Aperçu du sujet
DOCUMENT 1 My father, Patrick Toolis, worked as a building foreman and never voted for anyone other than the British Labour Party all his life. He was one of the most gentle men you could ever meet and he loved to sing for his exhausting brood of children. His songs
DOCUMENT 1 My father, Patrick Toolis, worked as a building foreman and never voted for anyone other than the British Labour Party all his life. He was one of the most gentle men you could ever meet and he loved to sing for his exhausting brood of children. His songs were always love ballads; only rarely would he sing rebel songs that 5 commemorated the glories of a lost republic. My mother, Mary Gallagher, was more animated; her fiery personality ruled our household, but she too had little time for a country in which she had only known poverty and hardship. Ireland was her past and Edinburgh, where she worked as a nurse, raised her children and prospered, was her daily life. 10 But we had another place, another identity in the world. Every summer my father would borrow his firm's noisy diesel workmen's van, pack it with a dozen children and aunties, and drive the four hundred miles to our real ‘home’ in Achill Island, County Mayo, on the extreme west coast of Ireland. Every year in the sixties and seventies as Northern Ireland was engulfed in communal violence we drove the same route 15 from Edinburgh to the Stranraer ferry on Scotland's west coast, past the farms where my mother worked picking potatoes as a thirteen-year-old girl, and sailed across the Irish Sea. As the ferry docked at Larne we grew anxious and drew into ourselves. […] We were as convinced as anyone that the whole of Northern Ireland was a war zone. We had no real understanding of what was taking place there and no desire to tarry 20 and find out. As the van hurtled through the North, I would look out of the windows at the blue- white- and red-painted kerbstones and the Union Jacks on flagpoles in private gardens that told us this was Protestant territory and a hostile land. During the early days of the Troubles1 we drove through Belfast and saw the soldiers, barricades and 25 rolls of barbed wire of a city at war. It looked too much like the television reports for comfort. Father found a new route and for the next twenty years we skirted around the far side of Lough Neagh to avoid2 Belfast and any potential contact with the hostile natives. In all those years we were rarely stopped and never once searched by the British security