The Few Who Cared

IN BOSTON'S fashionable Beacon Hill, in front of the home of Her Majesty's consul, a half-dozen old men and a young woman, all from Southie, walk in a circle twelve feet wide, carrying signs. 'Elize Brit--Queen of Death.' It's a terrifically hot afternoon, and there are frequent stops so the marchers can rest in the shade. But they've been there since midnight; they'll stay till midnight comes again.

A call from the young woman's sister in Belfast brought them here. She called to say that in Ulster's unfashionable ghettos the sound of trashcan lid on pavement could be heard again. Joe McDonnell (14 years, handgun possession) had died at the Long Kesh prison after 54 days without food.

And so, the few Bostonians who still cared gathered on Beacon Hill. There had been many more the night Bobby Sands died--more than 100 at one point, walking in a circle that stretched well down the street. That night there had been some hope; people talked about longshoremen refusing to unload British ships, and remembered how 200,000 Bostonians had marched when Terence McSwiney. Lord Mayor of Cork, starved in the 1920's. It's only a matter of time, they were saying. But they knew better, or should have.

In the weeks since. Ireland has faded into the background noise of the news again. Almost everyone remembers Sands; very few could name the sixth hunger striker to die--Martin Hurson--or the two that seem likely to go next--Kieran Doherty and Kevin Lynch. No political pressure of any sort has been mobilized in America; no message has come from our Irish-American president, and political leaders like Ted Kennedy have done little more than issue perfunctory statements asking Margaret Thatcher for more flexibility. And the left has done nothing at all, despite its support for virtually every other national liberation movement in the world.

It's nothing new, actually. Since the days when Woodrow Wilson sold out the Irish for David Lloyd George's support at Versailles, it's been the same story. As Andrew Greeley writes in his new book, The Irish Americans. "The American Irish were never able to persuade their government or their nation's cultural elite of the moral rightness of their cause. ...Concern for human rights in Rhodesia, Chile and Franco's Spain has in recent times all but obsessed the nation's intellectual and cultural elite. The issue of human rights in Ireland, however, even today scarcely gains any notice at all."

The brave men of the Irish Republican Army--who, in the last months have largely forsaken violence and demonstrated instead their courage and willingness to make this enormous, ultimate sacrifice--will probably return to their old methods, the methods of Collins and De Valera, soon. A campaign to raise consciousness, a campaign that has already cost six lives, seems to have failed, for the world is too blind, or too lazy, to see the pain of Northern Ireland.

On Beacon Hill, the circle grows a little bit, as a few more come to hold signs. 'Brits Out of Ireland.' They're bitter, these men, bitter enough that it pleases them to hear of the wave of riots plaguing England. And bitter they should be, for all the marching, and all the courage of Martin Hurson and Joe McDonnell, and all the weight of justice, does not seem to be getting their cause anywhere at all.