Belfast Stories
A working mens’ club is an unlikely setting for a museum devoted to the thirty year conflict that scarred Northern Ireland and claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people. But every day Kevin Carson, club member and part-time curator of the Roddy McCorley Museum will take visitors behind the clubs substantial lounge and around the three upstairs rooms that constitute a shrine to the Republican story of The Troubles.
There are wall hangings from the womens’ prison at Armagh gaol, walkie talkies used by the IRA, weaponry, both real and replica, of rifles used to shoot at soldiers. There are pamphlets, posters, British army and police uniforms. there’s a scale model, rescued from the governor’s office, of the Maze prison complex which housed many of the Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries during the conflict and bricks from now demolished home of Tom Williams – an IRA volunteer executed in a now forgotten incident during World War Two. There is even a metal dustbin, attached to a flagstone so that visitors can recreate the authentic sound that West Belfast residents made to warn of an impending army raid.
Kevin explains that the origins of the collection date back to 1972 when the first Republican prisoners and internees in the Maze prison camp (then called Long Kesh) made handicrafts from wood or other materials as a way of passing time in gaol and raising money. Leather wallets, wooden plaques and needlework items found their way first to people homes in West Belfast and thence to the club as donations. As the collection grew, so did the museum and so latterly, has its reputation. “Visitors come from far and wide,” he says. “Often they don’t know the first thing about the Troubles, but have heard about us. Some call it political tourism, or even a terrorist trail,” he adds, “but the whole point of the collection is an educational one - to demonstrate man’s inhumanity to man.”
But this is Belfast and other histories are available, and so are other museums. Not far from the Roddy McCorley club, in another part of Nationalist West Belfast, is the Eileen Hickey Irish Republican History Museum. Former Armagh gaol inmate Eileen Hickey, who took a university degree on her release and became a teacher was disturbed to find that many young people had no understanding of the roots of the conflict, so she began to collect Republican memorabilia as a teaching aid.
Hickey and a small group of volunteers then transformed a dilapidated social club in a former linen mill into a museum which seeks to explain the development of republicanism from the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 to the present day. Though there are no artefacts from the 18th century, the 20th century history of Ireland is well represented in weapons and medals from the 1916 Easter Rising, handbooks on guerilla warfare from the 1950s, and miniature cameras and radios smuggled in to prisoners in the Maze, and a recreation of a cell (with genuine door) from Armagh prison, which was closed in 1986.
The weaponry on display - from pikes to rocket launchers “isn’t a Rambo style thing,” claims Johnny Hickey, widower of the museum’s founder. “Eileen was determined that it should be an educational tool not an attempt to glorify violence.” He is particularly keen to emphasise that the museum also houses a library and interpretive centre to help with education projects and those conducting historical research.
Hop on a bus outside the mill and you can be dropped off half an hour later at the doors of yet another museum, this time telling the story from the Protestant and Loyalist point of view. More particularly, the story that is told by the Ulster Defence Association, a paramilitary organisation that contributed its share to the body count.
The Loyalist Conflict museum consists of three rooms in a shopfront next to a working mens club. Like its Nationalist counterparts, it is maintained by volunteers, many of whom are ex-paramilitary prisoners. Here too, there’s much emphasis on the leather goods and carvings made by prisoners and the hand-painted artworks that adorn the walls. Started as a project to help ex-prisoners reintegrate into the community, it is now “a place of reflection’ with a mission to help educate younger generations “not to repeat the mistakes of the past,” says Robert Scott, peace tourism co-ordinator of Charter NI, a community organisation which supports the museum.
But it is also part of a move to make Troubles tourism part of the effort to regenerate run-down working class areas whose local economies have suffered badly in recent years, he says. Museum collections are popping up in community centres all over Belfast, taking their cue from the success of the Somme Heritage Centre and the Museum of Free Derry, both of which began as community led initiatives and have transformed into major tourist attractions, supported by government funding.
Scott says there are plans for a major tourism hub in East Belfast which would incorporate the work of various local museums in the area, and build on the work of the walking tours which offer visitors the opportunity of hearing first hand from ex-paramilitary tour guides. Scott is keen to point out that the East Belfast walking tour is run jointly with community leaders from Short Strand, a Nationalist area and guides hand over to each other, so that “different sides of the story can be told.” The Roddy McCorley Society is also looking to expand, and has already received planning permission for a museum and cafe extension to their existing premises, with promises of council funding.
The casual visitor might be surprised to see how much these museums have in common. They are run by groups of volunteers, do not charge visitors and don’t advertise, using social media and word of mouth recommendations to encourage visitors. Belfast’s famous ‘black taxi’ tours which take tourists around the city’s trouble spots, are their most regular customers. They also guard their independence fiercely, having little engagement with the professional museum world, apart from getting advice on conservation and maintenance. They are proud of the fact that they are deeply embedded in their localities. “Its important that these museums be situated in areas where they came from, so that you can see the cranes of the shipyard, the local cafes and shops where people grew up,” says Maurice, one of the volunteers at the Conflict Museum.
Peter Doak, now a lecturer at Leeds University, was part of a two year research project for University of Ulster which examined local communities’ engagement with their history. He points out that despite their political difference, the volunteer running the museums had a deep respect for each other. What they shared was a feeling of “being abandoned or ignored by the conventional narratives of the Troubles.” The Troubles Gallery at the Ulster Museum, which has now had a substantial revamp, was not an adequate vehicle for telling their story, he said.
“People we spoke to felt a profound sense of disengagement with the gallery’s portrayal. They were also worried about academics trying to impose a single objective history, they want to tell their own story.”
Doak is sanguine about the impact that these partial histories will have. “People have become used to the fact that history is contested. There will be different interpretations even in a small place like East Belfast. There is no one single narrative that can capture everyone’s experience because the Troubles did not affect people uniformly.”
There is little prospect of a single ‘official’ all-encompassing interpretative centre for the Troubles. A project which was to have transformed the remnants of the Maze prison into such a centre, has been mired in political disagreement for more than a decade. “It has been talked about for a long time but it is difficult to see how it might actually happen,” says Deirdre Mac Bride, formerly of the Community Relations Council, who co-ordinated a series of legacy events in Northern Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries. “But in the absence of such a centre, these local initiatives have become even more important.”
What’s particularly important, according to Mac Bride is to recognise that the small museums are run by ex combatants, so inevitably they will concentrate on the military side of the conflict. “But that is not the whole story. The danger is that we, and the local communities in Northern Ireland, are not necessarily hearing the voices of the other victims of the suffering.”
She praised the “unsung” work that local museums have done during the Decade of Centenaries in working with local communities and with individual stories of ‘non-combatants’ affected by World War One or the Easter Rising. These museums had shown the way in negotiating difficult political conversations, she said, and could provide a way forward for a broader conversation between organisations like National Museums Northern Ireland and the community led museums.
ENDS
Patrick Kelly