Sir, - So 1970 in Northern Ireland was almost as peaceful as 2000, according to Dennis Kennedy (Opinion, January 5th). Not in my eye-witness experience of life as a Northern Catholic that year. Nor indeed that of the homeless Catholics driven from Bombay Street rear and the Crumlin Road the previous summer or the thousands who continued to be driven out from other parts of the Greater Belfast area. It will be news too for the 35,000 people of the lower Falls who experienced severe harassment building up to martial law in July of that year. The period 1969-72 saw the largest upheaval of people in Ireland since the second World War. I was there, I lived through it and I will never forget the experience of being a refugee in my own country.
Every night my family went to bed not knowing what attacks the night would bring, having little confidence that anyone would come to our aid. We watched the connivance of local police with extreme loyalists in fear and dread and my father was one of many who appealed in politicians to Dublin and Belfast for protection. It did not come. By August 1971 we were refugees with the Irish Army in Gormanstown, having left our detached home and all our possession, running for our lives from loyalist mobs with guns. Precious little impact the wonderful reform programme had on our experience.
In 1970 there were plenty of illegal and legal weapons in Northern Ireland held by extreme loyalists. I know this too from personal experience; by 1972 I had been shot by a loyalist using one of them.
We were under constant violent attack at our home and even at school. Calls to the RUC brought no relief - an experience relived today in Larne and other places.
I am grossly offended by the denial of the experience of Catholics during 1969, 1970 and 1971 which is implied in Dennis Kennedy's analysis. It is unionist revisionism at its most obscene and as a taxpayer I resent his use of his academic position and the respectability it confers to deny the painful and tragic history of a whole community.
My father's hard work in a society which discriminated against him was wiped out overnight. No compensation was ever received and his premature death was the ultimate price of our loss. Perhaps Dennis Kennedy has more peaceful memories of those years than has my family. - Yours, etc.,
S. O'Connor, Belfast 14.