Living a nightmare

Sometimes, in the dark of night, when she can’t sleep, she walks downstairs to the kitchen of her two-bedroom home in Ardoyne, leaving seven sleeping bodies upstairs.
She goes into her tiny kitchen and takes down a box from atop of one of the cupboards and opens it up to read the cards stuffed inside, sent to her and the other mothers of Ardoyne from the U.S. two years ago.
She said it still gives her some comfort, just remembering that people on the other side of the world cared enough about their plight to write to them.
McCabe’s life has changed since the protest. The world might have moved on, but its malevolent effects linger on in her life and the lives of many other mothers and children.
First of all, she has had to give up her job. She used to cook for the priests at the Passionist Monastery at Holy Cross in Ardoyne — but part of her working life involved answering the phone and there were so many loyalist death threats that she couldn’t stomach going on.
Second, she is unable to travel about Belfast on her own. Twice she has gone shopping and come across loyalists who recognized her. On one occasion, she was followed around a supermarket; on another she recognized a loyalist herself in a queue and was so angry she had to be restrained by her family.
These days she doesn’t go into Belfast town center at all and nowhere else in the city unless she’s in a car with her husband, Gerard, a professional musician. She’s fine outside her hometown, but Belfast itself is a “no go” area.
Why? You only have to remember the nature of the loyalist protest. It went on for a few months, but for McCabe it seemed to last for years. Her daughter, Gemma, was only 8.
They hurled abuse at the little girls, calling them “Fenian scum,” “harlots” and “whores.” They threw pornographic photographs, dog excrement, balloons filled with urine. They threatened to put snipers on the rooftops and pick the children off like targets at a fairground. They blew loud whistles, sounded claxon horns, threw loud firecrackers and, on one occasion, an actual bomb.
Fr. Aidan Troy, the parish priest of Holy Cross and chairman of the school governors, said Sharon McCabe’s story, although particularly tragic, is just one of many. “I don’t think, even now, that we realize the damage caused by the protest,” he said.
Two years ago last month, his craggy face and flapping black cassock became a fixture on TV screens throughout the country and the world. The newly arrived priest became a household name as he walked beside the schoolchildren and parents of Holy Cross through the ranks of screaming loyalists.
As the scale of the protest became clear, pressure was exerted on him to appeal to the Catholic parents to use a longer, alternative route and bring the girls in by the back door. He said, however, that individual families had the right to make their own decisions on the route to school and believes there was a principle here about the inalienable rights of children that could not be conceded.
“In any case, if I had called on them all to take the longer road, the protest would in all probability have moved around the corner,” Troy, who visits New York next week, said recently. “I left the decision up to them and 99 percent chose to walk the usual route.
“I was following, they were leading. At the same time, however, I was genuinely worried that a child might be killed. That was my constant fear and focus.”
Troy managed to walk a tightrope, keeping himself in good standing with the church hierarchy while retaining the trust of his largely republican flock.
Sitting in a spartan room at the monastery, just into the Protestant side of the interface between nationalist Ardoyne and the loyalist Shankill Road, you realize how vulnerable the priests there must feel as they sleep at night.
Paramilitary flags flutter on the lamp posts beside the old building, part of which is closed due to persistent attacks. Overhead, helicopters fly and — if there’s a riot in the area — it invariably takes place right outside the main gates.
Looking back on it, Troy manages a rueful laugh. After working in the Vatican for seven years, he’d been asked to become parish priest of Holy Cross in June 2001 when the first trouble associated with the school broke out.
Placards proclaiming he was a “pedophile priest” who had come to Ardoyne to impregnate its women and abuse its children were waved in front of TV cameras.
At the time, his father was lying terminally ill in Bray, Co. Wicklow, 100 miles away. Troy would frequently make the round trip in an evening to sit at his bedside. A mourner at his funeral told Troy the old man had been proud of his son, and in that he takes great comfort.
“I was, and still am, angry about the way it was reported, as if there were angels and devils on both sides,” he said of the protests. “This was not a ‘on the one side this, and on the other side that’ kind of story.
“Whatever grievances the loyalist protesters had, and I am sure they had some, they should never have used the children. The methods they used were totally unacceptable.”
Troy remembers the worst times. “The police phoned me one day to say the loyalists had threatened to put a sniper on the rooftops to shoot people dead as they walked up the road,” he recalled. “I had to decide whether to tell the parents and possibly cause panic or to keep the information to myself. I had no option but to tell them, but they still decided to walk up the road.
“That was a crucial moment. If we hadn’t gone up the road that day, if we had broken, then similar threats could have forced us to do the same day after day — but it wasn’t easy.”
Finally, it came to him in the dead of night as he lay trying to sleep. What was happening was a well-rehearsed drama. The parents walked in tight formation to the school twice a day, clutching their children, who were dressed in the Holy Cross uniform of bright red, white and gray.
The loyalists formed up and hurled abuse and anything else they could think of, blowing high-pitched whistles and loud claxon horns. The police, in black riot gear, used their bodies and their land rovers as imperfect barricades.
The parents told the police they would not cooperate anymore and walk the children to school in one group at a set time. They would walk as they always had for 30 years before the protest — in ones and twos.
Around that time, political talks began with the loyalist side on improving their housing, on setting up closed-circuit television cameras, on better community relations.
The evil spell was broken. Violence continued sporadically, but the power of the protest and the response from the parents was effectively over. There are no signs of it recurring.