There are no signs inside or outside the Market Place Theatre, a modern, brightly lit building nestled near St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, on a quiet Wednesday night to tell passersby about the play on stage. There’s no need, according to its writer, Gerry Cunningham, who says the tickets for The Martin Hurson Story, which recounts the life and death of one of the hunger-strikers who died in the H-blocks at the Maze prison in 1981, sold out within minutes.
In a place of contested history, not everyone agrees that it should have been staged there at all. Colin Worton, whose brother Kenneth was one of 10 Protestant workmen murdered in 1976 at Kingsmill, not far away, remains angry. “If this had been staged in a republican area I could understand it. But this is supposed to be a venue for people from across the community,” he told the News Letter. “Imagine the outcry if a play about a loyalist like Billy Wright was staged here.”
However, there were no protests at the theatre, which is run by Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Borough Council, against the play, which was first shown in the community centre in Martin Hurson’s home village, Galbally, last September.
Some of the play’s scenes are harrowing, especially the death of the 27-year-old IRA man on July 13th, 1981, after 46 days without food – a death that came agonisingly earlier than those of the 10 others who died, because he was unable to keep down water.
Jailed for 20 years in November 1977, Hurson was convicted of IRA membership and involvement in a series of roadside explosions targeting British army and Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers. Today, no one in the republican movement denies that he was an IRA man or that he was involved in the bombings, but they argue now, as they did then, that the confession given to RUC officers in Omagh was beaten out of him.
Speaking the morning after the play’s Armagh performance, Cunningham, a retired Tyrone teacher whose students included members of the Hurson family, insists that the play does not glorify the past. “Some people look back on our history with glossy eyes, ‘when men were men’, and all that. What’s on the stage is reality. Death was the reality. The reality of it was the horror, the brutality, the viciousness between both sides,” he says.
We have to live with the reality of this. We have to live with it. We cannot hide it. And I know that some people will take offence to this, but I have tried to be as honest as I can
Cunningham has his own share of memories, including running with his wife to a neighbour’s house to help after a young husband had been shot four times in the head by loyalist gunmen just seconds after he put his child on the floor. Equally, he remembers a night in Daisy Hill Hospital, in Newry, when his cousin Sean Farmer and friend Colm McCartney had been found shot dead and dumped on a road near Newtownhamilton after they had been stopped at a bogus UDR checkpoint.
“It was a horrible time, a terrible time in our history. I lived through it as a teacher, and I don’t want to see it come back again, ever. Violence didn’t work out,” Cunningham says quietly.
The play had to have balance, however, reflecting the opinions held then, he argues. “My main aim was to bring people back to the reality of what was 1981 was like.”
The Martin Hurson Story expresses the belief of members of the local East Tyrone brigade of the IRA that their actions were right and justified, but also the conviction of RUC officers that “these were dangerous criminals in the eyes of the state. I didn’t pull back from that. I have no right to be a moral judge. I wish to God that [the Troubles] never happened, but it did and there are countless men and women who are gone who should never be gone,” he says.
“We have to live with the reality of this. We have to live with it. We cannot hide it. And I know that some people will take offence to this, but I have tried to be as honest as I can.”
Softly spoken as he is, Cunningham is clearly annoyed that his work is treated differently from The Man Who Swallowed a Dictionary, the play about David Ervine, the Ulster Volunteer Force member and, later, politician.
In the eyes of some unionists, the Ervine play is one “that should be seen by everyone down South”, yet his own work is interpreted as eulogising the IRA.
But does anybody in Cunningham’s play question the morality of the IRA’s actions? “No, because Martin Hurson did not live to have that path. Could we say the same about Martin McGuinness if he had gone on hunger strike and died? People are trying to rewrite the past. We don’t know what Martin Hurson would have turned out like. All we know is that he died in 1981. We hope that he would have been like David Ervine.”
So what message does Cunningham want young people to take away? “That this should never happen again, that we should never return,” says the writer, whose son Ruairi plays a number of roles in the production, including an H-block doctor and a UDR soldier.
“If we don’t [stage it] again, so be it. I did it to the best of my ability. It was not intended to offend – I am not that type of person. I don’t have that type of feeling towards my Protestant neighbour.”
Cunningham’s Monaghan-born father always said, he recalls with a smile, “that there is far worse on our side. The other side might kick ye, but our side will come and take your eye out and then come back and look for the eyelash”.
He lists a slew of Protestant neighbours, family by family. They were “really good neighbours”, he says. “We worked with them, and they with us.” In later years many of the sons of those families joined the security forces. “That is just the way it was. Nobody wanted this. We don’t live ideal lives. We have to live with the consequences of what happened. Wherever we go in the years, wherever we go, we have to take these people with us.”
