Journalist and Author, Derry
Aoife Moore is an independent investigative journalist from Derry, Northern Ireland and formerly worked as a political correspondent for the BBC.
She calls herself a victim of England’s legacy in Ireland and says that every facet of her life has been marred by British colonialism, including the death of her uncle in the violence of Bloody Sunday.
Aoife chose her path to become a journalist because of her frustration with the British media’s unwillingness to challenge the government’s official narrative of what happened on Bloody Sunday and her desire to be a part of revealing the truth.
She is the best-selling author of The Long Game: Inside Sinn Fein, a book that explores the growth of Sinn Fein from the armed struggle of the IRA to its current political dominance in the country.
Journalist and Author, Derry
“Obviously I have my own beliefs but I think telling people that they were all in it together and they’re all mad up there does a great disservice to the colonial trauma that we still live under today.”
On her family legacy and British colonialism in Northern Ireland:
“So if we go back to my grandparents, both my grandparents are orphans who were abandoned by their parents, one through shame brought on by the Presbyterian community, in which my grandfather was given away by his unwed teenage mother. He was adopted by two Catholic people who, due to British colonialism, were technically homeless and lived in a slum, which was a disused army camp called Springtown Camp in Derry City. It was an American base in World War II. And once the Americans left, Catholics used that base as housing because they would not build houses for Catholics in Derry. That’s where my granddad’s life started.
“My granny’s life started when she was taken to an orphanage because her mother died and the Catholic Church didn’t believe men should raise children by themselves. And she lived under the boot of the Catholic Church until she was 14. Then my mother’s family were one of the first families to move into Creggan, which was the biggest Catholic estate in Derry. My great-granddad was a member of the Irish Communist Party and a known enemy of the Catholic Church. That made their life in Creggan quite difficult at times. They grew up in poverty.
“My granny married, had 14 children. My mother is the youngest. And when she was seven, my uncle was murdered by the British Army on Bloody Sunday. So every facet of my life has been marred by British colonialism in some way or another, whether it’s housing, education, murder.”
On the decision to be a journalist:
“I became a journalist because I hated journalists.
“The British media, the British tabloid media, but the British state in general, after Bloody Sunday, the British Army put out statements claiming that the boys, and they were boys — many of the people killed on Bloody Sunday were children, teenagers —they put out statements saying that these people that they had murdered, they shot men, women and children, but they said that all these people were IRA gunmen.
“The British army put out the statement and the British media did not question it. They painted my family and all the families in working class Catholic areas as terrorists and marred my uncle’s name, who was a 31-year-old man with six children when he was shot in the back trying to escape, as IRA men and terrorists.
“And the British press ate it up and it took us 30, 40 years for that to be cleared and we are still fighting for justice. No soldier at present on Bloody Sunday has ever sat in a prison cell for the actions carried out on that day and some have been decorated by the Queen with medals for bravery. I don’t know, and I think obviously as you’re American and you have your own law enforcement that shoots people in the back, that doesn’t seem very defensive on their side to me.
“And I remember thinking that I wanted to do journalism differently. When you’re a teenager you think you’re going to light up the world. And I thought the big reason that journalism was so important was because without the Japanese photographers and the Italian journalists and the Dublin journalists that were on the ground on Bloody Sunday, the British narrative would have continued.
“But it was the presence of journalists on the ground that we were able to keep our narrative, we were able to get the truth. Whereas there has been thousands of people killed across the north, Ballymurphy, Springhill, massacres that have taken place across the north and there was no journalists there. And there has to be journalists on the ground. You know, if anyone wants to look at the current state of the world and ask why is there no journalists that are the best place to look at the moment is Gaza.
“We are living in an age of misinformation and it’s because governments left and right do not want journalists on the ground and that’s why I decided to become a journalist.”
On trauma and poverty:
“Nothing will be solved in Northern Ireland without the eradication of poverty.
“There are a number of boys, now men, that I would have went to school discos with and kissed as a teenager who are in prison for dissident Republican offenses. I know people my own age who have been kneecapped. I know someone my own age who has been murdered and I’m supposed to be a ceasefire baby… So if I’m still living with that…you know, I remember when there was no drugs in Derry because the IRA kept drugs out of Derry City because of their own vigilante justice.
“Now Derry doesn’t have a detox centre but we are living through a weekly toll of death due to drug abuse in Derry. And the issue is, you cannot colonialize people for 800 years or more. Can’t have a dirty war — one in every 10 people in the north is related to someone killed or maimed — and then not put in any investment into mental health, domestic violence, addiction, trauma. That is where we have to start.
“Honestly, I don’t care about Stormont and Sinn Fein and the DUP and Catholics and Protestants. I believe in the working class and it is the working class that suffer and I really truly believe that all the investment that Northern Ireland should see now is jobs, education, and mental health.
“I’ve covered riots my whole life as a journalist because I’m usually more comfortable going into riots than most journalists are and the way I explain it to people my own age in Dublin is it’s so easy to go to a riot when you don’t have to get up for work in the morning. These are not young fellas who are getting up to go into an office. You know, you can go rioting any day of the week, you can go drinking any day of the week, you can take drugs every night of the week because you don’t have anywhere to go.
“Derry is suffering and has suffered with low employment since my grandparents were alive but it continues now to get worse. There’s ups and there’s downs but we are seeing that even in Derry City now, every week there’s new layoffs in different factories and the yearly salary in Derry is incredibly low. When I tell people in Dublin the average salary in Derry, they can’t believe it. Many of my close family members, aunties, uncles, make such a low wage that they don’t pay tax and that’s pretty standard for where we’re from. It’s a minimum wage city. Obviously the pints again are cheaper and the houses are cheaper but that doesn’t make for a thriving economy. So nothing really changes.
“People are turned off by politics because nothing really gets done. I mean look at Stormont, it’s an inflated city council with no fiscal powers of its own really, begging at the knee of the British state for more money in a time where as I say we have the highest rate of suicide, highest rate of unemployment, highest rate of poverty, the list goes on and on.
“Northern Ireland is the forgotten cousin of the UK. They don’t want us, we don’t want to be here for the most part and the Irish government don’t want us either.
“I believe that the only way we can fight our way out of the fighting is money for the working classes in education, housing, and mental health. But we can’t move on unless we look The Troubles in the eye and there’s been no effort to look The Troubles in the eye. There’s been no effort to look at the fact that a blind eye was turned to rampant sexual abuse in institutions, domestic violence in nearly every home, that young people are living with these traumas —myself included — the intergenerational trauma that comes from your parents and your grandparents.
“So I believe the only investment we should be talking about at the moment is in mental health and young people because as much as we can do for people of my parents age who have suffered and are traumatized from what happened, it’s the next generation we need to be very worried about and I think at the moment young people — my friends’ children — their life isn’t certainly going to be better than their parents.”
On humor and what’s next:
“I wouldn’t buy into the notion that it’s this war torn hellhole. I think a lot of people come to the north with this vision that it’s very dangerous and very sad. You would have better craic at a funeral in the north than you would at a wedding in England.
“We’re an incredibly funny, darkly funny people. Everyone has a story and the stories are usually very sad, but it’s the ability of people in the north to get up and get on with it. They’re very community focused. I have researched this a good bit and it comes from conflict and war. Community springs out of disenchantment, so especially in the Nationalist community and Loyalist areas, you have a real sense of community which I find very heartening and I think it is the only thing that’ll save us.
“I think to understand the north is to understand — and I’m not going to sugarcoat this — this was not something that we started. It was the British presence in Ireland that started this. How it plays out and how it ends is up to us.”
Derry, particularly the area known as Bogside which was the epicenter for the violence of Bloody Sunday, has a tradition of political murals that tell the story of the neighborhood’s Catholic and Republican history.
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
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A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and photos: John Noltner
Field production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah