AN ENGLISH PILGRIM IN NORTHERN IRELAND 1977-1992

WERE THERE VOICES FROM ENGLAND DURING THE LONG CONFLICT IN NORTHERN IRELAND?

Joan Tapsfield was an assistant controller with a staff of 2,000 in the British Civil Service. Challenged to see if there might be a connection between her country England and the origins of the conflict in Northern Ireland, she went to live there after retirement. In AN ENGLISH PILGRIM IN NORTHERN IRELAND 1977-1992 she describes what she experienced and learned. “I have grown to love Ireland but the mainspring motive of my move there was a love of England. If my father, for whom I had great affection and respect, had died in debt, I should have wanted to repay that debt. I feel the same way about my country.”

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A talk by Joan Tapsfield at the Tirley Garth Conference Centre, Cheshire
21 November 1992

If my friends in Ireland had been asked to choose someone to come and live among them, I fancy a prosaic ex-Civil Servant would not have been high on the list, but they have made me welcome for the past fifteen years.

My Civil Service career had nothing to do with Ireland but much to do with human relations in and between Departments. At one point I had the conviction that my responsibility was not limited to the sphere officially designated as mine, but that I should think for the character of the whole Civil Service and Establishment. This conviction persisted after I retired and lived in Kent, looking after my father until he died.

One Sunday evening a radio programme from Northern Ireland prompted a surprise thought, 'That's where you ought to go and see what the Establishment is doing.' Very tentatively, I told my one Irish friend, who put me in touch with a lady in Derry I had met in London some twenty years earlier. Warm invitations to Derry and Belfast followed.

I came for a week and left utterly confused, and with an invitation to come back for longer. This second visit, during which I had an unforgettable experience in a church in Inishowen, led ultimately to my selling my home in Kent and moving to Northern Ireland in 1977.

Inishowen

The lovely peninsula of Inishowen is the natural hinterland of Derry, though separated from it by the Donegal border.

My second visit to Derry coincided with their Civic Week, which included an exhibition in the University called 'Emigration'. Derry and the ports of Inishowen had seen many of the farewells of people who left Ireland in thousands in the famine years of the mid-nineteenth century. The exhibition included letters home from some of them and newspaper adverts from shipping companies, some of whom would provide a few loaves for the four to five week voyage. Many passengers already exhausted by famine died en route and the ships became known as 'coffin ships'.

I had been reading a history of Inishowen and the exhibition confirmed my impression that England, at that time responsible for the government of the whole of Ireland, was being blamed for all these tragedies. I strenuously resisted this idea, attributing it to 'left-wing propaganda'. All the same I was troubled about it.

Driving around Inishowen on a lovely sunny day we visited a little Catholic church where there were very vivid pictures of the Stations of the Cross. The one that caught my eye was one where Pilate was washing his hands to disclaim responsibility for the death of Jesus. It struck me like lightning that Pilate was a typical official, not deliberately wicked but sacrificing truth to expediency; typical too of officialdom in our own time often, and of my resistance to accepting the truth of the damage my country had done to Ireland.

I knelt and prayed for forgiveness for myself and my country and for courage to do whatever God wanted. After a few more visits and consulting my Irish friends I decided to sell my home in Kent and move to Northern Ireland, as a drop in the ocean of the restitution we owed the Irish of whom so many had been forced to leave their homes.

I have grown to love Ireland, but the mainspring motive of my move there was a love of England. If my father, for whom I had great affection and respect, had died in debt, I should have wanted to repay the debt. I feel the same way about my country

For two years I lived with Irish friends in Belfast; then I bought a little bungalow in Derry where I lived for eight years. Now I am back in Belfast in a small house of my own.

Life in Belfast, 1977-79

My first two years in Belfast began a learning experience which has gone on ever since. Initially my directive seemed to be to serve the Irish — a kind of counter-balance for English domination — and to listen.

A Catholic lady called Kathleen came to help in the house twice a week and as we sat around the table after lunch she often let out a 'spiel' about the Brits and the behaviour of the army. She didn't really approve of having a Brit in the house and constantly instructed me in how things should be done. Plenty of chances to listen!

On my first Christmas Eve in Belfast she launched a tirade about the families who would have Christmas without a father because the Brits had put them in prison. Having a rather homesick time of quiet on Christmas morning, sad and bewildered, I turned to the book A New Day and found Frank Buchman's prayer: 'May the Christ-Child bring us the birth of a new thinking at this Christmas'.¹ I realised that all birth —even of new thinking — is painful but can create something new. And it goes on growing. 

A year or so later I was hunting for a house in Derry and when I told Kathleen in Belfast that I had found one, she said, 'There, and I was praying you wouldn't get it, God forgive me!' She had become a friend and, now in a nursing home, still is a friend.