MINORITY: A way of thinking that puts one at an advantage, as in “Catholics are a minority in the North,” or “Protestants are a minority in the whole of Ireland.”
NATIONALIST: (See also: REPUBLICAN, SINN FEíN, and UNITED IRELAND.)
Any person or party that wishes to see Ireland a political whole, which some see as a simple geographic inevitability. Most Catholics are Nationalists, but not all Catholics are Nationalists, nor are all Nationalists Catholic … For an attraction of the North is its bollocks of political allegiances—the inadequacy of its categories, the uncooperative way its citizens will not necessarily slot themselves into neat pigeonholes for the convenience of your comprehension. Furthermore, neither do all Nationalists support the IRA. Foremost of these constitutional constituencies is the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which represents the majority of Northern Catholics and hopes to arrange a thirty-two-county republic by political means. While there are many degrees of tacit or queasy support for the Provisionals in the Catholic community which give rise to Protestant mistrust, the average Nationalist has no use for them, and one can find the same aversion to Republican violence on the Falls Road as on the Shankill.
PLANTATION: The generous if admittedly easy gesture of giving away something that doesn’t belong to you. Refers specifically to Britain’s award nearly four hundred years ago of a large portion of confiscated Catholic farmland to Scots Presbyterians. “Plantation” sowed the seeds of a psychology which crops up to the present day: a Protestant population that feels guilty and besieged, sometimes rightfully fearful of a resentful Catholic peasantry, themselves robbed, shafted, and determined to get their island back. For while the Protestants have been there longer than the Pilgrims in America, they are still considered interlopers in Ireland.
POWER SHARING: A political framework first attempted in 1973, when a new Northern Ireland Executive was formed with the Sunningdale Agreement. In 1974, however, the Protestant Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) declared a general strike, barricading streets to cut off supplies of petrol, milk, bread. As a result, the Executive collapsed, though there are those who believe that had Britain held her ground Northern Ireland would not be where it is today. While Sunningdale is cited as proof that power sharing cannot work, recent opinion polls show that a devolved (semi-independent) power-sharing government would be acceptable to the majority of both the Protestant and Catholic communities.
PROTESTANT: A.k.a., Prod, Orangie, Orange Bastard, Black Bastard, Bastard. In Catholic mythology, dour, intransigent, bigoted, and rich. Not only more a political than a religious term—Ulstermen are prone to identify with Carson over Calvin—but, like “Catholic,” bordering on the racial; for while Prods and Taigs are highly inbred and indistinguishable in face, mannerism, language, each can be convinced that if he ventures up the other’s street he will be recognized. Since neighborhoods are small and cliquish, it is more likely the problem that he won’t be.
RECONCILIATION GROUPS: A whole clatter of organizations established to fight factionalism which have become, functionally, one more faction.
Notably, the Peace People. In response to a family’s sidewalk massacre in an auto chase between the army and the IRA, this protest group catapulted to international fame in a matter of months, until its leaders, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many in the Province were mortified when the women did not donate their prize money back to the movement but kept it for themselves. Scandal and organizational infighting put the Peace People’s feet promptly back on the ground.
There are others: Corrymeela, the Columbanus Community, all sleeve-tugging—Why can’t we all be friends? “A little wet,” it’s been said. “Their mothers didn’t wipe them.” On the whole, the North’s relationship to these sorry ecumenists is condescending.
A political equivalent of the reconciliation group, the Alliance Party bids for the nonsectarian vote. Disdain for this coalition runs similarly high. Like the SDLP, the Alliance is smeared as middle-class: self-interested, twee.
REPUBLICAN: (See also: SINN FEíN; UNITED IRELAND.)
Nationalist and then some—a Republican considers himself a socialist, and probably supports the IRA. Republicans regard themselves as defenders of an endangered culture and will often speak Irish among themselves; though as virtually no one in the North has been raised speaking it, Gaelic functions largely as a secret code. Republicans can lay claim not only to an Irishness far more alive in the North than in the Republic, but to a surprisingly old-fashioned Marxism; though dog-eared, an ideology of any kind gives their reasoning a bit more backbone than blind Loyalist flag-waving. Most Republican journalism, like An Phoblacht, is articulate. The propaganda is sophisticated, down to the graphics and quality of paper. Republican leaders seem impressively well educated, because they have spent a long time in prison, where there is plenty of time to read.
SINN FEÍN: Pronounced shin fane. Irish for “Ourselves Alone.”
A legal political party that openly supports the IRA, Sinn Feín took its first big bite of the Nationalist electorate during the 1981 hunger strikes, when, near death, Bobby Sands won a by-election on its ticket. Once Thatcher let an MP starve, Sinn Feín was here to stay. Sinners (pronounced shinners, though the spelling tingles), to the consternation of Unionists, who do not understand how this happened to them, sit on city councils, and run for Parliament.
Contrary to the image of the rough and ready IRA man, Sinn Feín president Gerry Adams sports a trim, natty beard and smokes a pipe. He is lucid, presentable, sharp. He leans back in his chair and makes jokes. He is a gentleman. Elected MP for West Belfast, Adams could not take his seat in Westminster even if he wished to—MP or not, he is under a restraining order and cannot set foot in mainland Britain.
In 1988 Britain censored from the airways Sinn Feín and like organizations that advocate violence. As a result, BBC viewers are now confronted with clips of Adams speaking while a broadcaster reads what the president is saying in a voice-over. Only during elections can Sinners speak with their own voices, at which time one hears from Adams quite a lot. Predictably, not letting Sinn Feín get good publicity has been good publicity for Sinn Feín.
TROUBLES WRITER: A known subspecies in the North, almost always of foreign extraction. Compulsively Romeo-and-Juliets his characters across the sectarian divide. Arrives in two varieties: the Weekend Troubles Writer will typically fly into Belfast for a few days to suss out his setting, return home, and get everything wrong. Type two, the Infatuated Troubles Writer, will stay for much longer, and often returns more than once. Embraces his new home Where Everyone Is So Alive with embarrassing enthusiasm. Will often remain in the North well beyond the point where everyone is quite bored with him. Frequently composes his Serious Novel in situ. Prefers Yeats in the title. Gets everything wrong, with feeling.
U-WORDS: The OUP, UUP, PUP, or any other acronym inclusive of the letter U—standing for Unionist or Ulster; either indicates an unweaning desire to remain in the gradually sagging bosom of Britannia. Of these, the most rabid is the DUP, led by Ian Paisley, an imposing Presbyterian minister with his own church, from whose pulpit he thunders against “the whore of Rome.” In his unabashedly sectarian politics lurks a funny respectability: the honest-bigot syndrome.
Some U-words are more pernicious than others. The Ulster Defense Association (UDA), their illegal offshoot the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) constitute the Protestant equivalent of the IRA. Their idea of a canny political statement runs to random assassination: classically Orange gunmen clump into a Catholic neighborhood and shoot anybody. Protestant paramilitaries do not kill very many people, though this is probably less because they are restrained than because they are not any good at it.
The Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR) is a locally recruited part-time arm of the British Army and dead Protestant—sometimes literally. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) is the largely Protestant local police. Prods nearly to the man,
still the UDR and RUC imagine they wheel impartially through the Province to protect each side from slaughtering the other. It doesn’t work.
ULSTER: Common Orange reference to the North, “Ulster” is a malaprop: the old Irish county of Ulster included Donegal, now part of the South—and Donegal is in the (lower-case) north … Once more, like “West Belfast,” the inconveniences of geography are subsumed by the cruder requirements of politics.
UNITED IRELAND: A hypothetical nation in which there are no more problems and all the citizenry thrive in justice and tranquillity. Metaphorically: happiness. Historically: what has never been. Mythologically: at the end of the day, a phrase Northerners use compulsively, a time and place where all conflict will be resolved and there will be no more armies, and therefore an eventuality that every faction in Northern Ireland has a vested interest in preventing at all costs.
about the book
Teatime in London: Why I Spurn My Gerry Adams Mugs for the Cups From the John Harvard Library
Though I’ve never seen it excerpted elsewhere, this novel’s epigraph, from Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, is one of my favorite quotations. Were I not to prefer cremation, I’d be pleased for that passage to be inscribed on my tombstone.
For in my young adulthood, I surely qualified as one of those “intelligent people” going around “making themselves and everyone else miserable”—emphasis on the former. As a novelist, too, I believed that I gleaned my most valuable material from my own wretchedness. I harvested dejection like a crop. Should my life ever grow perky and pink, I feared I would have no more legitimate “experiences,” no fervor to drive midnight rants at the keyboard, no meaty melancholy to chew on, and nothing to say.
Veneration of affliction isn’t only a penchant of writers. Younger people of a certain stripe—ambitious, hungry, greedy in a good way—can be prone to perceive contentment as a threat and as a trap. Surely getting too satisfied and too comfortable means you don’t go anywhere or do anything, and condemns you to blindly accepting the status quo. Having heart, living life profoundly, must involve angst, anger, anguish, and despair. Happiness is for suckers.
If through my twenties I largely equated happiness with placidity, stasis, and idiocy, by the time I turned thirty and began this manuscript I had begun to question my elevation of suffering. Petty, pointless suffering, too, as the self-inflicted sort always is. I fasted for weeks at a time, to no particular purpose beyond seeing if I could do it. (If the experience was marginally interesting, I learned what there was to learn, and you will never again catch me going for days on end powered only by coffee in lieu of a worldwide famine.) I undertook cross-country cycling trips of thousands of miles, churning a hundred miles a day in often ghastly weather. (Ever wonder what controls where the wind blows? Apparently it switches to the exact opposite direction of wherever Lionel Shriver’s bicycle is pointed.) I forced myself to decamp to foreign countries when secretly I preferred to stay home. Worst of all, I fell in love with the wrong men—men who didn’t love me back, or who could at least be relied upon to make me miserable in those rare instances that I failed to do the job myself.
Ordinary Decent Criminals is both a consequence and an examination of these predilections. The novel is about people, in or out of Northern Ireland, who require troubles with a lower-case T—to feel important, stimulated, vital. Accordingly, it is also about people who are leery of love, which menaces the edgy, fractious life of discord with its soft, pillowy goo, and entices the adventurer with respite, ease, and the hellish repose of staying in one place. For the restless and willful, love offers weakness, enslavement, and sloth. Love, like happiness, is for suckers.
To set this novel where it belonged—a city where everyone adulated suffering—I moved to Belfast in 1987, with the intention of staying about nine months. The fact that I would be based in Belfast for the next twelve years helps to validate an aphorism coined in this very novel: the temporary becomes the permanent. To call those years formative is an understatement. Ensconced in the attic flat of a ramshackle Victorian manse, I apprenticed myself to the so-called Troubles, effectively earning an ad-hoc doctorate in conflict studies. I don’t regret any of the time I lived in Northern Ireland. I don’t regret leaving, either.
Ordinary Decent Criminals was the product of my first couple of years in that town. I arrived with few preconceptions. Presbyterian by upbringing but aggressively lapsed, I harbored no natural allegiance to Protestants. Politically, I was a blank canvas. Both paramilitary extremes soon inspired an aversion, though the Protestant loyalists’ crude, undereducated bumbling tended to trigger a loathing intermingled with pity. By contrast, the slick PR, dissembling, and hypocrisy of IRA-supporting, Catholic-in-name-if-not-in-creed Republicans rapidly aroused a deeper and more perfectly untempered disgust. It irked me that back in the U.S. the IRA was regarded as liberal, leftwing, whereas in fact the organization was wildly illiberal—nationalistic, rightwing—and peopled by bullies and thugs, some of whom I met, none of whom I liked.
A word on the title. In general, titles either come to me effortlessly right away, or they’re hard work, often up until the very last minute. Having gone through rubbish titles by the dozen, when the novel was about to go to press I settled in desperation on The Bleeding Heart, which I meant to scan as sardonic. It didn’t. It sounded sappy. The Bleeding Heart is the worst title I have ever concocted in my life. My capacity to make such a grievous mistake—one that cost me in sales, and understandably gave some reviewers a bad attitude from the get go—humbles me to this day. I conditioned the UK foreign rights contract on permission to rename the book Ordinary Decent Criminals, then a real official term in Northern prisons, believe it or not, and a title with which I’m still pleased.
Now, I remained in Belfast many years after this novel’s publication. The longer I stayed in Ulster—a nomenclatural giveaway that my sympathies eventually canted toward moderate unionists, who constituted a majority in the province, and wished for the North to remain in the United Kingdom—the more broadly my disgust spread to just about everybody. Though the touch paper of the conflict was a Catholic civil rights movement, by the time I arrived the Troubles had degenerated to an inconsequential feud over whether a tiny territory the size of Connecticut, with the population of Philadelphia, would remain in one democratic country in the European Union or join another democratic country in the European Union. It wasn’t about civil rights. It was about nothing.
Which is not to say that nothing was at stake. In addition to the appalling waste of nearly 3,500 lives, the Troubles were a crucial test case of whether terrorism works. The short answer is yes. Terrorism won no end of social, economic, and political concessions for both sides of this ugly tit-for-tat—particularly for the IRA. Because ODCs had not fully explored this moral hazard, I was moved to write The New Republic in 1999—which, though set on a fictional peninsula of Portugal and about a purely fictional terrorist group, qualifies as this novel’s sequel.
Just as I relied on self-imposed torment to feel alive, to feel like myself, to know who I was, to regard my life as compelling, the Northern Irish came to rely on bombs bursting in air for exactly these same certainties. For generations, the conflict provided all and sundry with a ready-made identity and a perverse local pride. Disproportionate international attention that, as an American, I myself lavished on this sordid squabble only reinforced the dependency. Yet don’t imagine that locals were grateful for the outside world’s concern, or touched by foreign focus on the niggling details of their provincial problems. As a New Yorker, I never assumed my neighbors in South Belfast would give two hoots about the MTA, MOMA, or the Mets. By contrast, they took it as a given that I would find the fine historical distinctions between the Provisional IRA, the INLA, and the IRSP absolutely fascinating.
Since the conflict was officially—if not, alas, altogether in practice—brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Northern Irish have been forced to go cold turkey. In
the dénouement since, citizens of every political stripe have gone through a protracted withdrawal from the crack highs of assassinations, riots, and car bombs. Northerners have had to reconstruct not just busted up buildings, but who they are.
Because my concluding “Glossary of Troublesome Terms” was included in the original text and is thus part of the novel, I have resisted updating it. Any references to the present in that dictionary allude to circa 1990. Much has happened since. Most notably, Northern Ireland has gradually accommodated itself to normal life. Despite a handful of retrograde holdouts, locals are decreasingly likely to define themselves by whom they revile and what grievances they bear. Sure, some Prods will still get irked that the region’s license plates alone in the UK do not picture the Union Jack. But Ulster is now largely a land of property bubbles, cancer-charity fund drives, and disputes over water charges. (I find it salutary that the nationally popular 2013-14 BBC series “The Fall” was set in Belfast, yet the plot about a serial killer was wholly unrelated to Troubles politics.) Frankly, it’s a lovely place to live.