Public Historian, Hilltown, Northern Ireland
Bronagh McAtasney is the daughter of John Bosco McAtasney, a master weaver and the last hand loom weaver in Ireland. She recalls his curiosity, his desire to learn, and his passion to instill the same in his children. When he passed away in 2018, Bronagh used her small inheritance to leave her job in administration, go back to school for a master’s degree in public history and now, in her own words, “I’m actually getting paid to be nosy about people’s lives.”
Growing up during the Troubles, Bronagh kept a diary that weaves the threads of daily headlines and historical trauma with the day-to-day realities of life as a 13-year-old girl in Northern Ireland. In 2013, she started sharing her diary posts daily on Twitter (and now BlueSky) as a way to document and juxtapose the geopolitical realities with her personal experience.
Hilltown, Northern Ireland
“There is trauma in reliving these things and the trauma is exaggerated and continued by picking at the scabs of what we’ve been damaged by.”
On keeping a diary:
“As a teenager, I was quite dramatic. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be writing stories. And so as all teenage girls especially do, I kept diaries.
“I think diary keeping as opposed to journal keeping is a real distinction for me. Diary keeping is when you’re writing for only yourself and the only person that you ever intend to read it is yourself. And therefore you are honest. You’re not writing up with the thought that this is a narrative that somebody else is going to read. And therefore that’s going to form how I tell my story.
“And as a teenage girl, I wrote everything down in my little tiny diaries. So about 14 years ago, my sister found one of my diaries from 1981. And I was 13. We had moved from Hollywood, outside Belfast. It’s now very, very posh, but because my dad’s working in the museum up there, that’s where we lived. But in 1978, we moved to Newry, which is the biggest town next to here.
“In 1978, it was the most bombed town in Europe. It was a war zone basically. And we had come from relatively posh, to moving into a house that had Sniper’s Corner written down the side of it.
“And I think because I was an outsider, I saw that differently from people who’d grown up in that world. And it made me want to write about it.
“So anyway, I kept the diary in 1981. And my sister found it about 14 years ago. And because I have drama in me, I decided to create a Twitter account and put the diary on Twitter. So it was designed to not interact with anybody. It was posted in real time, day by day.
“And for some reason, it just went a bit ballistic. It ended up being all over the place. I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. It was genuine. I had that internal narrative voice, I suppose. And then also it was a female perspective of the Troubles and a teenage female perspective of the Troubles. And what we have found about the Troubles is that the narratives of the Troubles, very much the gatekeepers are men. And the gatekeepers are men in power, be that political power, military power, or community power.
“So there wasn’t really that voice. So it struck a chord, I guess, with people.”
The post from the 5th of May, 1981:
“Bobby Sands died at 1:17 a.m. this morning.
“It’s very sad. And the whole day has been filled with trouble and news about it. The people of Belfast were on the streets knowing what they heard and there was fighting. And many grads from South Armagh didn’t come into school today because the buses were off.
“The police barracks or somewhere near there, has just had a fire, but I think it’s out.
“I couldn’t stay falling out with my friends. So, although we’re not as friendly as we used to be, we are friends. She doesn’t know how disappointed or sad I was after Saturday. We had falling out.
“Domestic science, or home economic, I guess you call it, passed peacefully. And although I was told off once or twice, my Cornish pasties turned out lovely.
“There may be trouble, yet, I don’t know. Many shop windows have been broken in Dublin and I feel sorry for the Sands family. “
On finding the balance between honoring the past and moving forward:
“You can do both.
“It’s very, very difficult. And I think in a society like ours — and in any society that has a history — we have to make the distinction between commemoration and memory.
“Commemoration allows you to tell your history in a way that celebrates what you’ve done. So here for example around marching season which is April to September there’s a lot of commemoration of battles from the past. Maybe you’re familiar with the Battle of 1690 which is symbolic of a Protestant defeat over Catholics.
“Even though that wasn’t a battle that needed to be fought on Irish soil, it wasn’t our battle at all. It’s gone past what that battle meant and has become a commemoration of a victory of one part of society over another part of society.
“And the same in America so you have all those statues that are memorializing, commemorating people who are extremely problematic but they represent something to certain people and a different thing to other people.
“And in having that conversation about these things if people are afraid of what that might bring out or they’re afraid that conceding something will mean a loss of something and that’s the difference. Concession does not mean loss and that’s where we get confused I think.
“So this idea that if you want to take down or stop my commemoration I will feel threatened by that because what you’re telling me is that my history doesn’t matter. And then people retreat from communicating into their silos I guess and that’s the big difficulty that we have here.
“I mean this place is all about marking territory. Literally and figuratively marking territory in the sense that you can tell what community you’re going into by the curb stones and by the flags and by the murals on the walls. So that marks that territory and that ghettoizes us and once you’re ghettoized it’s very hard to break out of that.
“And when I lived in Cincinnati as I did for 11 years it’s a very conservative place. The center of the city has been ghettoized in the sense that all the nice comfortable white people have moved out of it — and that’s a very American thing I know — but in a place like Cincinnati where it is right on the cusp of North versus South and has that Underground Railway history and has the history of being on the cusp of slavery and things like that… The race riots that happened in places like Cincinnati when I was living there were wholly endemic of the fact that people had been siloed into these areas and when they tried to break out of it in any way people reacted in ways that meant things erupted into violence.
“And that’s what we have here, too, is that everything is about not conceding or seeing concession as defeat. That’s where we get lost.
“So the difference between commemorating something and historically remembering it are very different. We have a big issue and how you break down the barrier? What is our history anyway? The history of my family is different from the history of that person over there’s family. But our familial history means that it has impacted how we live and where our family grew up means that it has impacted our family and everything is tied together and it’s bound up with your identity it’s bound up with how you feel safe.
“I mean here you’re talking about in the 70s and 80s, your name, your school uniform, and where you live were literally a matter of life and death. If you were in the wrong place with the wrong football scarf on it was life or death. You were at risk. Nowadays that’s fine but in the past for a lot of people it was life or death.”
On trauma in a post-conflict land:
“There’s an amazing woman called Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, the youngest female MP ever and never on the right side. Always on her own side. And I saw her talk one time.
“I used to work in a children’s charity. We dealt with children who were experiencing trauma and family breakdown and dysfunction and things like that. And what she said has always stuck with me. She said that the violence here didn’t stop. It just went behind the front door and that’s our problem
“Our trauma is so ingrained in us that until we find peace within ourselves, we will not have a peaceful society here.
“We talk about post-conflict and we talk about how we have peace now. Do we have peace now? No, we have thousands of traumatized people. We are one of the most traumatized societies in the world and that trauma goes somewhere. It goes into drug abuse. It goes into domestic abuse. It goes into child abuse. It goes into violence. It goes into settling arguments with a punch. It goes into all of that stuff and if we don’t work on that and work on the legacy of our trauma we will never have what you define as peace in this community.
“It is behind the front door. We’re not dealing with that because it will open so many cans of worms that we won’t be able to put them back. It will be Pandora’s box times a million and we won’t be able to put it back.
“I think there are things we can do on a personal basis. I think there are things that we need our leaders to do because they have the power to do it but they’re not willing to do it because they have gotten to their positions of power by building on the legacy of violence and they don’t want to relinquish that.
“We have a huge crisis in our young people. We have a suicide epidemic here that is absolutely terrifying. My son lost a friend to suicide last week. He committed suicide on the anniversary of his brother committing suicide. There are clusters. There’s a woman in Belfast, she has lost all three of her sons to suicide. It is endemic here and we are failing them over and over again. Mums and dads do what they can but once our children are out in society they are out there.
“My son is 20. I would give up anything for him to be a toddler where when he’s in trouble I can pick him up and carry him under my arm and take him out of that place of trouble. I can’t do that now and it scares me witless. The suicides are destroying the society here and it’s not just young men it is young women too and that is a direct result of the trauma and the transgenerational trauma that we are passing down because we won’t deal with that.
“So if you ask me how we fix it, I honestly don’t know. I wish I knew.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
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
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