Investigation on the Troubles

Patricia lives in Stepaside, a village 20 minutes away from Dublin City Centre. As I cross the iron gates of the main entrance, I see on my right a garden neatly tended, with beautiful flowers and small trees here and there; on the left, her huge house. I walk on cobblestone until I reach the graveled courtyard where a black car is parked, a small fountain in its centre.

I climb the three steps to the door and ring the bell. Two minutes later the door opens, and it is an average 60-year-old lady who greets me with a smile, her piercing blue eyes being the first thing I notice. Her two dogs, both white, one big and the other small, welcome me heartily.

The interior of the house is as huge as it looks from the outside, with 3 stories, all carpeted in a dark green. She leads me to a room on the right side, warm from an old and impressive stove, and where the TV is on. The dogs quickly find their own spots back on the couch near the window.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

Once the tea is ready, accompanied by a personal tiny jug of milk, we sit at the table. She apologizes for the environment, as usually she receives guests in the bigger living-room; but the weather being so cold these past days, we might as well stay in the warmth near the stove.

Today, Patricia is dressed in a dark blue pullover, jeans and used snickers, as she is going for a walk with the dogs after our meeting. She wears a slight touch of make-up, and her shoulder-length blond hair is perfectly brushed.

Patricia is not originally from Ireland, but from Scotland -we can hear that she doesn't have quite an Irish accent. She came here when she married her first husband, Ronan, a man from Newry.

As a child, she lived a regular life in Scotland, with her parents and two big sisters. During her student life, she visited and lived in a few countries, such as Greece, Poland, Italy or France. In Paris she lived for two years, and this is where she would meet her future husband, a medicine student. She went back with him in 1966, and since then, never left Ireland. They married two years later in Belfast.

Their life was made a little hard by the Troubles, where the worst happened in the North, as everyone knows and remembers. When I ask her about Belfast, she becomes very serious, frowning.

“Well, today Belfast is good I think. But even ten years ago, soldiers were patrolling everywhere, there was a curfew, and when you took the chance to go out at night for a drink or to go the restaurant, you never knew if you would come back home alive.”

[...] From somewhere out beyond the breeze-block walls we get a broken rhythm
Of machine-gun fire. A ragged chorus. So the sentence of the night
Is punctuated through and through by rounds of drink, of bullets, of applause
(Ciaran Carson, Night Out)

She also talks about the check-points on both sides of the border separating Northern Ireland from Southern Ireland, where green cars were often arrested and searched by British soldiers, the green standing for the Irish colour.

But they were never sufficient reasons for her to flee the country: “Why should I have abandoned my husband for this? It was my home now, and I wanted to stand on the Irish side -because of course, I was against most of the British decisions.”

When in 1969 they had their first son, the married couple moved to Stepaside as it was a safer place. However, Ronan made regular trips between Dublin and Belfast or Newry, to check on his family and friends, and support the civil rights movement. She would stay at home to take care of their child, and rest while she was awaiting their second baby.

A mural in Derry/Londonderry
on the Civic Rights marches

In 1971, she didn't want to stand back from the general protest anymore, and wanted to express her support to the Irish cause:

“Once I went to the British embassy in Dublin -because that's where I had to go as I am from Scotland- and I went there to give back my passport, I didn't want it anymore, I didn't want to be associated with all this. You know, it was in sign of protest, I wanted to show them that I didn't agree with what they were doing, that was my small way of resisting. But the thing got bigger and bigger: people gathered to see what was happening -because of course the embassy didn't want to grant my request- and the media arrived, it was on the news the same day... And the following weeks, I had to get a close protection, because it had angered some people. I was a young mum at that time, and I remember that my kids had received razor blades by post; that was a dark time...”, she says quietly, a note of concern in her voice.

The year after, her husband was caught in the bombings of the Bloody Friday in Belfast, on the 21^st of July.

As for sharing this with me, Patricia is surprisingly calm and serene. She has dealt with so many things in her life, now living with her two dogs in a quiet town, that she looks at her life with serenity, with peace.

Patricia is far from the stereotypes of the bourgeois lady who has been spared all her life. When we don't know her, we could be tempted to have prejudices on her. But hidden behind her classy life-style and elegant looks, this woman owns an unknown strength, an unknown past. When I visited her again afterwards, it was always a pleasure to hear her stories.

She raised her two sons alone for several years, having the support of Ronan's family and her own, dealing with her grief to keep on living and resisting.

In 1977, she met her second husband-to-be, Patrick, working in the press. He was also a widower, and therefore a strong connection developed between them, as they were morally comforting each other.

He was also from Northern Ireland, not far from Derry; but since he was little, he had lived in the Republic of Ireland:

“When he was a child, his father was an activist against the British Crown. One day, some British soldiers broke into their house, and started setting it on fire. All his family had to flee in the South of Ireland after that: just because his father militated, [the British] got back at all the family.”

It was during the same period that Catholic pogroms occurred, where shops owned by Catholic Irishmen were destroyed in Northern Ireland, in the Catholic/Protestant and Republican/Loyalist conflict.

Another mural in Derry about peace

They had together two daughters, and lived happily for a long time until she lost her husband again, this time of disease, in 2002. Since then, she never remarried.

Today, Patricia has four grown adult children living all around the world: one son in China, another in the United-States, a daughter in France, and finally another one who stayed in Ireland, in Enniskery, a village a few minutes from Stepaside. Patricia has seen a lot in her life, and lives peacefully with it.

Patricia has recently sold her house. She will be moving next year into another smaller place in Greystones, a village along Dublin Bay. She will leave her home full of memories, some hard and others happy. She is glad to know that it is a family with four boys who will take it back: she wants this house to be full of life again, and to create new happy memories.

This article was written for a university assignment.