‘The war’s coming, Kevin, and it’s going to be serious’
Kevin Myers became Northern Ireland correspondent at the start of the Troubles - a job no one else wanted. His account of the era is thrilling, says Ed West
2 May 2008

A boy covers his face in Londonderry in the 1970s

Watching the Door by Kevin Myers
Atlantic Books £14.99

Northern Ireland: perhaps the most off-putting phrase in the English language, especially when one adds "troubles". The Six Counties from 1969 to 1998 were like the Holy Land with long winters and year-long rain, or, as the author describes one grim council estate in west Belfast: "It was mesmerisingly dreadful."

Which is why we probably will not see Kevin Myers' memoir lodged between the latest Da Vinci Code knock-off or celebrity cookbook in the bestsellers list. That is a shame, because Myers' account of his years covering the Troubles in the early 1970s is wonderful. At times Watching the Door feels like a well-written thriller, and he reels off background information about the conflict that even the semi-knowledgeable would find astonishing. But most of all he captures the sheer insanity and nonsense of the conflict with dry wit and self-deprecating humour.

The book starts with Myers freshly arrived in Belfast, where "the Victorian grandeur of one of the great industrial cities of the world had faded into the drab and unconvincing pretence of a minor vaudeville star living in a damp and grubby boarding house".

He has arrived in town as RTÉ's correspondent, a job he did not really want but, he suspects, no one else did either, just as the Troubles are starting - a prospect that thrills his Catholic taxi driver, Tommy. "The war's coming, and it's going to be serious, Kevin... The Provies have got fresh gear coming from America, Kevin, and they're making claymore mines. Claymore mines! Brilliant! Kevin, listen here, there'll be people dying in this town who've never f---ing died before."

Myers, through the international language of drink, gets to meet politically astute, sinister Republicans, stupid and vicious Loyalists and the various media grief groupies who turn up in war zones.

Like many, he was politically naïve. After an IRA bomb that killed seven men, Myers was one of many to entertain the popular myth that the RUC was responsible. "I was a socialist; my instinctive sympathies were with working-class organisations that declared that they were on the side of the working class," he writes. "The IRA called itself socialist: the RUC most certainly was not socialist. So part of me wanted to be believe that the IRA could not have intended this: surely the RUC must share some of the blame?"

The reason, he now relates, is that the war was being reported by a new generation, the 68ers. "I somehow or other thought that [the IRA's] motives were honourable, and that it was politically preferable to "reactionary" and "fascist" working-class movements - namely Loyalist paramilitaries... Loyalists discussed their activities through uneducated grunts, but Republicans articulated themselves with verbal splendour and intellectual ersatz-Marxism. Morally, each spoke the common heathen Esperanto of Cain."

And they acted on it. One evening Myers was drinking with a friend who introduced him to a Loyalist psychopath called Rab Brown (a pseudonym). Rab ribbed Kevin about his suspiciously Catholic-sounding name. Later his friend whispered: "They're going to nut [murder] you, the guns have just arrived. Do as I say or you're dead."

The murders of young British soldiers, innocent, scared and far from home, are particularly awful. Kids such as Gary Barlow, a young soldier from Lancashire, who got lost from his platoon and was grabbed by a crowd; some women wanted to escort him back to base, but others prevented him. "A soldier helplessly watched from a distant watchtower as a teenage girl appeared to orchestrate the semi-circle that had surrounded and trapped the weeping soldier. An IRA man then arrived, drew a gun and murdered the helpless boy, while Belfast's vile Mesdames Lafarge, no doubt contented in their handiwork, watched on. Gary had just turned 19. There must be nearly a dozen grandmothers on the Falls Road today who can tell the rising generation of youngsters about their gallant contribution to the war for Irish freedom."

Myers contrasts this brutality with the sheer absurdity of the conflict. He meets a 16-year-old IRA killer who berates him for swearing. "Excuse me, Mr Myers, but I don't like talk like that." An IRA man from 1939 explains how one unit of "Catholic boys had staunchly refused to handle bombs that used acid-containing condoms as timing devices. They were not certainly going to imperil their mortal souls to blow up Londoners."

He even meets a man wearing an official UDA blazer and ponders: "What other terrorist organisation in the world would have its own preposterous regimental blazer, complete with gold badge, but an Ulster Loyalist one?"

Myers ended up trying to broker peace talks between the two sides, but by the age of 30 he was burnt out, unlike the Troubles. It would be another 20 years later before the gangsters decided they'd had enough, leaving 3,000 dead and thousands more with broken lives. His driver Tommy, like so many people, had got his wish.