This September marks the 20th anniversary of the Holy Cross Primary School dispute—a months-long, awful period in the history of Northern Ireland which, despite its violence, took place in a time of supposed peace. Although it is often termed a “dispute” or a “protest,” it’s perhaps more accurate to call Holy Cross a crisis. An all-girls Catholic primary school, Holy Cross is situated in a religiously segregated neighbourhood in Ardoyne, north Belfast. In the summer of 2001, just two years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, an uneasy, tense summer, marked by sporadic violence, bled into an international crisis when the primary school became a flashpoint for violence and disorder.
For months Protestant Loyalists protested against Holy Cross children walking to school in what they regarded as their area, where the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British Army were drafted in to separate protesting adults from children as young as four as they faced gunfire, urine and petrol bombs, in scenes hardened police described as “vicious” and one local politician compared to 1960s Alabama. After a summer of simmering sectarian violence, the explosion in tensions quickly captured the attention of international news media, with the press pack descending on the little girls of Holy Cross. “There was just such stress and anger,” says Allison Morris, crime correspondent at the Belfast Telegraph, who covered the unfolding violence as a rookie reporter. “At one press conference every single one of the international journalists asked the mothers, ‘Would you not just walk the children round the other way?’ Around the same time there wereriots in England and I said to one of the mothers, ‘The next time they ask you that, ask if they’d say the same to a kid in Birmingham. Why is it okay to ask that?’”
“I remember even at the time being pretty clueless, being aware of the injustice of the situation,” says Morris, who has since written of her experiences at Holy Cross. “Even if you look at the early archive footage, the pictures are so dramatic. The first few days the army stood with their backs to the protestors, with their guns pointed inwards. So when you look at those pictures of screaming kids, you look above their heads and there are guns at head height. That was one of the things I noticed most about it at the time.”
International media attention was diverted away from the crisis after the September 11th terrorist attacks. But the violence and disorder continued for 11 weeks in total before protests were suspended. “September 11th happened and all the foreign crews disappeared”, says Anne Cadawaller, author of Holy Cross, The Untold Story. “And I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t the end of it. It was unbelievable to me, bearing in mind what had just happened in New York, that the loyalists would continue. I thought they might stop, you know, out of decency. But they didn’t stop. It was inexcusable, absolutely inexcusable.”
“Holy Cross dispelled the myth that women are unaffected by conflict, that they’re in some secure private sphere”
Cadawaller attended the protests daily as a freelance journalist, walking with the children to school in the morning and returning home in the evening, and saw first hand the long-term effects that were beginning to germinate as a result of the violence. “A lot of [the kids] were on tranquilisers,” she says. “And their parents couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t get out of their pyjamas. The first thing they did when they got home from school was to get into their pyjamas. And then a psychologist explained that that's because the girls associated their pyjamas with safety and they didn't want to get into their school uniforms in the morning and they didn't want to get out.”
The girls of Holy Cross school are now young women of my age, some with families of their own. They were, in the words of the late Lyra McKee, ceasefire babies, inheriting intergenerational trauma from their Troubles-era parents, and adding their own to it. Many have been left with deep psychological scars as a result of the abuse they suffered. Brendan Bradley, head of the Survivors of Trauma group which deals with victims of Troubles-related violence, said that the trauma experienced by the children was “almost without parallel” in the history of the Troubles. “It wasn't as though this abuse lasted for a couple of days or was a one-off; it went on for months,” he said. “Many needed counselling, some long-term counselling, in the wake of it all. Parents told how their daughters had changed from being fun-loving to being very withdrawn.” Father Aidan Troy, the local parish priest who supported families walking to school, said the schoolgirls had been put on heavy tranquilizers like diazepam as a result of the trauma. Others experienced tantrums and bedwetting.
In the years since, as many of Holy Cross’s girls reached adulthood, few have spoken out. Scannal, a recent RTÉ documentary about the protests, focused mainly on the testimony of reporters who covered the event, while others who spoke to journalists in the past experienced such negativity online following their testimony that they’ve sworn off speaking to media since.
One of the schoolgirls, Alice-Lee Bunting, now a mother of two, was five when the protests began, and revealed recently she still suffers from nightmares and flashbacks. Bunting, immortalised in one of the most widely seen photos from Holy Cross, crying and clinging to her mother, experienced the protests on her first day of school in Primary 1. “It still feels like yesterday,” she told PA. “It was just horrendous. “[My mummy] was really scared, but it was a choice either to get us to school or not.
“They were wearing masks, they had their faces covered. They were shouting ‘RIP’ and urinating in balloons and throwing them at us, pipe bombs were thrown, bottles, stones. When we got into school everyone was shocked and crying. I remember they gave us teddy bears in school, wee girl dolls, I still have mine.”
It’s perhaps somewhat due to the fear of exacerbating that raw trauma and long-term psychological damage that any events to mark 10 years since the tragedy were, in the words of retired local Presbyterian minister Dr Norman Hamilton, “deliberately suppressed.” Certainly, there’s a fine line to walk when it comes to calling attention to traumatic events, making sure they’re an opportunity for growth and education, rather than something to be exploited. It’s particularly important in a city like Belfast, where trauma and long-term psychological damage from decades of constant conflict have contributed to a suicide and mental health crisis and an anti-anxiety drug dependency five times higher than the rest of the UK. However, to continue to ignore the crisis for another 20 years would be to ignore the lessons we can learn from it.
“Holy Cross illustrated how deeply the conflict embeds itself in people’s everyday lives,” says the University of Ulster’s Dr Fidelma Ashe. “It dispelled the myth that women are unaffected by conflict, that they’re in some secure private sphere, a protected category. There still is a more general understanding of the conflict as a male theatre of violence; I think there have been different types of trauma that women have experienced in Northern Ireland, and not just during that event. And I think [Holy Cross] also signals something else and that is, if you are embedded in the conflict, if you are being affected by the conflict, then you have a right to be involved in the building of the peace.”
It was certainly the responsibility of people within the community to bring peace to their streets again. With the world’s attention focused on the New York, the crisis at Holy Cross continued to rumble on, finally petering out in November of the same year, but not before one of the children’s parents had embarked on a hunger strike, a rally had taken place in Belfast in support of the besieged school children and Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first minister became involved. Still, though, the issue didn’t immediately disappear. Greater CCTV presence and tighter security was required in the area. Even then, it would be months before parents were able to walk their children to school without a police and Army presence.
It is, without doubt, a messy, shameful period of post-conflict Northern Irish history that many would probably like to forget. But as we have seen in the recent furore over the British government’s proposed Troubles amnesty, burying history, even when it’s shameful, is rarely—if ever—the answer. Certainly, it’s not the way to heal. Today, Belfast feels a world away from September 2001. But certainly the uneasiness of what could—and did—happen in supposed peacetime lingers in the collective consciousness of the city’s ceasefire babies. Occasional sporadic violence and disorder, like that we saw earlier this year in riots on Lanark Way in Belfast, only serve to remind us all peace is not static, but something we must continually prioritise and work at together. Remembering Holy Cross might be uncomfortable. But it’s vital to see how we must never slip further back into the past. As Hamilton said of the anniversary earlier this month, “I want to focus on now. You can't forget, we'll never forget what actually happened, but I want to focus on what's actually happening now."
