ROY GARLAND is the author of ‘Gusty Spence’, the acclaimed biography of the former UVF leader. Spence changed his ways and became a key participant in the peace process. Here, Roy Garland, who knew many of the key Loyalist figures of the Troubles, describes some of the preliminary steps taken on the long road that led to peace and in which he was involved.
My parents last visited the old Monaghan homestead where our Garland ancestors came from the 1920s. As a child in the 1940s, I felt a strong desire to be Irish in the streets of the Shankill where I lived. The Garlands in Monaghan, were relatives and when my parents’ last visited, Frank Garland was on his death bed and offered the farm to my dad, William Garland, and granddad but mum said she would not live in this “back of beyond.” Otherwise, I would have been reared in Monaghan instead of Belfast’s Shankill Road.
When I first visited the Republic in the early 1960s, I felt uneasy crossing the border until I returned to the many shades of green of the six Ulster counties. By the mid 1960s I asked a stranger in Monaghan Town for directions to the farm. There I met Garland relatives and friends, and the old fears slowly melted away. What’s more Joe Gavin wrote and told me a story that showed how people on this island can learn to love and respect each other and our different traditions. I also felt the pain of members of the local Orange Lodge, whose parading stopped when a church parade was blocked before they could reach the church.
Yet my relatives and friends there lived in peace with their neighbours. What’s more Lodge members employed local Catholics in their Hall where they played the drums and instruments in the hall. More recently Joe Gavin retold a story to me that his dad had told him. Joe’s father, Brother James Gavin, a Capuchin-Franciscan Friar at Pittsburgh USA had worked on the Monaghan farm. In January 2014, his son, 81-year-old Joe Gavin, wrote to me at the Irish News where I was a columnist. His dad had worked on the farm and my writings had touched Joe deeply. His father James had taken ill at the farm and told Joe what happened when his father James took ill at the farm and his dad told him what happened:
“Frank Garland was like a father to me and on the 12th. July, Orangemen’s Day the Garlands carried my dad into the Orange Hall and told the brethren to give him his dinner in the Orange Hall and treat him with love and kindness. Dad of course was scared and afraid being a Roman Catholic. I enjoyed your writings about the Garlands and how they treated my dad with Christian love and kindness when a boy. I could not die in peace until I expressed my honest thanks to you. I am 81 years old, an old man. I wanted to let you know the Garlands are in my prayers. When I was a boy, my dad told me of his life at the Hand and Pen and the Garland home and farm where he worked. Thanks again dear friends of my late dad James Gavin who died January 12th, 1955.“
Small steps like these challenge us all and reinforce our efforts to improve relations between our people and their traditions. It so happened that around that time Gusty Spence told me we needed someone to speak for us at the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin. I agreed to be that person. The Church of Ireland Gazette commented on the kind of unionism I represented and said it could become a permanent feature of Irish life. Ruairi Quinn Irish Minister of Finance was “in something of a state of shock, as though he had never come face to face with anyone just like this Mr. Garland.”[1] I had said that people of the:
“Irish Republic have the capacity and the responsibility to help in the healing of this land. They could help reduce the siege mentality…by cementing the non-coercive approach upon which this Forum was built. In the absence of siege there will be no siege mentality…” [2]
The late John Robb, New Ireland Group leader, liked my use of the word “diverse” rather than “divided” people and said my “focus on collective guilt” was “so important” and “our failure to take responsibility for the selective images and notions of history have resulted in the recurring cycles of violence, to which you allude.” “In a sense the prisoners reflect the guilt which the rest of us should feel for failure…to resolve the conflict.” He suggested a conference “to launch a major national debate.”
A Church of Ireland Gazette commentator said I “made a deep impression on those present, as evidenced by several press reports and in comments made that night on RTE by Mr Ruairi Quinn, Irish Minister of Finance.” The Gazette went on:
“They could not have imagined that a unionist could so clearly be a magnanimous man, courteous, considerate, kind and without a trace of narrowness or bigotry but nevertheless unflinchingly committed to unionism as his inviolable and impeccably argued bottom line. What could a republican do in the face of it?… RTE TV showed Southern politicians listening carefully and apparently riveted by what they were hearing. And most conspicuously there was Mr. Gerry Adams–listening carefully eyes glued on this man Garland, and in the intensity of his concentration nervously plucking at his beard.” [3]
On my return to Belfast, I met a former UDA friend who thanked me saying, “You showed that we (working class Loyalists) could do it.” Rev John Stewart, Minister of Woodvale Methodist Church and an NILP member, welcomed Loyalist leaders to his manse for discussions. He understood the conditions many of us lived with and our limited educational opportunities. My father left school aged 12 to become a manual worker but then engaged in war damage glazing work in Glasgow. He saved £100, bought stock and rented a shop in Belfast’s Old Lodge Road. My mother was a part-time worker in the mills until she was 13 years old and worked at large machines at the mill. She recalled visiting her Uncle Joe in the workhouse as a child when she lived in minimal conditions. Like friends of both traditions, I was 14 when I left school.
I spoke with historian, the late Dr Harold O’Sullivan, local historian Alphie Reilly and Kevin Gartland from south Monaghan before forming a discussion group led by Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group and myself and known as the Guild of Uriel. We spent twenty years in dynamic discussions that involved all sides of our conflicting traditions from security people to paramilitaries and politicians and ordinary people. This proved a fruitful experience that helped lay the basis for our hopes for a new Ireland at peace with itself and with our neighbours.
[1] Mr Garland goes to town, By Cromlyn Church of Ireland Gazette (24 February 1995).
[2] Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, Report of Proceedings – Vol 5 10 February 1995 (Dublin Castle.)
[3] Church of Ireland Gazette 24 February 1995.