In the line of fire

I went up to the Nationalist section of the Ardoyne Road, North Belfast last Thursday night with a colleague, basically to cover the Holy Cross school being reopened and the children going back to school on Friday morning – but also, I guess, to get a sense of the riots. At about half eleven at night we parked the car up on a footpath a little bit away from where the riots were happening, and in the distance we could see about three or four British Army tanks blocking off the road, a couple of cars on fire in front of it, and at the corner of an intersection, guys coming out with hoods and scarves over their faces throwing petrol bombs over at the British soldiers. Further up the road there were more tanks blocking it off and the Loyalists on the other side. The Nationalists and Loyalists were not actually firing at each other; they were firing at the soldiers.

It’s one thing to see this on the television, another to actually step outside the car and smell petrol bombs and burnt out cars, smouldering metal and rubber, the heat – it’s quite overpowering. When we stepped out of the car two young boys came down, fourteen or fifteen, with scarves over their faces, very sinister, and they said: “We’d actually like to burn that car out”. And my colleague said, “You can’t really. Anyway, what’s going on, what have we missed?” And they said, “No, no, no, we’d actually really like to burn that car out.”

But then two women came down, one of them Kate Lagan, a leading figure within the nationalist community, from a Republican background, known to everybody. She welcomed us and said she was going to show us around, told the lads to go away, took the mobile phone out, checked that it was okay to drive our car to a certain area, which we did, and then there were people put on guard to mind it.

Then she brought us up to where the tanks and land rovers were, and there were hundreds of people – men, women, children as young as nine and ten – with hoods up, throwing petrol bombs and bricks. It was like going to a rock concert, except much more sadistic: hundreds of people with an energy, tension, an air of anticipation. We were actually walking by people and Kate was saying, “Will you wait ’til we get by before you throw the bombs?”

We were walking around the estates, relaxed, until hundreds of people started to run, screaming and shouting. There were helicopters overhead, noises of bombs being thrown, glass all over the roads and the paths. I’ve never experienced that before, where you’re just told to run. You don’t look left or right, just straight ahead, you’ve no sense of what’s going on at all, you’re trying to keep up with the people you’re with. Somebody roared at me to get into a garden, so I did, near the main intersection of the Ardoyne Road.

Next, twelve tanks came screeching around the corner at high speed, 50 to 70 mph, with literally hundreds of people jumping out of their way or running up and throwing bombs at them. Then, about 40 soldiers in riot gear with guns walked right down, parallel to us, looking around. Some Nationalist kids were running up and firing stuff at them even though the guns were being pointed. People were shouting abuse, some screaming, “They’re going to beat me up, the peelers are gonna kill me!” We were being told, “Get down! Duck! Dive!” It was absolutely terrifying. I kept expecting Steven Spielberg to say, “Cut!” it was that dramatic.

It eased off after about ten minutes. I was trying to figure out why this all happened. Was it to disperse the crowd or was it the army flexing their muscles? I couldn’t figure it out. You’ll get a different answer from the Nationalists and Loyalists. When I went to bed that night the adrenaline was up, my heart was still pounding, and I was still shaky when I woke up the next day. But from that I could understand the high, the buzz and the attraction, the danger for young people, to experience that cat and mouse game again the next night is more exciting than sitting in and looking at Coronation Street.

On Friday morning the Loyalist protests were down to a minimum and the Nationalist kids went to school quite peacefully, with about an 80% attendance. What was intimidating for the kids was a massive media presence: satellite vans, photographers, everyone stopping them for interviews on the way up. But when I walked back with a couple of the parents having dropped the children to school, a bigger protest had gathered.

They were shouting things like: “What’s that brown stuff coming out of your mouth? – it must be the shit you speak,” or “Have you no men with you today to beat the shit out of ye?” It was all very personal because they all know each other, but the fascinating thing was that the women turned around and smiled at them – which can be the most infuriating thing. But they remember every single thing: it’s all logged.

The saddest thing for me was when we were on air and two women were chatting to Gerry (Ryan) about their experiences, then this young mum with a seven-year-old girl came up, and the child was sobbing, not even crying, just sobbing, afraid to go to school, afraid to come home from school. And to me that was the real tragedy of it.