Prime Time 8. Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks, Schulbuch

1 Reading: Sinn Fein has hijacked the history of Ulster a) Before you read, form groups of three and do some research. In your group, write down definitions for the terms or names below that could be used as short encyclopaedia entries. Include at least one date and one adjective. b) While reading the text, find seven examples of figurative language. In July 2007 British troops withdrew from Northern Ireland. Behind them the story of the Troubles is being traduced, says Peter Taylor. 2 Sinn Fein Remembrance Day IRA Union Jack Falls Road, Belfast Stormont Old Bailey SAS (Special Air Service) Ulster Defence Association (UDA) Maze Gerry Adams Word bank sectarian rioting • deployment of troops • withdrawal of troops • army campaign • to come under attack • curfew • internment • interrogation techniques • (military) stalemate • to put sth. on hold W Driving up west Belfast’s Divis Street last week, the scene of the fierce sectarian rioting that triggered the deployment of British troops 38 years ago, I noticed a gap in the murals that have adorned its walls for so many years, a visual barometer of the changing climate of the times. I wondered if the creative talents of Sinn Fein’s art department were already preparing to fill the space with a fresh mural depicting the withdrawal of British forces. At midnight last Tuesday the army brought down the final curtain on the longest campaign in its history. There was no great ceremony, no Last Post, no rolling up of the Union Jack as in Aden 40 years earlier. The army slipped out of the province in carpet slippers. Driving up on the Falls Road I passed the narrow streets around the Clonard monastery where Catholics had come under Protestant attack in that hot August of 1969. I remember talking to soldiers about their experiences when they first arrived to keep the two sides apart and prevent a feared Catholic pogrom. Many of the troops barely knew where Northern Ireland was or understood the bitter sectarian divisions that had flared into violent civil conflict in this far corner of the United Kingdom. They were welcomed like heroes. “I felt like a knight in shining armour,” one of them told me. “Tea and an endless supply of buns were the order of the day.” Within months the honeymoon was over and tea and buns were replaced with rocks, petrol bombs and bullets. Soon the army became the enemy, as a result of a series of misjudgements and catastrophic errors, largely through ignorance and blind reliance on the unionist government at Stormont against whom the civil rights campaign had been initially directed. A disastrous curfew was placed on the Falls Road, alienating the very people who had welcomed the soldiers with open arms. Internment was introduced in 1971, carried out by the army as young and old were dragged from their beds and carted off in the early hours of the morning. To make matters worse, a handful of suspects were subjected to controversial interrogation techniques previously used by the army in colonial situations in Malaya, Kenya and Aden, including hooding, wall standing and exposure to an incessant high-pitched “white” noise. The techniques were subsequently deemed to be illegal. But worse was still to come. On 30 January 1972 paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in Londonderry on what became known as “Bloody Sunday”. It was undoubtedly the darkest day in the army’s 38 years in the province, and in the eyes of many nationalists it completed the transformation of the troops from knights in shining armour to a murderous army of occupation. In the bitter and bloody years that followed army commanders emphasised the need to win “hearts and minds” in order to win the war, but the message fell on many deaf ears out on the ground as squaddies saw their mates shot, blown up and maimed by an ever more effective IRA. 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 12 Ireland Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv