Ireland and others will say Northern Ireland. The politics of language right from the get go is problematic. Protestants making up two thirds of Northern Ireland or the north of Ireland, whatever you wish to say.
- [06:18]
Anita Arnand
Originally, no longer, though.
- [06:20]
Snoop Dogg
But what was. What was life like? I mean, what were these communities like during, you know, the 30s, 40s and.
- [06:25]
Patrick Radden Keefe
50S, when you get the partition of Ireland? It happens in this strange way. It's quite gerrymandered. Right. So my family on my father's side is from Donegal, which is part of the republic. But of course, the way they draw the line, it's partially because of the concentration of Catholics in Donegal. And you end up with this kind of bizarre situation in which on this island you have 26 counties in the south and. And six in the north. And you have these two religious communities, both of which feel like an embattled minority in the sense that Protestants are the minority on the island of Ireland. And so there's always this fear of getting kind of subsumed by Catholic Ireland or outbred by them. And then in the north, in those six counties, Catholics are the minority and felt that there was a great deal of discrimination. And indeed there was. There was discrimination in jobs, in housing, there was discrimination in political representation, because being able to vote for the regional government at that time, that the vote was tied to property ownership. And so the lot for Catholics was not great. And during precisely the period of time you're talking about, there's this fascinating thing, which is that that in the 30 or so years leading up to the outbreak of the Troubles, the Catholic birth rate is twice the Protestant birth rate in Northern Ireland. But the Catholic population remains static over those three decades because of emigration. Presumably Catholics left. They left. So they would come to England, they would come to America, go to Australia, wherever else. You had a kind of situation in which there was a. A low simmer of tension during that time. You had the devolved government in the north, you know, in which you didn't really see Catholic political representation. These religious tensions between the communities that were, you know, sort of identity tensions, kind of tribalist tensions, as much as they were political ones, which would just sort of ebb and flow. Like, there had been periods of time where you get these kind of flashpoints and hostile interactions, and then other times when things seem to calm down a bit, and then it all just comes to a boil quite quickly. At the end of the 1960s, Patrick.
- [08:37]
Anita Arnand
Just to stress the discrimination for a second, almost no representation of Catholics in the security forces or in the police force or the judiciary.
- [08:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes, that's right. And also, particularly with the police force. So you had the Royal Ulster Constabulary, but then there was almost a sort of paramilitary wing of the police who were known as the BE Specials.
- [08:59]
Anita Arnand
You have a lovely quote in your book that we want them the wilder they are.
- [09:03]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, exactly. Get us the get. The wilder they are, the better. Again, there's this kind of interesting thing that happens throughout this story, which is the way in which politics kind of bleeds into tribalism and vice versa. But. So the B Specials were this police auxiliary kind of officially blessed, but it was also basically a kind of loyalist. And by that I mean sort of an extreme form of unionism in which you have these people who are proud to be British and have a great antipathy, in many cases, towards Catholics and nationalists, who would sometimes just show up and kind of beat people up. That obviously added to the tensions.
- [09:37]
Snoop Dogg
One thing we haven't talked about is also the way in which the English regarded the Irish at this time, because we've talked about this a lot in the past, but, you know, there still is that early feeling that somehow the Irish are wild, particularly those who are Catholic. That certainly is. You know, if you look at the newspapers at the time, they're still being characterized the way they were even at the end of the 1800s. Similar tone coming through when describing people. But also you've got suspicion because you have, during the Second World War, Irish nationalists who are cozying up to German Nazis to fight against who they perceive to be their oppressors. And you've got, you know, Eamon de Valera signing a book of condolence for Hitler. And those things are deeply embedded. So I mean, this whole idea of suspicion, it is just a whirlpool of suspicion in this very small geographical area.
- [10:27]
Anita Arnand
I think there's also something which I think people may not know. I'm from a Catholic background and my father's generation experienced strong anti Catholic discrimination in Britain. By the time that I was born, that had completely disappeared. I've never once in my life had any instance where being a Catholic has even been an issue, nevermind been a problem. But those prejudices that my father felt very strongly in his early career in the 50s and early 60s, lingers on in Northern Ireland in a sort of incredibly strong form. Much stronger than it ever was in Britain.
- [11:03]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. And then the other thing that for me was a bit revelatory when I started going back through and kind of reading the primary documents and even just the news accounts at the time is that in the 60s there was a sense the Reverend Ian Paisley, who was a real kind of rabble rouser at this time, was, was very emblematic of this and had a real visceral loathing of Catholics. You know, I mean, he was kind of a proponent of ethnic cleansing. He described them in as rodents and vermin and infestation. But there was also this kind of fascinating sense. It's just funny thinking about this today because I feel as though the Catholic Church is not what it was, but there was a sense that Catholics had dual loyalties. Right. That it was actually Rome behind the scenes that was calling the shots.
- [11:46]
Anita Arnand
That's a huge thing in British history up to the 20th century and it's completely disappeared. It's impossible to find anyone in Britain now who has that sort of prejudices, but they are there very strongly dictating so much of British politics from the Reformation right up into the early 20th century.
- [12:02]
Snoop Dogg
So that is the backdrop against which in the 60s you have a civil rights movement that springs up saying, you know what? We are human, we deserve to be able to work in the jobs that you work in and speak a little bit more about how the civil rights movement was influenced by the civil rights movement in the country that you're sitting in in America.
- [12:19]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's So interesting to put these two histories side by side and think about the American Civil rights movement and the fact that it rem. Remains primarily peaceful. You know, you ultimately get the Civil Rights act, obviously there's. There's a lot of progress even now still to be made, but that movement kind of has its own history. And then there's this sort of interesting way in which in Northern Ireland you had a civil rights movement that was very consciously inspired by what black Americans were doing. And really kind of young people, students studying the Selma march and sort of thinking, well, how. You know, look at this, this tradition of nonviolent resistance in which black Americans are working. And then there's this kind of fascinating thing which is that Northern Ireland then kind of deviates. So it sort of starts running in parallel with the civil rights movement in the US and then it goes off in this very different direction quite sharply.
- [13:13]
Anita Arnand
I think one thing that's very important to make clear at this point is that when the civil rights movement is beginning in Northern Ireland, the IRA is sort of semi dormant. It's not still a major force. You even say that there was a decommissioning of weapons immediately before the Troubles. They lend them to the Welsh.
- [13:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
There's this kind of, to me, quite funny little historical footnote which is that on the eve of the Troubles, you know, what's left of the IRA sort of sells much of their supply of weapons to the Free Whale Army. But yes, you had an Irish Republican army which had its origins earlier in the century. And it kind of over the years would sort of wax and wane, but it mostly was distinguished for its failures. And so it was this kind of underground army which had there been a campaign in the 50s, but they were a pretty dormant organization, an organization which was, I think, dominated by older people by and large. The caricature which I think is not completely off base is that they were these romantic Irish revolutionaries who were sort of in love with their own failure. There were these sort of barstool revolutionaries.
- [14:20]
Anita Arnand
Who were nursing their Guinness and talking.
- [14:22]
Patrick Radden Keefe
About nursing their Guinness and singing their songs, but not really, actually serious military commanders. You know, I wouldn't want to sort of suggest any direct causality, but you're absolutely right that at the point where the civil rights movement comes to the fore, there isn't like a particularly credible or inspiring military alternative.
- [14:42]
Snoop Dogg
I mean, you've got these sort of young, idealistic and you know, you paint a picture so, so beautifully of mini skirted, long haired hippie types who try and replicate their own Selma march. And it is what happens to the people who go on that march that transforms both the idea that you can get some kind of civil redress through peaceful means, but also completely morphs some of those people on the march. Now, talk about that particular march across that particular bridge. That changes everything.
- [15:10]
Anita Arnand
Yes. And introduce us to your characters, Dollars and Marion Price.
- [15:14]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I mentioned earlier that I came to this story after reading an obituary. So the obituary was of a woman named Dolores Price who died in 2013. She had grown up in West Belfast in an area called Anderson's Town. She'd grown up in a very Irish Republican family. Her father was a member of the ira. Her mother had been in the Women's council of the ira. She had an aunt who lived with the family, her Aunt Bridie, who had actually been handling explosives back in the 1930s for the IRA. And they detonated and they blew off her hands, and they blinded her and disfigured her face. And so Dolores Price kind of grew up in this family in which she was sort of steeped in the traditions of Irish Republican martyrdom. And this fascinating thing happens, and it's. It's just what you're getting at, Anita, which is that as a teenager, she had a little sister, Marian. They had really been reared by their kind of domineering father to have the sense that they, too, would join the struggle when the time came. But as teenagers, they rebel. But in the 1960s, in that family, the way you rebelled is that you said, what about peace? Like what? You know, like, what if we found another way? What if we didn't try and bomb the English? So they ended up getting involved in this group called People's Democracy, which was a sort of a student, peaceful, democratic protest group, very inspired by the American civil rights movement. There had been, starting in sort of 1967, 1968, there had been a series of these marches which were done in defiance of orders, you know, not to march, not to protest, protest, and had drawn some reaction from the authorities. And again, the playbook is very much the kind of playbook of the naacp. Remember, television is kind of coming to the fore at this time. And so if you get these televised clashes, it's a great image. I think they were very in tune with kind of iconic imagery and its power in social movements. And so there's a sense of if you have peaceful protesters just trying to march and hold their placards, and then the cops come in with batons and start hitting people, and there's a television camera nearby that can actually Be quite good in terms of advancing the word. So in January 1969, they prepare this march from Belfast to Derry. And the idea is it'll take four days. It's organized by people's democracy. And the Price sisters go along on this march in defiance of their parents. In defiance of their parents. Their parents were openly skeptical of the idea that, you know, taking a walk was going to achieve anything. And there are a number of quite significant figures in the kind of peaceful side of the movement, people like Eamon McCann who were there on this march. And on the fourth day, just as they're going to enter Derry, Ian Paisley had been kind of whipping up a frenzy of loyalist agitation about this. There were rumors, I think, not totally unsubstantiated rumors, but rumors that there was an IRA presence in this group. I don't mean to suggest that it wasn't a peaceful protest. I mean, that you may have had some kind of interlopers or people who are in the mix. This was not a violent protest. It was not a threatening, menacing protest.
- [18:31]
Snoop Dogg
No, I mean, they were advised, if you're hit, stand your ground, don't hit back. Sing louder. I mean, that was the advice. Just sing louder.
- [18:38]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So those were the orders. And then on the fourth day, just before they get into Derry, they had to cross this ancient bridge, Burntola Bridge, and the marchers ended up in a kind of a little bit of a choke point. They were in a kind of a valley. There were hills on either side, There were hedges kind of hemming them in. And suddenly they end up getting ambushed by loyalists who really come in quite savagely, throwing rocks, beating them. They had these clubs that they drove nails through. And so it's a kind of bloody Malay.
- [19:12]
Anita Arnand
That's not a kind of something you could take a blow from.
- [19:15]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, this was not just people sort of rousting them about. I mean, there were lots of people were hospitalized. And you can see there's footage of it. It's very dramatic, a lot of blood flowing. And the Price sisters are in the midst of this. They get beaten up, they end up going to the hospital, and then they turn up later at the doorstep of their home in Anderson's town. And remember, their parents have been so dubious of this whole thing. So they turn up kind of bruised and bloodied, and their mother, Chrissy Price, opens the door and she takes one look at them and she says, why didn't you fight back?
- [19:44]
Snoop Dogg
When you say, you know, the loyalists. And when we say loyalists, if you're listening from outside, the British Isles. These were the Protestants of Northern Ireland who wanted. They're loyalists because they want to remain loyal to London, Westminster. That's why they're called loyalists, just to clear that up. But the attack that takes place. And there's this extraordinary character you draw our attention to in the book, Major Bunting. You know, these people come out to have a fight, and whether these are young kids or young women, and Marian and Dolores, they were young girls at this time, one of them's almost drowned. And she looks up and she describes this herself. You know, seeing the hatred in this man's eyes. And then suddenly, in that moment on that march, realizing, I can't talk to you because you don't hear me, there's nothing I can say.
- [20:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's a funny moment to think about now. You know, this project, I started working on it in 2013, 2014, so it's been more than a decade of my life. There is a kind of strange sense in which, when it began, for me, it all felt a bit remote. And the more time has passed and the more the world has changed and my own country has changed, it all feels much closer to me now than it did when I started. But that idea of having a moment where you realize there's no way I will ever rationally persuade you, you're just unreachable. There's a gulf between us that cannot be bridged. I think that's what she experienced.
- [21:06]
Snoop Dogg
And that moment on the bridge and the fact that there are pictures of it and that there are bleeding children, I mean, they're just teenagers, young and very relatable to. Not only does it radicalize these two sisters, but it does radicalize politics as well, because not only they are looking up into the eyes of the people who have brought masonry with them to throw. When we're saying rock throwing, we're not talking about pebbles. We're talking about paving slabs that have been mined the day before to be hurled at these young people. The whole of Northern Ireland, Irish politics, suddenly becomes overheated after this.
- [21:39]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. I mean, I think that you had enormous tensions starting to kind of crank up, and then you just kind of have this sort of strange process of, like, mutual and, in retrospect, totally irrational escalation. But so it's a thing where there's a peaceful protest. If it had been left on its own, truly. I think there are a number of junctures in this story where you think if. If you just left it alone, all of history could have been different, but there's all this overreaction. And so you then end up with the sort of bloody clash with Bern Tollet. But then that same year, you have this loyalist group, the Apprentice Boys, historically, would kind of taunt Catholics on particular dates.
- [22:20]
Anita Arnand
We should say that the dates are all the episodes we've been doing of this podcast up to now. So it's the Battle of the Boyne. It's all these historic moments that have fueled this. The. And this is the moment, in a sense, that all that historic Pete, if you like, suddenly catches fire.
- [22:36]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. And I have to say, I mean, I don't want to kind of caricature myself as an American. It's just so startling to me in the Northern Irish context, the way in which people fight over history. And sometimes they're commemorating Something that happened 500 years ago, it's translated into something else. Like it's. They're not really arguing about history per se, or even politics. Like, it's become a kind of football hooliganism. It's become a sort of tribal badge. But the flashpoints are always these dates and these kind of commemorations of these bygone battles.
- [23:11]
Snoop Dogg
And they're not artificial pains, either. I mean, we mentioned Ian Paisley because he also has these close ties to the Orange Order. You know, they celebrate the Protestant William of Orange coming to Ireland in 1690. And I suppose a lot of people want to know, why do the Protestants feel so keenly that this is a war they have to fight?
- [23:32]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I think for a number of reasons. Right. Like, I think that if you're a Unionist or a Loyalist, part of the challenge is that there is this fear, this very real fear that someday we're going to get out bred on this place and we won't be the majority here. And maybe Ireland will reunite, or even if it doesn't reunite, if we become a religious minority in these six counties, our position will start to erode. There's always this kind of imagination of, like, erasure. There's this great Kipling quote, this Kipling.
- [24:04]
Anita Arnand
Poem that I never have heard of.
- [24:06]
Patrick Radden Keefe
He has a poem, a 1912 poem called Ulster. And he says, we know when all is said, we perish if we yield. And then on top of that, I think there's this added thing which is very awkward for the Loyalists, which is they feel this tremendous loyalty to Mother England. And I think this fear that Mother England kind of doesn't care. Right. Like, Mother England actually doesn't hold them nearly as dear as they do her.
- [24:35]
Anita Arnand
Mother England is Shedding colonies. At this point, every single year, there's another African country that's getting independence, and Northern Ireland is beginning to feel just like a headache that, you know, you can get rid of.
- [24:48]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. This kind of asymmetry of affection during this period, I think is so pronounced. And I do think that it. It just kind of adds an edge to that sense of anxiety. However, I'm not justifying any of it. Like, I think it's kind of wildly irrational and tribalist, but you can sort of understand and retrospect what gave it its edge.
- [25:07]
Snoop Dogg
And understanding is so important, and it's always so human. It's like, you know, because my uncle believed this, or, you know, my grandfather died for this. And these things are human emotions that often drag you into the very depths of the poorest human behavior.
- [25:21]
Patrick Radden Keefe
You referenced this guy Bunting. Major Bunting. It's exactly what you're. Just what you're describing, but kind of incarnate. One of the leaders of the counter protest at the bentollet march is this guy. Major bunting, who'd been in the British army, and he was kind of a guy who, in middle age, fell under the spell of paisley, is kind of leading these violent counter protesters, mobbing the.
- [25:44]
Snoop Dogg
Peaceful protesters, clubbing and throwing rocks.
- [25:47]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Exactly. But what is. So if you think about his anxiety, his own son, Ronnie Bunting, is one of the peaceful protesters. So he had. He had a kind of young, rebellious protestant son who said, actually, you know, things are pretty brutal for the Catholics here. I kind of see what they're talking about. I'm going to join this movement. And so you. You actually get the battle playing out within this family.
- [26:14]
Snoop Dogg
This is a turning point. You know, if you get the sliding doors moment in a movie, this is it, I think. You know, as Willy said before, had things gone a little differently, history would have been so very strangely, completely different than the one that we have. We're gonna take a break now. Join us after the break where we look at the aftermath of this turmoil that is kicked up by the attack on the bridge.
- [26:42]
Anita Arnand
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- [27:55]
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- [28:55]
Snoop Dogg
Welcome back. So look in the wake of this, where you've got now people's maybe irrational fears before that we're going to be erased on both sides. We're going to be erased. We have no rights. You suddenly have this moment where actually there is a real and present tangible danger. And just talk us through what happens after this.
- [29:16]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, a few things happen. I mean, really 1969 is the turning point and a number of big things happen. And again, it's this issue of kind of mutual escalation. So one thing that happens is that the IRA splinters. There had been the kind of the old IRA which becomes eventually known. The kind of remnants of it become known as the official ira. And then there's this split where you get the provisional ira, this kind of younger group of people who are much more hard nosed. There's an old joke which I've always liked about the kind of fractious nature of revolutionaries, which is that at any meeting of Irish Republicans, the first item on the agenda is the split.
- [30:00]
Anita Arnand
And this is Brendan Behan.
- [30:04]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So there's a little bit of that. But what comes out of that split is a group that is much more consciously modeled on paramilitary groups from Latin America, from the Middle East. They're just thinking about guerrilla tactics and how you would really take on the empire.
- [30:24]
Anita Arnand
This is the same sort of time as the PLO are in the news. There's been hijackings in Beirut, all that.
- [30:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Sort of stuff as you get into the 70s. Absolutely. And they think of themselves very much as part of a kind of global trend towards national liberation. Not just in terms of the sort of tactics and how you position yourself politically, but also what I found was, I think in terms of the iconography, like there's a kind of romance of all of this. They were all obsessed with Che Guevara. Right. And you can sort of see that, that there are these people they're looking to abroad who seem emblematic of a kind of anti colonial struggle that they see themselves a part of. So first you get that. But the other thing you also get at the same time is the arrival of the British army and a sense in London that we need to sort this thing out. Because you have these kind of escalating riots, you have a lot of ethnic cleansing that's happening, particularly in places like Belfast, in these kind of urban centers in which you have these different neighborhoods where you get these ethnic purges. Like a big chunk of the Catholics.
- [31:31]
Anita Arnand
Driven into Catholic areas, Protestants into Protestant areas, Protestant areas. And all the mixing and all the intermarriage suddenly becomes problematic.
- [31:38]
Patrick Radden Keefe
And in the midst of that, the.
- [31:40]
Snoop Dogg
The British army arrives, I mean, just before they arrive. Because actually when they do arrive, a lot of Catholics are like, oh good, you're here, you can sort this out. We can go to the shops now without fear of, you know, getting blown up. But there is a pathway to that. And why maybe Catholics might have felt that initially. I mean, the way you put it, you know, young green jacketed soldiers arriving on ships in thousands, initially greeted warmly by Catholics who welcomed the soldiers as if they were allied troops who'd liberated Paris. And there are reasons for that. I mean, two of the episodes that made people feel so unsafe. First of all, there's the Apprentice boys March in August 1969. We should talk about that. And then the repercussion of that, which will become known as the Battle of Bogside. So let's start with the Apprentice Boys March in August, a hot August in 1969. What happens?
- [32:26]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, you had these kind of. Again, there was this tradition perceived as part of the culture of, of Northern Protestantism, in which the Orange Order and, and various other groups would go out and do these kind of triumphalist marches to commemorate different episodes from history.
- [32:45]
Anita Arnand
The siege of Derry in particular, which is a thing we talked about, they're.
- [32:49]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Kind of sort of reenacting, right, the idea of Derry as this, like, contested place. And I'm calling it Derry, right, of course, but they would call it Londonderry. Even. Even the proper nouns are political over there. So there's this sense of Derry as a contested place. You have the apprentice boys, we should.
- [33:03]
Anita Arnand
Say, just to remind people, apprentice boys are so named because it is the apprentices who close the gates of Derry and in the view of the Unionists, saved the town from the Catholics from James I's Catholic forces.
- [33:15]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So you can imagine that young people, at a time when these tensions are already high, going out on a summer day to kind of reenact this. And then historically, what they would do is they would go to the Bogside, this very kind of Catholic ghetto into.
- [33:31]
Anita Arnand
Which the Catholics got shoved in the 17th century, when the Irish equivalent of the East Indies Company takes over Derry and cleanses the Catholics from the center of town and sends them off to the bog outside. And that is the bog side, the.
- [33:45]
Snoop Dogg
Bog side, which traditionally is lower down. And so they are literally being looked down upon by those who have the power and that. You know, the ritual I think you're going to talk about is the throwing of pennies.
- [33:55]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They would throw coins. Yeah.
- [33:57]
Snoop Dogg
You know, like, you are so poor. It's a provocative act, and it could result in people being very angry and upset about it, and it could blow up into violence. And it is the latter that happens in this case.
- [34:08]
Patrick Radden Keefe
What happened is that the Bogside sort of rose up and fought back, and you had a riot, and the riot then spread to Belfast and you suddenly had this kind of spectacle in which you have people fighting in the streets. You've got this retail ethnic cleansing in which people are basically banging on doors. You know, you'd have a predominantly Protestant area in which there's one Catholic family that's been living there for years, and basically somebody would get a dozen guys show up at the door and say, you got to be out in an hour. Same with Protestant families living in Catholic areas. People start pulling up paving stones and throwing them. They overturn buses and use them as barricades. I mean, very, very quickly, the kind of physical architecture of the city is transformed into a war zone.
- [34:57]
Anita Arnand
Petrol bombs. I mean, quite rough stuff.
- [34:59]
Snoop Dogg
Yeah. You have quotes that I had never come across before. You know, people like Ian Paisley saying, there is a Catholic living at 3, 4, 5, Shank Hill Road, get them out. You know, just very, very simply targeted neighbour who you've known for decades, make them leave. And that is what happens. There are also other leaders, and we've talked about Paisley, but around about this time, with this rioting or the battle back, or whichever way you want to put it that goes on, some names come to the fore, one of them being Gerry Adams. Now, tell us who he was at this time and why. You know, the Battle of the Bogside kind of makes him famous, if you.
- [35:35]
Anita Arnand
Like a younger man than Ian Paisley.
- [35:37]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes. I mean, Jerry Adams was very young at this time and had grown up in an. In a Catholic family, an Irish Republican family. He was from Ballymurphy, part of West Belfast. He had actually worked as a barman at a bar that you can still go to in Belfast today. And he became involved in the civil rights movement. He was involved in some of the fights over housing rights, you know, particularly housing issues. He also became a member of the Provisional ira, that offshoot. I should say. Jerry Adams has always denied that he was ever a member of the ira. I say pretty forthrightly in my book that he was. That's based on many conversations with people who were in the IRA with him. There are not, not too many people apart from Jerry Adams, who would tell you with a straight face that he wasn't in the ira, but we should say that he denies it. So he emerges as a kind of a young, very charismatic, very wise member of this kind of new, quite radical revolutionary movement, which essentially says we need to organize and do what we can to expel the British by any means necessary.
- [36:46]
Snoop Dogg
Well, and there is a disparagement of the old ira, you know, the ones you described in the first half of this podcast, where, you know, they're sitting over their Guinnesses and talking about the days of Michael Collins. The IRA at this time is known by some as standing for I Ran away. This is the gap that the Provisional ira, or the Provost, if you like this younger breed who comes along, they are going to change it. They're not going to be like those.
- [37:10]
Anita Arnand
Guys in the TV version of your book, the Disney Serialization. We actually get to see an actor who, playing Gerry Adams, standing on the burnt buses, fighting at the barricades. Is that. Is that an accurate picture? Is Gerry there amid the Molotov cocktails, sending off crowds of young teenagers to throw stones?
- [37:31]
Patrick Radden Keefe
He was. There are definitely accounts. Yeah. I'm sure we'll talk about this in due course, but when you make a television series, you are dramatizing certain things, but you're kind of trying to color between the lines of what you know. And I think, think the sense is that Adams was at a sort of organizational level involved in the street protests during that time. And to Anita's point, you're absolutely right. You know, you end up in this situation in which there is a pitched battle really, in the streets between these different communities. And there was a feeling in the Catholic community of, what's the point of the IRA if they can't defend us? When a Protestant mob comes in and starts ejecting people from their homes or throwing petrol bombs into people's front windows? Like, what good are you if you can't stand up for us at this time?
- [38:17]
Anita Arnand
And you answer that, in a sense in your book by pointing out that the IRA have just given away all their weapons so they can't just go and take on the loyalists.
- [38:25]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, and in fairness to the old ira, I mean, all of this was happening so quickly. I mean, I think the same is true with the British government and the British Army. It was all happening so fast, it all spun out of control so rapidly that I don't think anybody was prepared for what came.
- [38:43]
Snoop Dogg
So going back to, you know, this moment, within days, as you say, it happens so very, very quickly. Within days, these troops are sent by, you know, Westminster, go and sort this out. And at first they're welcomed with cups of tea, you know, sort of ladies with curlers and their housecoats on, sort of giving them tea and cake. And very soon that feeling of goodwill is frittered away. It just evaporates. Which, then again, I think is one of those turning points. Had they behaved a bit differently, the story might have been a bit different.
- [39:12]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's such a complicated set of dynamics, but the army is sent in to kind of straighten things out as peacekeepers, in effect. And they are initially greeted very much on those terms because you had people, just civilians, feeling very, very insecure and welcoming. The idea of a kind of an armed referee who's come in to sort everything out. But I think that their tactics were heavy handed. There were a whole bunch of different things going on. Their tactics were pretty heavy handed. I think that a lot of the young soldiers were kind of out of their depth and were frightened in this environment and didn't necessarily have the training to be able to drop into a kind of urban warfare situation and not overreact. And I guess, you know, we may talk about this next time. But I also think that the theory of the case on the part of Westminster and the British army was that this was essentially a kind of a colonial uprising and one which should be handled in the manner that other colonial uprisings had been. And so quite quickly, you have a sense in the Catholic community of the British army, not as a neutral referee coming to protect all of these British subjects, but as a partisan in this larger fight and one which should be resisted.
- [40:30]
Anita Arnand
And is this partly because they're being given lists by the RUC and the B Specials, who are this very biased police force.
- [40:38]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Anita Arnand
That are directing the army into Catholic ghettos. They're roughing up people, they're breaking into houses, they're looking for arms. And they're not doing that on the loyalist side because they're not being given lists by the IUC that names Ulster Defence Folk.
- [40:52]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. There was a sense, and I think a legitimate sense, that they were disputed disproportionately. Focusing on the Catholic communities, Catholic nationalist communities. You have to remember this was a place where it was illegal to fly the tricolor flag, the Irish flag. It was illegal to wear an Easter lily.
- [41:11]
Snoop Dogg
Describe what an Easter lily is, because that in itself gives the nickname to the old ira, doesn't it? Say, what is an Easter lily? And how could it get you into trouble?
- [41:18]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, it was just a little, like a little paper flower that you would wear to commemorate the Easter Rising. But there was a law in place which essentially said, I think the kind of fear of an uprising was so acute during this period that any sense of kind of speech that was like, sympathetic to the nationalist cause or defiance. Yeah. Could get you locked up.
- [41:40]
Anita Arnand
Yet again in the series, we have so many parallels with Israel, Palestine at this point, and the fact that this. Exactly. At this point, the Palestinians are not allowed to fly the Palestinian flag, which is illegal in Israel, and the equivalent of the lily is the watermelon. There's an exhibition in Ramallah at this time which is broken up because it has pictures of watermelons.
- [41:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Fascinating. The echoes are all over the place. But what it means is that, you know, you have a community, there's a large Catholic community in places like Belfast and Derry, which is probably sympathetic to the nationalist cause and to the idea of better civil rights for Catholics, but not necessarily ready to get into bed with the ira. Right. Like not necessarily looking for armed insurgency. And what ends up happening is that that presumably somewhat persuadable community is alienated by the kind of heavy handed tactics of the British Army.
- [42:33]
Snoop Dogg
Now, if you've got an aunt who's arrested for wearing a sticky or a sticker or a lily or something. You're not, you're not going to feel well disposed to the people who've swept her up and others. Look, we're going to come back and talk about how now this sort of febrile atmosphere will change Northern Ireland and Northern Irish politics forever. And also about a really intriguing man who comes up, like so many of the characters on Empire, in different colonial experiences, a man called Kitson just found fascinating and also appalling.
- [43:03]
Anita Arnand
One of the things Anita and I first rang each other up about when we were reading your book is have you got to Kitson yet?
- [43:09]
Snoop Dogg
Have you got to Kitson? It's Kitson. We know about Kitson. Anyway, look, so do join us for the next episode. If you want to hear that episode right now, you can join up Empire Club, early access to the whole Troubles miniseries series. So just go to empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.com and we'll give you the whole lot right here and right now. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Empire. Maybe this is the first time you've listened. It could be, couldn't it? Whichever platform you've listened to us on, do make sure to tap the follow button at the top of the page when you search for Empire. That way you'll never miss an episode. For now, though, it's goodbye from me.
- [43:47]
Anita Arnand
Anita Arnand, and goodbye from me, William Durimpo.