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an impartial insider?
by Rudie Goldsmith
I could swear that Kevin Myers deliberately sets out to annoy me. But then probably around half the population here thinks so too… probably because he is rather good at it. In Watching the Door Myers attempts to describe with “savage indignation” our descent into the Troubles as he reports as a young journalist for RTÉ and various publications. But it reads more like fiction in the vein of say Ripley Bogle or Woundlicker.
The author seems intent on bedding all women in sight, no doubt in some desperate attempt to touch base with his humanity amidst all the murder and barbarity but it just seems gauche and unnecessary when written down. Everywhere he goes someone seems to be dying a pointless and hideous death which is fair enough for a representation of early ’70s Northern Ireland.
But Myers is an unreliable observer. He doesn’t even seem to check the facts on himself. At one moment he states “no sense… of grief informed my responses”, the next he is shaking and in tears. For a reporter his view is patently biased, he laughs at the “preposterousness” of an IRA member having gaelicized his name but praises the British Brigadier Kitson, creator of the notorious ‘counter-gangs’ against the Mau Mau in Kenya, for his “bright mind” and a later GOC as “a thoroughly likable and decent man.”
And then he gets offensive: working-class Catholics don’t look you in the eye; everyone agrees that Protestant tradesmen are more reliable; Catholic homes are full of noise, chaos and dirty plates; Catholics are so backward they kept coal in their bath; we are asked to believe that the IRA shone lights to guide Luftwaffe bombers onto Belfast in 1941. I could go on and on. Myers does. Again and again he attacks all manifestations of republicanism with the zeal of the convert. But he doesn’t get it; “I had become an impartial insider” he considers of himself.
Myers talks of a nationalist community which dearly nourishes a grievance. At one point they respond “out of all scale to the provocation” after a British soldier kills a lorry driver passing Springfield Road barracks in Belfast “when the IRA opened fire… soldiers returned fire” he explains. Yet again Myers has got it wrong – there was no IRA gunfire, just a backfiring vehicle. The ensuing violence took place after the dead man’s companion was released from the station having clearly been assaulted. My source for this tale is Lost Lives which Myers several times refers to as an important source for his book.
There are other factual errors in this book alongside the author’s tedious tirade but his brief and incorrect summation of the killing of the nameless driver becomes all the more insensitive when Myers later devotes several pages to his own close encounter with the army in a backfiring vehicle: “I was nearly paralysed with terror, and outside it was dark dark dark”, he writes inviting us to empathise. He continues, “Behind me stood a young working-class British soldier on sentry-go whose name I will never know, who was sitting in the most fired-on place in western Europe, and who stoically and unflinchingly endured the gunfire-like sounds from a stationary car at point-blank range, without firing once. By such men is civilization made”.
I almost cried!
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