The Knights in the Shebeen

Canadian by birth, Irish by temperament, Correspondent James Wilde, who has covered wars for TIME from Asia to Nigeria, visited Ulster recently. His report:

A BIG burly man called "Beer Belly" stood on the wooden stage. He glowered through the smoke-filled hall that was once a Catholic church and is now a shebeen (illegal drinking club) in the middle of Belfast's Falls Road Catholic ghetto. It was Sunday and the wooden trestle tables groaned under the weight of Guinness bottles, but no police or military would dare enforce the law that closes pubs on Sundays. The place was packed with laughing, plotting Irishmen, nearly all working-class, some of them members of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. As Beer Belly began to recite an anonymous poem, the crowd grew silent:

Who dares to say "Forget the past" to men of

Irish birth?

Who dares to say "Cease fighting for your place upon

the earth"? Let remembrance be our watchword, and our dead we'll

never fail. Let their graves to us be milestones on a blood-soaked

one-way trail.

The voice boomed on in a litany of injustices perpetrated on the Irish for 800 years. He spoke of the men of the 1798 "rising," of the stand at Kilcommodon Hill, of Pearse and Connelly, who declared Irish independence in 1916.

How can we e'er forget The blood that's on those British bosses, The brokenhearted mother's losses, Lonely graves, and wayside crosses, Lord, forget all that?

There was thunderous applause, and the I.R.A. "provisionals" lifted their Old Bushmills whisky to the tricolor flag of Ireland and the pictures of dead heroes on the wall.

At a table sat "the Gray Wolf," a provisional leader who had spent 24 years, half his life, in jail for terrorist activities. "All we want is a free united democratic Ireland and an end to sectarian discrimination," he said. "We have always been betrayed: betrayed by the church, betrayed by our own politicians and even by fellow comrades. But despite all our failures and past disappointments, I feel this is the turning point and soon we will be free."

In Dublin from 1916 to 1921, there were only 83 true terrorists. In Belfast today, there are perhaps 50. Author J. Bowyer Bell characterizes them in his book on the I.R.A., Secret Army, as "knights templar." Writes Bell: "Certain of a true cause, possessed of the moral justification for the use of force, intimate with the long tradition of the struggle, comfortable in the company of proud men, an I.R.A. volunteer often lives a life not so much of denial as dedication, a laic pilgrim on the road to the Republic, a knight templar justified in the use of his sword. This atmosphere of sanctity and violence is alien to the Saxon world."

In the cellar of a pub, a provisional spoke of the hatred for the British "army of occupation." "In the beginning our only weapons were 'Belfast confetti'--rivets, bottles and stones--but now we have guns and plenty of ammunition. And I'll tell you this: we won't be wild geese [exiles] no more. We are going to fight this through till we die."

And in the shebeen were the women, with their burdens of pain and sorrow. Women who have watched their children grow from innocent games to making petrol bombs: "I was brought up in this atmosphere of violence, and my heart is broken because I see my children torn and distorted as I am." Women who have come to terms with life comforted by the Irish saying, "One is born in sorrow and dies in joy."

A woman rose to sing. "The English crushed our culture and tried to break our tradition," said a bearded harp player, "so the spoken word and ballad have become very important to us." There are songs that mock with bittersweet humor and songs that tell of terror:

There's barricades and burning now and gunmen walk the street.

There's C.S. gas from England that hungry kids can eat.

Our town's an old sand castle and the waves begin to pound.

And I tell you, John, I won't be long in leaving Belfast town.

At 4 in the morning, Beer Belly rose again to quote the words of Patrick Pearse, who was executed by a British firing squad after Dublin's Easter Rebellion in 1916: "Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The defenders of this realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think they have purchased half of us, and intimidated the other half. They think they have foreseen everything: but the fools . . . the fools . . . the fools . . . They have left us our Fenian dead. And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." When he finished, everyone was drunk on language and sorrow and song.

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