Danny Boy by Malachy McCourt Read Free Book Online Page B

fortified city in Europe enduring the last great siege of the British Empire. Involved in the struggle was the Pope James II, Leopold I of Austria, Maxmillian of Bavaria, Louis XIV of France, and any other available monarch with an unemployed army. Did the Irish Protestants or Catholics know that they were miserable, disposable pawns in an international quarrel among foreign kings? Not bloody likely. Just mention God, country, and principle, and it’s no bother exciting people about preserving what never was.
    This Siege of Derry dragged on for four months; the number of people who died from warfare and starvationcannot be counted, only estimated. According to Jonathan Borden in his “History of Ulster,” there were seven thousand soldiers defending the city and as many as thirty thousand civilians clambering for safety. The soldiers were commanded by a Major Henry Baker and a Church of Ireland rector named George Walker, which causes one to wonder if he has a descendant who is a sitting president of the U.S.A.
    While the rain of bombshells and cannonballs failed to damage the walls, it ravaged buildings and snuffed out many lives. The brave women defenders injected themselves into the fray by heaving stones at attackers who attempted to scale the walls. George Walker did his best to preserve stability within the walls, posting a price list of meats in a place where the starving defenders devoured everything except each other:
    Horse flesh: one shilling eight pence per pound.
    Quarter of a dog: five shilling six pence.
    (Fattened by eating the bodies of dead Irish)
    Dog’s head: two shillings six pence.
    A cat: four shillings six pence.
    A rat: one shilling.
    A mouse: six pence.
    A fish: Priceless.
    Considering that a shilling amounted to a week’s wages, that was an awful lot of money for a bit of flesh. Fever wiped out most of the children. It was estimated that the total mortality of the Siege of Derry numbered fifteen thousand people. After 105 days, the siege was lifted when the defenders were relieved by ships sailing up the river Foyle, and Derry, in the words of Captain Ashe, thanked “the lord who has preserved this city from the enemy. I hope he will always keep it to the Protestants.” God did for many years “keep it to the Protestants” with the help of odd laws and political gerrymandering, but today it is governed by a mostly nationalistic city council, and the name Derry has superseded the old name of Londonderry. In spite of that power shift, another enormous tragedy lay grinning in the dark, centuries later, awaiting the call to grisly duty.
    On August 9th, 1971, the British government arrested 350 men suspected of IRA activities and on that day, the policy of internment without trial had begun. In a move designed to crush the IRA, anybody could be flung into the pokey on the suspicion of a senior police official. Mostly young Catholic men felt the brunt of this nefarious policy, and just six months after the policy was implemented, nearly 1,000 men had been jailed.
    So it was that on Sunday, 30th January 1972, the NICRA (North Ireland Civil Rights Association) called for a massive demonstration in Derry, protesting the jail without trial policy. The government refused to issue a permit and banned the protest. The NICRA responded defiantly, stating that the protest would go forward, like it or not, and the government responded by putting men of the Parachute Regiment on duty to quell the prospective marchers. As a civil rights march, it emulated the strategies and tactics of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., used so effectively in the United States. The organizers were eager to protest in peace, even singing “We Shall Overcome.” The police were, for the most part, keeping things calm, but the paratroopers were a bit trigger-happy. Twenty thousand people assembled on that day and marched and sang with little resistance, except for a few rough encounters. But as the