H-Block, D-Block

It was a sign of some respectability to have a son attending St. Malachy’s College, and my parents let me know that they thought it wonderful for me to be going to such a prestigious college, a college where the priests and brothers and teachers could break down any good man and have the joiners and repairmen fashion a fine priest out of the shattered pieces. It mattered not a jot to them that I had barely scraped a pass in my exam to get into this prestigious college. I passed, and that is all that mattered, they said, and I was to be thankful to God above I was going to the place where they fashioned the good priests that would supply the whole of Ireland and the suffering Catholic countries filled with Black Babies. That was cause enough for a great deal of pride, they said. My sister had passed her 11-Plus exam also, and had made it into Dominican College, also in north Belfast, where nuns taught the good and the pure Catholic girls, photographs of whom would never appear on page three of any mass media publication, with the exception perhaps of The Universe, on bended knee kissing a Pontifical ring or accepting the Cleaner of The Year Award for doing good women’s work in the House of The Lord, and just you be happy with that, woman.

Catholics living in Carrickfergus really had only four choices when it came to going to a school that continued the teaching of the other supposed one true faith: you could go to Saint Malachy’s in Belfast, if you were a boy; Dominican College, if you were a girl; Saint Comgall’s in Larne or Saint Nicholas’s in Carrickfergus itself. There remained the possibility of going to Garron Tower, but of all the descriptions I ever heard of that place, I pictured it as remote and filled with the toughest priests and brothers in the land. And you had to board there, so you would be attending school without your brother and you knew you would miss the madness and the fun that filled your time together. No-one I knew had ever gone there, at least not a soul that had come back alive to tell the tales. Father McGarry had taught there once also, and he felt a great affinity with the place, and if a priest said it was good then it was good and that was that. No matter, I barely scraped a pass and my primary school friends Paul McKay, Robbie McKeown and Mark Reel persuaded me to go join them at the prestigious college at 36 Antrim Road, Belfast.

Mum spent the summer of 1981 trying to pull together the money to buy the Saint Malachy’s uniform: shirt; black trousers; grey or white socks; a white, green and black school tie; black, tie-up shoes. The whole ensemble was to be topped off with a black blazer, and on the blazer pocket on the upper left there was to be sewn the patch with the college coat of arms and its motto, Gloria Ab Intus. 

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Gloria Ab Intus, glory from within, glory from within,” said the grey-haired old master conducting the introductory pre-term lecture in the school’s main lecture theatre. He dallied on his first “glory,” waiting to exhale as his pointed finger came from the back of his head to end pointing straight into the audience. “Glory, ladies and gentlemen, young men.” It was mid-August, and the time between school years, but he took the parents and pupils gathered that day on a tour of the grounds and gave his lecture dressed in his black schoolmaster’s cloak. The cloak left me in no doubt that the business of learning never ended for the teachers of Saint Malachy’s College. Summers in Saint Malachy’s were for learning too, not for boyish fun and games and rites of passage.

“Glory from within the self, you young men, and glory from within the walls that surround this school, this place of learning,” he declared haughtily, his wizened face puckering under the weight of glasses thick in frame and heavy on correction. His lower lip disappeared under his nose, as if he had no teeth, and his pointed chin projected unnaturally beyond the furthest extent of the rest of his face. He stood in what I would come to know as the Learned Man’s Stance, his hands behind his back, swinging heel-to-toe, toe-to-heel, chest out, his hands swung occasionally to aid balance, and the ubiquitous scholar’s stare into nothingness to aid in the search for truth, knowledge, meaning, and wisdom. Mum sat beside me, a respectable distance from the front and from the back, just as we sat in church, a distance safe enough to ask questions in her quiet manner, or to blend into the air if necessary, if anyone dared seek answers. 

That day, in that lecture theatre, the old master told us about the history of the school; its rules and its punishments; the proud sporting history and academic record that were the very cornerstones of the glory that came from within the walls; how to dress, how not to dress, and the punishments meted out for contravening the dress code; the importance of religion in the school’s life; the buildings within the school grounds. 

“Saint Malachy’s is divided into blocks, and we, ladies and gentlemen…” The old master paused for effect and to allow a thin, almost imperceptible grin to develop over his face, “we are currently in D Block.” At that, a polite laugh went up, laughter of the type we heard in the old Church of The Holy Plaster Shower when the priests made jokes as the drums of Protestant pride beat loudly outside, and The Sash filled the holy air. 

“I know, I know,” said the old master, laughing now, and, in doing so, convincing me that he did in fact have teeth, upper ones, at least. “But we go only as far as E Block in here, you’ll be glad to know.” Another polite laugh.

Within the college walls over one thousand spotty boys dressed in black and sporting bad haircuts scurrying between Blocks A through E produced the Gloria Ab Intus. Outside the walls, on the streets of Northern Ireland, the only blocks that really mattered were the H Blocks, the impenetrable H-shaped accommodation used to house prisoners in Northern Ireland’s largest prisons. Since 1971 prisoners convicted of, or suspected of committing or planning, terrorist-related offences, languished behind the walls of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze, just outside of the town of Lisburn, ten miles south of Belfast. The government built the prison hurriedly in the early seventies to detain the suspicious men they removed from the streets of Northern Ireland, mostly Catholics as they were the enemies of Ulster, innocent or not, guilty or not, and guilt by association was often deemed guilt enough. They held suspects without trial, a tactic known as Internment, or so Radio Ulster and Downtown Radio told us anyway. The prisoners did their languishing in blocks of cells built in the shape of a giant H, when seen from above, with four wings in each block and an administration area connecting them all, the bar of the H. Since its construction HMP Maze had become a place of fervent Republican and Loyalist politics and thinking and thuggery and deals, and the men could reach out from behind its high walls to affect everyone in the country. In 1981 the prison was in the news again. Republican prisoners had gone on hunger strike as a campaign to win back special category status, a status that allowed them additional freedoms because, under that status, they were considered political prisoners, or prisoners of war. On the first day of March 1976 the British government abolished the special category status, and on the first day of March 1981 – exactly five years later - the leader of the IRA in the jail, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, refused food for the first time. Sixty-six days later, on 05 May, he died, making a martyr of himself and bringing the world’s attention to his Republican ideals. His funeral two days later attracted almost one hundred thousand mourners, a sign of the support his Republican ideals attracted in the fervently British colony. The streets of the country blew up in the face of the security forces and the rioting continued for many days after the funeral.

As we sat in the lecture theatre that day, learning of the mighty glory all around us, the hunger strike and the H-Blocks were alive and real in the minds of everyone sitting there, and in all Britain and Ireland. Ten days before I started school proper, on the first Tuesday in September 1981, the tenth hunger striker - twenty-seven year old Michael Devine - died. Other hunger strikers were ready to lay down their lives for God, Catholicism, the Pope and a reunified thirty-two county Ireland, but none did so before the strike ended on 03 October that year, broken as it was by Margaret Thatcher’s tough stance on everything from prisoners, to free school milk, to striking miners, to just how sharp her pencil must be. From the day the strike started to the day it ended, sixty-two men, women and children would die horrific deaths on the streets of Northern Ireland, not counting the ten who died in the hospital wing in Her Majesty’s Prison Maze. Of those deaths on the streets twenty-eight were Protestant, eight were British soldiers – as good a kill as any Protestant, even if Jew or Catholic - and twenty-six were Catholic. During my first three months in school, before the IRA called its annual Christmas ceasefire, there would be thirty-seven deaths in Northern Ireland, many near the rusty blue gates enclosing Saint Malachy’s College. The hallowed main gates of the college were on the Antrim Road, a road that formed one edge of the area that we would all eventually know as the Murder Mile.