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This is border country -
the dividing line between the British province of Northern Ireland
and the Irish Republic. The border meanders for nearly 300 miles.
It was created in 1922 when Ireland became a free state and Ulster
remained British.
This is the border - cause of some 2,000 deaths on this island
over the last ten years.
It's virtually impossible to seal up this border.
Is the border the source of the trouble,
or is it merely a symptom?
There's a lot of money made off the border.
All kinds of smuggling, be it cattle, cigarettes, alcohol.
Your job is to protect the border.
Hello, is that the IRA Publicity Bureau, please?
I grew up hating the people in the uniforms.
I grew up hating the police. I grew up hating the British Army.
And I ended up joining the IRA.
The border has a huge impact on my life.
Everything I do now is affected by that one moment in time.
LOUD BANG
The existence of the border has caused dispute and bloodshed,
but nevertheless it constitutes an international frontier.
Would its removal unite the hearts and minds of the people
of this island?
Or do the divisions run too deep?
Do I like the border?!
Course I don't like the border.
The border should never have existed on this island.
I get fed up that people keep talking about the "Irish border."
It's a British border.
Partitioned by a treaty signed in 1922.
Six counties allied to the north.
26 counties of the Republic to the south.
Between the two is the border, manned on either side by customs
guards as if the people and the land were different.
ALARM RINGS
My name is Paddy Gillespie.
I like to be called Paddy, because I really am a paddy.
And I'm older than the Irish border.
I'm 102, so I know quite a bit about the activities
and what went on across the border.
It was all about a division on our wee island of Ireland.
There were 32 counties, and there were six of them taken away.
And that was run by the British Government and left Ireland with 26
counties which so far, up to date, we're doing all right.
Our money's all right and we're living fairly peacefully.
HE LAUGHS
My family have been resident here in the border area for well
over 200 years.
They came here as soldiers,
towards the end of the 17th century during the reigns of Elizabeth
and also of Charles I.
Just perfect, just perfect.
England was driven by a very serious concern for security.
They wanted to prevent either the Spaniards or, later, the French
from using Ireland as a beachhead and potentially launching a direct
invasion of England.
And therefore there was a considerable effort on behalf
of successive British governments to settle Protestants on the island
of Ireland, where the vast mass were Catholic.
I think any border that is imposed upon a country from outside
is going to create scars, both on the land
and also in people's minds.
There is absolutely no question, the imposition of a border
has been a disaster for the island of Ireland.
England seem to dominate lots of places across the world,
and build barriers and invade different countries.
But, I'll tell you, I would have preferred they had have
stayed out of our wee island.
When I was 17,
when you wanted to go over the border you were issued
with a book, which entailed you had to go in
and have this book stamped.
And if you stayed over the border, even if you were only in for an hour,
you had to have it stamped coming out again.
You're trying to get into your own country, and across
your own river.
No-one likes this frontier, like a scar
on a beautiful woman's face.
And it made you feel,
"Am I wanted here? Am I a part of this country? Am I part of Ireland?"
Travellers are stopped by Irish Guards as they leave the Republic,
by Her Majesty's men a few yards farther on as they enter Ulster.
To the tourist, it is an inconvenience.
To the patriot, an open wound.
And to a segment of the Irish youth, a call to violent action.
This is a smuggler.
She's on a return trip from Britain into Ireland with quantities
of butter, bread and tinned food, all of which are cheaper in Ulster.
Smuggling is an old tradition around here, and they start them
kind of young.
Once a year,
my mother would take us on the train up from Dublin, up to Belfast, to
buy clothes, cos clothes were much cheaper in the north
than they were in the south.
And I just remember vividly the change in your body as you came back
across the border, because you have five layers of clothes
on, supposedly to fool the customs officials, you know, that you were
you were smuggling these clothes, basically, by wearing them.
So, you went up as a skinny little kid, and you came back
as a kind of Michelin Man, you know!
I smuggled my wedding dress.
And I'm sure you smuggled yours.
Smuggled my wedding dress.
I smuggled the curtains for the dining room on this.
I'll tell you, I used to be sitting maybe seven or eight cars
in front of you, coming to the customs, you know,
and the custom man coming out, and checking all them cars,
and you sitting sweating.
And by chance, he sort of waved you on.
"Oh, my God." I know, you felt so relieved.
Oh, relieved, surely to God.
You went and you smuggled the flour, and the bread,
and butter, and the tea,
and cigarettes... Yeah.
..was things that were smuggled.
In John Britton's pub which quenches thirst for 13 hours a day,
cigarettes are up to a shilling cheaper.
So, addicts flock in from across the border to buy over 200,000
cigarettes a week.
I remember smuggling cows, cattle across the river.
Many a farmer took to smuggling cattle across the border to markets
in Northern Ireland.
Four of us were asked to help seven or eight head of cattle across the river.
Now, we had a great bit of bother
getting them into the river.
And we all followed with sticks
and battered them across the river and I had, I wasn't a great swimmer,
so as soon as I went in to chest deep,
I had to hold on to a cow's tail.
And, believe it or not, if somebody had have told me that cows could swim,
I would have laughed at them.
But that cow took me across, no problem at all.
I wasn't very heavy!
You used to get some money from the state, so you'd get
a kind of a headage payment for every pig you exported.
It was a little inducement for exporters, and...
..there's anecdotal...
..evidence that people used to smuggle pigs across the border,
so they would export a lorry-load of pigs, get the cheque,
and then they would drive those pigs back across the border,
then a few days later export the same pigs.
Customs officials wouldn't recognise them as the pigs
that crossed the border two or three days ago,
so you would be paid twice for the same lorry-load of pigs.
I think there's a tendency to look at the border and smuggling
for comic relief of something that was actually quite distressful.
Smuggling wasn't a hobby. It wasn't, it wasn't a comic event.
It was economic necessity for a lot of people.
Strabane has the highest proportion of people out of work in the whole
of the United Kingdom.
At least one in three men here is unemployed,
and unless he has brilliant exam results,
a boy who is now in his last year at school
has probably less chance of finding a job
than anywhere else in Europe.
The border definitely affected Strabane.
There's no question about it.
There was no work in Strabane. There were no jobs in Strabane.
There was no industry in Strabane.
My wife didn't like this idea of smuggling at all.
She didn't like it.
Although she had to admit that the money was useful.
HE LAUGHS
The border goes down roads, it goes through houses, it goes
through streams, it crosses fields.
The border is like a child took a pen to the map of Ireland, just
did a squiggly line across the top of it.
If I get caught speeding on this side, I'll get fined in euros.
And if I get caught speeding on the side I'll get fined in pounds.
Unless I get run over on the border.
So, I don't know which ambulance'll come to get us.
SHE LAUGHS
Mr McRae, a shopkeeper, undertaker and a Protestant,
buries the British.
When a Catholic dies,
he drives Pettigo's one and only hearse to the border,
where John Britton, who's Irish in spite of his name, collects
the hearse and goes off to bury his fellow Catholics.
So, where are you for today?
Ballyshannon. Ballyshannon? Yeah.
Safe journey.
There's this idea that the Protestants have a really strong
work ethic, and that Catholics are inherently lazy.
Like, if I tidied my house, I would go round, and I do say it,
I know I say it, I say, "Now, that's a bit more Protestant looking," cos it means
it's nice and tidy and clean and organised.
What a weird thing to say.
TRADITIONAL MUSIC
But the Catholics, I think, are considered to be a bit more craic,
a bit more laid back, you know?
A bit more kind of drinking and dancing and singing,
and the traditional music and all of that kind of thing.
Protestants would be seen to be quite uptight, a bit straight-laced.
As a Protestant child, I crossed the border to go to my church
and when I crossed the border,
I felt almost like people were staring at me.
I was a foreigner in a foreign land.
Even on the buses.
For example, Protestants sat one side, Catholics sat the other side,
you know, you lived it totally.
Different community. You didn't mix in any way.
And that was a sad state of affairs, because my family
were all from Southern Ireland originally.
And we felt like we were foreigners in our own land.
INDISTINCT CHANTING
As a kid crossing the border, you did feel that you were into
a different kind of terrain.
We had a very ignorant view of the North.
We thought of the North as Protestant, exclusively, you know!
We were actually very unaware, oddly enough, of people like us.
You know, the Irish Catholics being north of the border.
I knew the importance of being a Catholic in the North.
The first time I met a Protestant, I was working part-time in Dunnes Stores,
and this girl came in on work experience, and we were told
that this girl's a Protestant.
But what I believed at that time about Protestant people
was, one, they all hated us.
I had asked my father why they all hate us so much, and he told me
was that they believed that our Pope was the Antichrist,
so they thought we were all Antichrist.
And I remember thinking, "God if I thought somebody was an
"Antichrist, I wouldn't like them either."
So, this young girl is coming in on work experience,
and I'm expecting somebody who's snobby, polite, expensive,
and in comes this wee hard ticket, covered in tattoos with piercings all over,
and I'm thinking, "Are you sure this one's a Protestant?"
When the working day's over,
both sides go back to their own separate communities.
For most people in the city, the only time they meet across the divide is at work.
They live separately, worship separately, drink separately.
The schools are separate.
As a child, you don't really know about this.
But as you get older, you realise well, there's a Protestant school
and a Catholic school, there's a Protestant church and a Catholic church.
There are Protestant shops.
You know, there was two newsagents in the town.
There was the Protestant newsagent and the Catholic newsagent, you know,
and the Protestant supermarket and the Catholic supermarket,
and the Protestant hardware shop and the Catholic hardware shop.
So, you became aware of that over time and, you know, I suppose
there would have been a tiny bit of prejudice, but not much.
I mean, there was no real trouble in my town.
There was a little bit of name calling, that was about it.
You know, I think we called them Proddie goats and they called us kitty cats!
This is Fintona, County Tyrone, one of the six north-eastern counties
of Ireland which are held under British rule.
Big families and little houses are normal in these
back streets of Fintona.
These two-room cottages in Brunswick Row have no running
water and no sanitation.
Against a background of such great need,
how is it that council houses are built for people who either
do not need new houses or can well afford to rent them
in the ordinary way?
The answer is a political one.
Two-thirds of the people of this little town are nationalists.
They are in favour of unity with the rest of Ireland
and against being treated as part of Britain.
One third is unionist, which means favouring British rule
and the partition of Ireland.
But the town is controlled by that Unionist minority
and run solely in their interest.
I was brought up believing that we were second class citizens.
The fact that we didn't own homes because if we owned homes
then we would have a vote.
It was a manipulated state. Housing was bad.
The job situation was bad.
Patrick Coyle has lived five years in a condemned house.
We're living in there just like animals.
Four children - three girls, one boy - a wife and meself.
We're in one room, a four by three room,
we have no toilet, nor we have no, eh,
adequate supply of water.
My granny, my mother's mother,
when she had her home, she had 14 children
and they shared that house with another family.
Me daddy's family were nine children and they shared with another family
and he remembers curtains partitioning.
Me daddy always relates to a story where a family eventually got
one of the new houses in the Creggan Estate,
and about a month after they moved in, the council came along
to see if everybody was fine.
But the whole family were living in the kitchen
and the father of the family says,
"When is the next family moving in?"
Only to be told that this house was for them. They couldn't believe it,
cos there was four bedrooms and there was another sitting room.
So these are the stories that I grew up with.
These people are gathering to protest.
They're British, but with a difference.
Over a quarter of them cannot vote in local elections.
This is Londonderry, Protestant stronghold of the North,
a city of religious rivalry, housing shortages, sweeping unemployment
and a mounting bitterness over civil rights.
# We shall overcome...#
Those who campaign for civil rights in Londonderry feel they share
more than a song with civil rights movements elsewhere.
They have even called themselves Britain's white Negros.
I think it was pretty clear that Catholics were discriminated
against in Northern Ireland, purely in terms of jobs.
The jobs in the manufacturing industries seemed to be pretty
sewn up for Protestant people. Jobs in the civil service were scarce
for Catholics. The police force was almost exclusively Protestant.
In Northern Ireland only one policeman in line was Catholic.
Unlike the police in the rest of the United Kingdom,
the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the RUC, was armed.
But if the Minister of Home Affairs thought that the situation
demanded it, the police could be augmented by a voluntary
part-time force, entirely Protestant, the B Specials.
In October 1968 a civil rights march in Londonderry,
which had been banned, met a police barricade
of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
God save us all! Argh!
The behaviour of the police, and especially of their auxiliaries,
the B Specials, shocked the outside world.
Clear evidence that something was alarmingly wrong with the state of Ulster.
Here is the official north of Ireland view on partition.
40 years ago, 26 of the countries of Ireland
broke away from Great Britain and formed an independent state.
We in the north of Ireland, with a population of 1.5 million people,
decided by an overwhelming majority
at a great national general election, that we would remain
within the United Kingdom.
When the state was set up, you had, erm,
I think roughly 36% of the state would have been classed as Nationalist.
And that's 36% did not support the formation of a government
in Belfast. They wanted to be part of an all Ireland government.
And if you have a third of the people not supporting the government
then it was always going to be in problems and there was always
going to be issues, and those issues festered for years and years and years.
In the early days of the new state, Protestant resolve
was stiffened by the fact that the IRA made violent efforts
to prevent the Northern Ireland government from functioning at all.
A long and bitter struggle to secure its authority
left an enduring mark on the character of the new regime.
In the hundred years of the Northern Ireland existence,
it has always been under attack from IRA.
There are always people getting killed, always threat of violence.
There's always a threat of people being shot and that has not stopped
since the 1920s.
The conflict rapidly worsened as the front line between Protestant
and Catholic became a sectarian war zone.
When the first British troops marched in, they were greeted
by Catholics as saviours, an army of liberation.
Is it all right if I give you this coffee? Hello.
There you are, love. Thank you. That's for after your lunch or after your dinner. Thank you very much.
Appreciate it. Thank you.
In the Catholic ghettos especially, appearance belied reality.
Though the soldiers were still a novelty,
the relationship had already become extremely fragile.
In the absence of reform, the people would begin to turn on the troops
and the erstwhile liberators would soon be regarded
as an army of occupation.
The sort of training that we were doing was essentially
sort of colonial stuff. You identified your target,
you spotted the ringleader.
And if the crowd didn't disperse, well, and you had to open fire,
he was the chap you shot first.
I mean, this was the basic sort of teaching.
Well, erm...
None of that applied.
CROWD SINGS
My Uncle Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday,
and that changed all of our lives.
13 men died on Bloody Sunday.
It's impossible to exaggerate the way that this event burnt itself
into the hearts and minds of the Catholic community.
My father was a serving member of the RAF
but when Bloody Sunday happened, that was my mother's brother.
So, we came home.
Me daddy resigned from the RPF and we ended up living back in Derry
right back in the Bogside.
The Bogside, Londonderry, where it all began,
where bigotry made fools of the world's church leaders
who were trying to cool down religious differences,
not heat them up. The Protestants foolishly marched,
the Catholics foolishly threw stones.
All hell broke loose.
We were brought up through the Troubles, so every day was...
..stop and search and every day was Brits and army on the streets.
But as relatives of a Bloody Sunday victim,
we were targeted very much, like all our neighbours
and all our friends and extended family and stuff like that.
So everyday was stopping and searching, lots of raids.
I remember me daddy getting arrested and taken out of the house
one morning, and another morning a couple of raids after that,
me mother was arrested and taken out of the house.
And this was, this was normal.
The police do not go into Catholic areas without the protection of the army.
The searching of houses is a joint operation between the army
and the police.
Patrolling like this is relatively routine,
but searching, which is probably the most contentious activity
of the security forces, they don't allow to be filmed.
I remember the soldiers coming into the house and taking apart
me and me sister's doll's house, where you'd wake up
and there'd be soldiers looking at you, armed soldiers,
and me mammy and daddy would be trying to bring us downstairs.
The soldiers and the police would be in wrecking the house.
The amount of funerals that I went to,
of kids that were killed with plastic bullets,
of hunger strikers, the two Derry hunger strikers,
the amount of protests that I was on, the Bloody Sunday marches,
and in the middle of all I'm going to school and doing O Levels
and A Levels and trying to be as normal as possible,
have friends, follow the style, follow the music,
erm, be down at the riots.
So when I was 18 years old, this fella that I knew,
asked me...
..well, it seemed to me like he was asking me to help him join the IRA.
And it turned out that he wasn't asking me to help him join.
He was asking me to join up.
And there was such a rush of adrenaline at that moment
when I realised what he was saying, because I'd been to the marches,
been to all the demonstrations.
And it seemed like he'd seen something more in me than marching
and demonstrations, and it felt like, here's an opportunity
to fight for my people, to fight for freedom.
I had this idealistic, romantic dream of a free Ireland
and...and from what I had seen and experienced all over the years,
the only answer to what was going on in our communities
was to get the Brits out and take control for ourselves.
So I became a member of the IRA.
County Fermanagh is Northern Ireland's Lake District.
In happier times it could well be the holiday paradise
the guidebooks all speak of.
But the reality is that Fermanagh is the only county in Northern Ireland
to be surrounded on three sides by a border with the Republic.
Enclosed within it is about 25,000 Protestants.
Many are farming along the border itself.
The high ground you see away in the distance,
on the far side of the lake, as the border runs right along the back
and across the far side of the mountain, because the lake
is all in the north.
My family are from right on the border. My family are originally from Donegal
and then we moved in, erm, before I was born in the late '50s,
erm, to the northern side of the border.
My father's theory was really to get a better farm, better land
and a better education for the children.
Erm, and at that stage I can recall, certainly as a child,
that we mixed well with the Roman Catholic community
within that area of Fermanagh.
Unfortunately that started to change.
In 1969, '70, the IRA realised that it was these Unionists
along the border who were the bulwark for the British people
along that border, that they would need to remove them.
And that's what they consciously tried to do,
is remove the border minority Unionists away.
These are the gates into our old family farm.
The border runs along the back of the farm, roughly half a mile away.
And on the 30th of March, '84,
that was the route they used. They parked on the other side
of the river, followed the hedgerows down to the farm
and waited in the early hours until my brother went out to feed the cattle,
on the tractor, and they shot him in the back on the tractor.
Shot him dead.
My father, when my brother was murdered, was in his 70s.
A place that he'd built up for years,
and they had to sell the farm very cheap,
all the machinery was sold off cheap.
The animals were sold cheap.
My father and mother and young sister had to move into a rented house.
And it still to this day rankles with me that...
..neighbours, people we would have classed as friends,
set my brother up and had him murdered.
Not good.
The IRA claimed he was on the security forces. He wasn't.
He had been a part-time UDR man for a short time
and he left, he didn't like it.
And he'd been away from it seven years when they murdered him.
I remember as a boy growing up in the Unionist community,
not the Unionist community - small farms as you can see round here,
and it's subsistence farming,
and I know plenty of guys joined either the police
or the Reserve Police, or the UDR, or the British army even,
to get a lock of extra pound to bring into the family,
put a bit of food on the table and have some quality of life.
Most border farmers have always had at least one licensed shotgun
close at hand, ostensibly for vermin.
In the troubles of the '20s, their fathers patrolled with them
at night, and those days are not forgotten even now.
Many of these men served in the B Specials themselves
and naturally enlisted into the ranks of the new UDR.
Most northern Protestants would have seen the border as almost
like a defensive perimeter, you know.
We drew this line and we retreated behind it.
And they could say, well, yes, it did stop Irish nationalism
from taking over the entire island.
It did preserve our place within the United Kingdom.
And that has to be acknowledged,
you know, and the reasons
that they thought like that have to be acknowledged.
When you see your neighbour getting out with a gun on his shoulder,
a gun on his hip, and you're on the road,
and you meet another neighbour,
and that neighbour happens to be a nationalist neighbour
and they have a different, maybe they had a different attitude
or a different upbringing or they were a different religion,
and they take them out and they search them,
and maybe they were searching their house the night before.
My God, to put two communities and divide them like that
and put such animosity between them, and enmity between them...
REPORTER: In the last few weeks,
this deceptive landscape has been the setting
for a series of vicious sectarian murders and reprisals.
And in an attempt to deter travelling gunmen,
the army have started a limited campaign
of blocking the border. OK? Stand by. Blow now.
EXPLOSION
Blowing up border crossings has long been an established army tactic.
It's deeply resented by most local people,
who, in many cases,
have been quick to repair the damage.
This side has never been blown before.
It was temporarily blocked at one stage by a Braithwaite tank.
But now it's been decided to blow the pitch.
What happened to the temporary blockage?
The temporary blockage was put in a long time ago
and it was cut away.
It was cut away by some of the local people
who wanted to reopen the road?
To get their cattle over and go to the market and come to church.
LAUGHTER
All those good things, eh?
They haven't come to admire the view,
but to dig up the road.
Does this kind of thing affect your own personal attitude
to the British and the army? Of course it does.
We resent this very much,
and the very fact that they come in there
and the fact that I have taken a shovel
that they have left in the Republic
means that they have been in the Republic,
violating our territorial boundary
and they have absolutely no respect for us.
I have confiscated the shovel and that is my evidence
and I'm prepared to give it to the guards that are...
if they want.
Otherwise, it'll be a souvenir.
That's what you got?
Well, I took it.
It wasn't given to me.
That barricade there is absolutely useless to anyone
except to deprive the people of this locale of their livelihood.
That's the only thing it's doing.
It's a waste of time.
In a couple of days, the people have opened the road again
and taken out the obstacle with ease.
The tightness and the nilness round that space.
And the car stops in the road.
The troops inspect its make and number.
And, as one bends his face towards your window,
you catch sight of more on a hill beyond,
eyeing with intent down cradled guns
that hold you under cover.
And everything is pure interrogation until a rifle motions,
and you move with guarded unconcerned acceleration.
A little emptier.
A little spent, as always,
by that quiver in the self subjugated yes and obedient.
There was a lot of times when...
..that part of crossing the border,
your heart's in your throat.
You're hoping to God that the bus doesn't get searched
or whatever car you're in doesn't get searched.
I was coming back on the bus
and I had a handgun to bring back into Derry,
and I had the handgun down me trousers.
And I was on the back of the bus
and there was this fella sitting beside me,
and there was a wee bit of flirty stuff going on,
and I remember thinking
that if I didn't have this gun down me trousers,
then I probably would've went for it because he seemed all right.
So here I am the back of the bus on the way back to Derry
and it was a long journey,
and there's all this flirtation stuff going on
And I go, "Ah, too difficult there."
And when I got back to Derry,
I actually had a massive bruise the shape of a gun on me leg.
My own view is that the British Army,
that their position is a very, very dangerous one
because they now are like the bit of ham
between two pieces of bread and it may well happen
the British Army will take the brunt
of the future struggle in Northern Ireland.
Soldiers like these and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers
patrol this border for four months at a time,
and they know better than anyone else
that they are operating in bandit country.
You're playing this very dangerous, high-stakes game the entire time.
Are we going to walk down that side? Or that side?
I don't like the look of that car.
I don't like the look of that lamp post.
I'm not going where that bin is.
Why are the windows open?
What's that car doing down there with the engine on?
Whenever we went near the border, the hackles went up
and we were very, very wary of what could happen.
And we'd been told about attacks
coming over from the south into the north,
and how the Provisional IRA would attack
and then quickly go back over the border,
so to us, the border was a very, very dangerous place.
In my mind, I saw the border as being a threat
because I saw, without even knowing anything of the politics,
I'm not interested in the politics.
I'm just a young infantry platoon commander, holding a weapon,
who's thinking about the wellbeing of himself and his men.
And for me, this represents a safe haven for my enemy
because all I know is that they can just come from across the border
or escape across the border
almost with impunity, you know, and launch attacks on us.
The IRA were mounting illegal vehicle checkpoints
along the border.
Our company were tasked to put these observation positions
along the border and we were supposed to be waiting for the IRA
to come across the border and mount these checkpoints,
and we were going to stop them,
either by arresting them or other means.
My group comprising three men, another soldier,
Lance Corporal Gavin Deane, who was in charge of us, and myself,
and we went to this scrapyard literally on the border.
We found this old, derelict rusty van
that was quite close to the road,
so if anything happened,
we could get out of this van very quickly to do what we needed to do.
Nothing happened the first night.
Everything was quiet.
And then on the second day that we were there,
as dusk was approaching,
the sudden stillness and calm of the Ulster midsummer's evening
was suddenly shattered by loud firing from across the border.
I returned fire as best I could from where I thought they were.
And as I did that,
Lance Corporal Gavin Dean, Deano, was hit.
I then ran out of ammunition.
And I picked up the rifle that Deano had had.
And then I was hit.
I didn't know at the time,
but I was hit in the spine just below my neck.
The three soldiers were hiding here in the corner of the scrapyard
when they came under fire.
Exactly what they were doing here isn't clear,
but they may have been involved
in some kind of SAS-type undercover operation.
Deano was shaking next to me in some sort of violent spasm,
trying to fight for his life
and his foot was kicking the side of my, side of my face.
And it's something that...
It's the sensation and feeling that I'll never forget.
It's something that...
..I'll probably take with me to my grave.
After a short while,
half the British army sort of descended on this particular point
on the border and put Deano on a stretcher,
put me on a stretcher, and then they flew us to Belfast.
And as we arrive there,
that's when Deano actually died, just as we arrived.
So he died just before midnight on the 16th of July, 1981.
Later that day, they decided to move me
to a better neurological facility over in England.
Must be very hard, being as young as you are.
Then suddenly something like this happens, and...?
Um...
Yeah, well, I'm 20 years old now
and that happened when I was 19, so...
I'm quite young.
But...
There's people were born with things like me from the start.
I'm not that bad off.
How do you stay so cheerful?
Well, I'm not in any pain.
So why not?
The border is inside me all the time.
Everything I do now is affected by that one moment in time.
In an Irish tour, I always try and include Belfast
and the North of Ireland.
After all, I lived there for a while,
and I learned a lot playing in the clubs there.
So I have a certain home feeling for the place.
Really, the only thing that kept the island together
in those years was music.
He was the ultimate hero there,
and he did cross that sectarian divide
that was such a phenomenon in Northern Ireland,
and in the context of the most intense conflict,
people from both sides of the divide came to see Rory
at those great gigs in the Ulster Hall.
One sector of the economy that seemed to be immune
from the violence and the mayhem was the entertainment industry.
Hello. Yes.
My name is Ardal, and I know quite a lot.
The stand-up comedian, I travelled across the border regularly,
you know, while a lot of comedians wouldn't go across the border,
you know, during, like, intense flash points
in the history of the Troubles.
You know, there were times, there were periods of months,
maybe even years, where people just,
you know, just didn't want to take the chance of going over.
I would relish the opportunity to go to the north.
I remember just the reception I got when I stood on stage.
I didn't have to do anything.
I didn't have to do any jokes, really,
like, it was just the very fact that you came, that you were there.
Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you.
Oh, this is wonderful.
This is wonderful, I love it. Anyway, hello!
So nothing would stop you. crossing the border,
in fact, if there was trouble, tension,
it made you all the more determined
to try and live as normal a life as possible.
You know, people still wanted to go out
and have a good time, so I suppose the biggest show in town
in those days was the show bands.
These were essentially cover bands and, you know,
they travelled over and back across the border at will.
And the biggest band in the mid-'70s
was a band called The Miami Showband.
# I didn't even know your name
# I didn't care cos I was sexy... #
I remember the Miami Showband really vividly.
They were, you know, from Dublin,
but like all of those show bands, they played everywhere,
and they just treated the island as one place.
There was no sense that, you know,
you were a Northern show band or a Southern show band.
They just played whatever dance halls were available.
They had a very charismatic lead singer called Fran O'Toole
who was writing his own songs and he was a pin-up boy,
a bit like David Cassidy or something.
# You gotta smile a little more... #
They were travelling back from a gig back to Dublin
and they were stopped at a checkpoint.
It looked like an army checkpoint that they were stopped on,
and they were told to get off the minibus.
And they were lined up on the side of the road
and they were joking, at first, with the soldiers.
But they realised something was slightly amiss.
And what happened was
people were planting a bomb on their minibus
for reasons that are probably going to sound very arcane,
and almost too farfetched for words.
But the idea was that the UVF
or the Protestant paramilitary organisation
wanted to harden the border
to stop terrorists coming across the border.
And I think they were trying to illustrate the point by saying,
"Look, apparently innocent people like the Miami Showband
"are smuggling bombs across the border."
So the idea was that
the Miami Showband would get back on their bus,
and that the bus would blow up
at some point further down the road,
and it would look like they were smuggling bombs
across the border.
The bomb went off when they closed
the back of the personnel van.
And instantly killed the two guys that were standing at the van,
one of them that just pushed me.
When it transpired that the objective was a complete
and utter cock-up on their part,
they decided to assassinate the members of the band
there and then on the side of the road.
Fran was the good-looking lead singer.
And they shot him 22 times in the face.
They found the arm of one of the bombers.
It was obviously blown up in the explosion,
and the arm had UVF tattoos.
So that's pretty clear cut that the person who was planting
the bomb was a self-styled member
of a Protestant paramilitary organisation.
The murders of the Miami Showband seemed to sound like
a kind of deliberate attack on that...
..fragile but beautiful texture of everyday life.
You know, where people just got on with living together
in the same place
and having the same kind of enjoyment,
listening to the same kind of music,
flirting with members of the opposite sex
from whatever denomination they were.
That those murders really just seemed
like a particularly brutal assault
on the pleasures of daily life
that had kept some sense of unity together for people.
Colonel Prosser inspects the Walls of Derry.
It's only the army who go on the walls now.
Before 1968, it was a regular walking place
for the people.
How's the Bogside this morning?
The walls were closed
because they were designed only too well.
They overlook so much of the surrounding city,
that they're ideal either for sniping or observing.
This mural down here, it depicts the innocents,
the innocent lives lost in this war and in all wars.
But the images of a young woman called Annette McGavigan
who lived up in this area,
and when she was coming home from school,
she was shot by a British soldier and killed in the Troubles.
There was a lot of innocent people, children,
that got caught up in the Troubles.
# Armoured cars and tanks and guns
# Came to take away our sons
# But every man will stand behind
# The men behind the wire
# Through the little streets of Belfast
# In the dark of early morn
# Wrecking homes from early morning
# British soldiers...
# Armoured cars and tanks and guns
# Came to take away our sons
# But every man will stand behind
# The men behind the wire. #
This is the regular Saturday afternoon shooting incident
in Strabane.
# Armoured cars and tanks and guns
# Came to take away our sons
# Every man will stand behind
# The man behind the wire. #
APPLAUSE
A bomb exploded near the war memorial
in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.
The crowd which had gathered there was given no warning.
They were civilians, Catholic and Protestant, young and old,
there with their wreaths to remember.
There were a number of staging posts in atrocity...
Actually on the border.
..where the legitimacy of the IRA's campaign
was being fundamentally questioned by the very community
on whose behalf it was supposed to be waged,
which were, you know, Northern Catholics.
Patsy had his own business when we were married.
He had a mobile fruit and vegetable van
and he went bankrupt in this business.
So he took a job with the army
because it was the only thing available
here in Derry at the time.
The IRA...
..let themselves into the house.
Somebody ran up and stuck something at my neck.
I was told, "If you do what you're told, nobody will get hurt."
And Patsy put his arms around me
and he says, "Everything'll be OK, girl,
"I'll be back soon."
Even if someone was a Catholic, it didn't make any difference.
They were still considered as legitimate targets by the IRA.
They took him across the border to where they had the safe house
and where the van was.
They chained Patsy...
..to the controls of the van.
I will surmise that he knew by this time he was going to die.
Because, as they went across the border,
they couldn't stay in the car with their masks on.
So it's quite possible that Patsy recognised them,
or would have recognised them at a future time.
So he knew from midnight on, until the explosion at 4.00AM,
for four hours, that he was going to die.
The Coshquin Checkpoint outside Londonderry
was a heavily fortified Army position
guarding one of the main crossing points on the border
between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.
Afterwards, all that was left was a pile of rubble.
I've had evidence from surviving soldiers...
..that Patsy saved lives that night.
Which is something that I'm very proud of,
because, with him being chained into the van,
he obviously knew he wasn't getting out.
He wasn't going to get out alive, but he shouted,
as soon as he stopped the van,
he shouted, "Run, lads, I'm loaded."
The murder of Patsy Gillespie was a particularly grotesque moment,
even, you know, we got used to atrocity,
but this moment seems like one
that there was just a darkness to it.
And you thought, "It's almost like this darkness is emanating
"out of something beyond the immediate,
"you know, that it's as if all of this toxicity
"which has been built up in this landscape for so long
"is expressing itself in something as horrible as this."
Right, do you know what?
It has to be somewhere along this part of the road
because this is the Coshquin Road.
So it's somewhere...
on that stretch.
By the powers of deduction,
having never had to really think about it before,
I reckon that this is the point
where the North meets the South.
When the word came through
that Patsy Gillespie and those five soldiers
down at Coshquin had been killed in the bomb,
you have to, you think about it.
Bombs weren't unusual, horrific deaths weren't unusual.
That was the norm for us here.
But there was something about the fact
that my organisation had taken this man from his home,
held his family hostage,
but chained him in the van
where he had no escape,
then remote control the explosion.
And I was a member of the organisation at that time.
But when the news came through, my stomach hit the floor.
My heart was ready to burst and I cried.
And I thought, "What the hell have we become?"
Oh, there has to be a better way than this.
I remember being in the kitchen and my parents,
nobody knew, none of my family knew that I was in the IRA,
I'm leading this massive, secret double life.
And my daddy had his hands on the counter in the kitchen
and the news was on the radio and TV,
and I remember saying to me Daddy,
"Daddy, that's not what we're about, is it?"
And he said, "No, that's not what we're about."
It was after Patsy's death more than anything,
that my involvement with the IRA just dissipated.
And, eventually, I would leave Derry and move to Limerick.
The horror at the murder of Patsy Gillespie
definitely did create a revulsion that...
..in the long term, the IRA and Sinn Fein had to respond to.
CHEERING
Sinn Fein leaders will meet
the Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern tomorrow
to discuss the state of the peace process.
There's been reports of divisions within the IRA
over how best to proceed.
When the Labour Party get in, one thing that they had
was a huge majority.
And history had taught us, not just in Ireland but elsewhere,
that it didn't depend on what their politics was,
but that they had the strength behind them to make big steps.
An historic agreement for peace in Northern Ireland has been reached
within the past few minutes.
We can see pictures now from Stormont,
where the leaders of the eight parties
which have been involved in the talks,
together with the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom
and the Republic of Ireland are announcing details
of an agreement which is intended to end nearly 30 years of conflict
and which have cost more than 3,000 lives.
I never thought in my lifetime I would see it,
but what we were talking about here
is something as mammoth as the collapse
of the Berlin Wall.
I just remember celebrating wildly
when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.
I mean, it was right up there as one of the great occasions
in recent Irish history.
I mean, it was like, it was like the birth of a child or something,
or it was like, you know, Ireland winning the World Cup.
It was like, it was an extraordinary occasion.
Every household in Northern Ireland, including mine, was sent a copy
of the Good Friday Agreement.
It set out a plan to disarm the men of violence,
release paramilitary prisoners,
and for both sides to share power in government.
And then we voted on it.
The people of Northern Ireland had until half an hour ago
to decide whether they're prepared to do
what everyone from the President of the United States
through Prime Ministers in London and Dublin
and most political leaders here want them to do
and endorse the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
The Northern Ireland Referendum,
the 22nd of May, 1998...
I hereby give...
I hereby give notice...
..that the percentage of votes given
at the Referendum was as follows...
Yes.
71.12%.
CHEERING
The other brilliant thing about the Good Friday Agreement
was you were allowed to choose
whatever nationality you wanted to be.
You could choose to be Irish in Northern Ireland
or you could choose to be British in Northern Ireland
or, like me, you could choose to be both.
When you see the prisoners,
and you know that some of the things that they have done,
coming out of prison,
big smiles and handshakes,
you sort of think, "You know, this, this isn't right,"
but the more I thought about it, the more I thought,
"No, this is right.
"This is the way to go forward."
When the army is off the border,
when the watchtowers are taken down, the miracle happens.
The border doesn't disappear,
but it just becomes irrelevant
and it really meant that vast numbers of people on the island
could just get about the business of living.
When I came back to settle in Derry in 2001,
I didn't realise that I had a lot of stuff inside,
a lot of stuff that I hadn't dealt with.
So I went down the road of peace and reconciliation
and would come to dialogue with Patsy Gillespie's wife.
I knew when the group met up,
that one of them was an ex-IRA woman
and I was curious to meet her.
That first meeting of all of us women together
was unbelievably nerve-racking.
I was nearly sick, because now, for the first time
I would be telling who I was.
I was 13 when the Hunger Strikes began,
and that was all anyone talked about.
I could have told you the names and times of death
of each of the Hunger Strikers.
They were our saviours, our heroes, our protectors,
in my eyes, they could do no wrong.
Before I turned to Kathleen, and I thought,
"Whatever this woman has to say to me,
"whatever this woman has to do, I'm just going to take it,"
and I was prepared for grief
because I had heard that Kathleen was a tough cookie.
And when I turned round, she put her arms round me
and she gave me a big, massive hug.
And sometimes I get emotional when I tell this bit of the story,
and she says, "We're going to be OK."
If you look at the two extremes of myself whose husband was murdered
so wickedly by the IRA, just so brutally.
And I'm best friends with an ex-IRA woman.
We are the embodiment...
..of what can be.
But I will never ever forgive the IRA,
because they just tore my life and my family's apart.
I mean, Patsy wasn't there for his daughter's wedding.
Patsy should have been there for that.
People on the outside, they thought, "Oh, they have a ceasefire
"and they have a peace process.
"And so that's all that sorted.
"Now, we don't have to worry about Northern Ireland any more."
But it's not sorted.
It's not by a long way sorted.
This attack has been linked to the dissident Republican group
known as the New IRA,
prescribed organization which aims to bring about
a United Ireland.
Northern Ireland has a long way to go yet.
People go to their own churches, their own schools,
their own community centres, their own pubs,
they live in their own areas,
and it may as well be down a racial line.
The one thing we absolutely definitely know as a matter of fact
about the Irish border is it is unpolice-able.
Nobody has ever been able to control it,
and nobody ever will be able to control it.
We simply know that
if you put up any physical infrastructure,
it will become a magnet for attack.
Don't put everyone through all this again.
You know what happened all those years ago, you know...
..with the border posts and all the checks and everything
out on the border.
Don't put us through that again because too many lives were lost,
too many people were broken.
Are we all fine? Are we all over it?
Is it all out of our systems?
I mean, there is a theory that the entire country
of Northern Ireland suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Is that true?
I don't know.
There's some talk now if the border comes back,
that there's a possibility
that they could be spoiling it again.
But I'll tell you one thing,
I'll not be involved in anything like that again.
Not for a minute.
You could have been shot. You could have been shot.
But I survived or I wouldn't be talking to you.