Growing Up In A Divided City

Mary Brenda Garvey, currently spending one year studying at Yale University in a program known as “Ambassadorial Scholarship” provided by Rotary International, addressed the Rotary Club of Newtown Monday.

Ambassadorial scholarships are very competitive and Miss Garvey is the only scholar from Ireland to have obtained this coveted scholarship this year.  Miss Garvey comes from Armagh, the capital of Ulster, located about 45 minutes from Belfast, and only 15 minutes north of the border, an area known as “bandit country.”

Armagh is the ancient seat of saints and scholars, the place where Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels and of which W.R. Rodgers (1902-1969) wrote a lovely poem, which begins:  “There is a through-otherness about Armagh, Of tower and steeple, High on the Hills are the graves of the arguing Kings, And below are the people.”

Miss Garvey is studying comparative literature and anthropology at Yale, on leave from Trinity College, Oxford University, where she is pursuing a doctorate in French literature.  She is staying at the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale and enjoying the community of graduate students, who come to Yale from all parts of the globe.  As all Yale students are required to do, she is also serving in the community, at an inner-city high school, where she teaches drama and its beneficial effects on conflict resolution. Currently, she has a class of freshmen and another class of juniors who are preparing highly imaginative plays based on preconceived notions and deeply felt stereotypes.

Miss Garvey told of her years of growing up in a divided city.  Her hometown of Armagh has about 20,000 inhabitants and is clearly and absolutely divided into the two camps, loosely described as “Catholic” and “Protestant.”  The real differences are, of course, political and cultural.  Whereas the “Catholic” girls had Irish names like “Aoife” (pronounced “Eefa”), “Dearbhla” (pronounced “Dervle”), and “Caoimhe” (pronounced “Keevah”), “Protestant” girls would be called Amy, Heather, or Ruth.  So as simple a notion as someone’s name would immediately mark a friend or foe.

The two sides never, ever mixed and did not even play the same games.  One side played Gaelic football, the other rugby.  One side played hurling, the other cricket.  Not only the names are different, but so are the rules of the games.  Catholics spoke both Irish and English, whereas Protestants spoke English only.

At the time, Kenneth Branaugh donated money to set up a drama club in which six Catholics and six Protestants were enrolled and soon had 50 enrollees. Barriers were broken down, people got to know each other very well, performed a play together at the outskirts of town.  After the performance, they could find no place to celebrate because there was no place to go to where all of them would be accepted.  The town was so strictly divided that this integrated group was unwelcome on either side.  “We went to a park, we had trespassed a little, and their guardians came with dogs and guns and knives.  That was the end of our togetherness,” said Miss Garvey.

Mary Brenda Garvey received her bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and she told of how, during her last year at Trinity College in Dublin, she developed a program called “Drama and Personal Development,” imparting confidence and having the potential for conflict resolution.

It took her, she said, the first 17 or 18 years to find out that it was not normal to live with no peace, with suspicion of and distrust for everyone from the other side of town.  In high school she developed an interest in French literature and spent time studying in France, where she learned, for example, that people of various religions could talk and play and study together, and did not even care, nor ask, what religion you were. 

At the age of 17 she left her hometown altogether and found that elsewhere these distinctions did not hold true.

She used her drama major to teach classes in conflict resolution and did so at the Sisters of Charity for children whose parents were in prison.  These children learned alternatives to fighting and found talents they did not know they had.  She was asked to travel to India for Mother Theresa’s funeral, and she was in Calcutta when the Good Friday agreement was drawn up.

“I was elated but felt frustrated and regretted that I could not be at home to celebrate,” she said. From there she traveled to Israel, arriving on August 14.

“On the 15th of August 30 people were killed [in Belfast] and all our hopes were shattered,” she said. “Two of our politicians were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.”

“I hope that my younger sisters won’t have to go through what I had to go through,” Miss Garvey said. “I look forward to great improvements.  The big push is for EMU, that is Education of Mutual Understanding. People want peace and want to work together.  It looks like I am now beginning and finding my place in a new, improved society. I don’t know how it is going to work and it will probably take another generation for understanding to take hold.”  Northern Ireland will have its own assembly, based on the Scotland example, and the seat of the assembly will be in Armagh.  “There is a through-otherness about Armagh, Delightful to me, High on the hills are the graves of the garrulous kings, Who at last can agree.”