The Good Friday Agreement, my short-lived poetry career and my first bra.

(A look back on my childhood diaries during the peace process in Northern Ireland)

Where I live, your religion dictates which newspaper you read, it dictates what brand of clothes you wear and what shops you go to. It dictates your pronunciation of the letter ‘h,’ what sport you play and what school you go to.

For those who aren’t aware, the conflict in the North of Ireland, also known as the Troubles was a long and complex conflict that took place from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. It primarily involved two main groups: Irish nationalists (who were predominantly Catholic and wanted Northern Ireland to reunite with the Republic of Ireland), and Ulster Unionists (who were predominantly Protestant and wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom). The conflict was rooted in complex history as well as political and economic discrimination, paramilitary violence, cultural factors and British military involvement and has resulted in extreme segregation between these two cultural groups.

The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, brought an end to the bombings and shootings in Northern Ireland, and although far from perfect, this piece of legislation has been instrumental in bringing peace between Catholics and Protestants. Children, such as myself, born after the Agreement was signed were known as ‘Peace Babies,’ and supposedly embodied a spirit of hope and optimism for generations to come. On the historical 25th Anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, I want to look back at how my childhood was affected by Northern Ireland’s dark past.

I decided to hoke out my old diaries, entries spanning from when I was just 6 years old and writing my first sentences in school, until now, expecting to find tales of hardship and woe. Instead I found accounts of a perfectly normal childhood. I found a diary entry of my day out to the aquarium with my family when I was 6 years old, 'I touched the rays in the touch tank, they were very kind. My mummy eats rays,' and another about my trip to the school bun sale, ‘I went to the bun sale,’ I wrote, ‘I got three buns. My buns are just what my granny and grandad wanted. I love to eat buns.’ Riveting stuff. My later works detail my transition from primary school to secondary school, ‘I got my new uniform today. Not trying to boast but it looks quite good on me. I am soooo excited about my new school.’ I also tried my hand a poetry after the traumatic death of my first cat, Felix:

(Felix was a lovely cat, on the road he got squashed flat.

I'm so so sad he's gone, it's just so hard to move on.

I still think he's alive at home, I can't get to grips that he's buried all alone.

I'll never forget you, you're in my heart, but now it's time for us to part.)

At around 13 years old, my writing took a more agony aunt based approach after my babysitter confided in me that she smoked cigarettes;

(Dear Kate, I'm so sad,

Your decision (spelt wrong) was bad.

I'm unhappy you met,

Friends who smoke cigarettes.)

Of course, at around 14 years old my diary began to fill with drama from school, who liked who? Who was going out with who? Who said what? And there are at least four different entries detailing the Valentine’s Day when I received an (anonymous) rose from a boy in my class. I even found an entry detailing my experience of shopping for my first bra (it was too painfully embarrassing to include). And within 15 diaries, there is merely one entry that related to the sectarian tension in the North of Ireland. It came after the murder of a prison officer by the New IRA, a dissident Republican group who rejected the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. The getaway car was abandoned outside an estate close to where I live. I remember the sick feeling in my stomach as I watched the news that night and reality set in, ‘There has been a murder committed and the getaway car was parked just down the road form my house. I am scared… Dad has just arrived, he drove past the murder scene on his way home from work.’

After that, things slowly but surely started to fall into place in my head. Why I wasn’t allowed to wear clothes that reflected my cultural identity outside of the house, why I had to take off my tie and blazer when walking through the ‘other’ side of town out of fear that someone would recognise that I went to a Catholic school, why we couldn’t leave school that one time because of a bomb scare and why police helicopters would circle above my area at the first sign of heightened tensions. Although I was angry at the injustice of it all, I was aware that these problems weren’t something that only affected my community, that hiding your cultural identity in public and suffering through bomb scares wasn’t a ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ thing, it was just normal. And if we were ever to complain we would just be met with the older generation telling us that we should be grateful that we didn’t suffer any worse.

However, all of these things were very subtle and had a minimal effect on my day to day life. I never really felt unsafe and I thought that the instructions from my parents to hide my upbringing from others was a complete overreaction. I never saw this divisiveness that they swore existed. Until one evening, when I was 14 years old. I remember standing in the living room watching the television and seeing a news report about how a Unionist politician had ridiculed the Irish language in the Northern Irish Parliament and refused to apologise. At first, I struggled to believe what I was hearing, I wasn't angry or bitter, just confused. I thought that politicians were supposed to be respectable people and I could not comprehend how or why a politician would mock any language so publicly and unapologetically. When I had finally wrapped what had happened, I felt a seething rage at how this politician from, ‘The Other Side’ could be so ignorant and belittling. I began to feel the division and hatred that existed in Northern Ireland that I had tried so hard to deny.

On the 13th of March 2013, I wrote in my diary about a volleyball tournament that I had competed in. It was the first of many and I loved volleyball with a passion. However, living in the North of Ireland, volleyball couldn’t just be volleyball. As it wasn’t part of the Gaelic Athletic Association, (an organisation which focused on the promotion of Gaelic sports), volleyball was a Protestant sport. Objectively, it seems absurd that a sport could be ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ but that’s the way it is. I began playing for a club and this was the first time I met Protestants organically. We didn’t talk about our differences, they were irrelevant, we just trained together and focused on putting the ball across the net. For a while, everything was great. I was training with the best team, I had friends and a coach who pushed all of us, no matter the creed. When he left, I was suddenly dropped to the worst team, I wasn’t invited to tournaments anymore and I quit volleyball altogether. I thought it was a coincidence, maybe I had just got really bad at volleyball, maybe I had lost all of my ability overnight, but when one of my Catholic friends who was selected to play at semi-professional level quit because her teammates were so nasty to her, the only Catholic in the squad, I began to think that maybe this problem could be bigger than just me. The thing is, I’ll never know what went wrong, if it was my ability, my attitude or my religion. I just knew that it wasn’t fair.

I never recorded these events in my diary. At the time, I felt as though these details were insignificant. This was just the way things worked, and I couldn’t, or felt that I shouldn’t, expect any better. I was much more interested in documenting my hatred for whatever teacher had given my class punishment work that week, ‘I would love to rip the hair out of her inflated head,’ and scheming to have a secret boyfriend ‘My mum says I’m not allowed to go out with anyone BUT I’m going to the Gaeltacht (an Irish speaking summer camp) so I can have a boyfriend there and my mum won’t know. I hope.’

Therefore, sectarianism, political tension and security issues were for the most part, just so utterly irrelevant to my teenage brain. That’s not to say that I never felt the tensions, or that I accepted the way things worked, it’s just to say that although we were Peace Babies, and although we were growing up in a post conflict society, we were doing exactly that- growing up. And growing up involves angst and heartbreak and embarrassment and in my case, cringy diary entries and no political or religious conflict will ever change that.