Ladies' choice

The women of Belfast stand up

by Jeffrey Gantz

DAUGHTERS OF THE TROUBLES: BELFAST STORIES. Directed by Marcia Rock. Written by Rock and Jack Holland. Narrated by Anjelica Huston. Airs this Tuesday, April 1, at 10 p.m. on WGBH/Channel 2.

They lived a few miles apart, but in the same kind of clustered red-brick houses in West Belfast. Their mothers and aunts found employment in the same shirt factories and linen mills, shared a common world of work, religion, and family. Catholic Geraldine O'Regan tells how the (now exclusively Protestant) Shankill Road was part of her life. Protestant May Blood speaks of being equally at home on the (now Catholic) Falls Road.

Marcia Rock's provocative new documentary, Daughters of the Troubles: Belfast Stories, which airs this Tuesday on WGBH, gives us yet another pairing of Protestant and Catholic determined to help bring peace to the six counties of Northern Ireland. The two women offer wistful accounts of religious tolerance, even friendship, in the six counties prior to the reopening of the Troubles that followed the civil-rights marches of 1969; May Blood recalls how she and other Protestant women would meet their Catholic fellow workers and all walk up the hill to the factory, exchanging news on the way, then walk back down together at the end of the day. She remembers how Catholics would come to roast their potatoes at the Protestants' Ulster Day bonfires, and how Protestants would return the favor on the Assumption of the Virgin the following month. Geraldine O'Regan admits that she used to enjoy the Ulster Day parade; she even playfully breaks into a bit of that Orange favorite "The Sash My Father Wore."

Rock, who in 1992 gave us a similar Protestant-Catholic documentary, Sons of Derry, is ingenuously holding up a past vision of a Northern Ireland where Protestants and Catholics got along. She should know better: they got along pre-1969 because Catholics had not yet rebelled against the Protestants' rank housing and job discrimination, or the appalling gerrymandering of voting districts. The civil-rights marches were as inevitable as they were necessary; once they started all hell broke loose, and Northern Ireland is still picking up the pieces.

Rock also fails to explain that May Blood does not represent the kind of Ian Paisley/Orange Order Protestantism-of-hate that has been the biggest obstacle to justice in the north. Indeed, when Blood's father tried to stick up for their next-door Catholic neighbors who were in danger of being burned out, he was told to stand aside or be shot. The hopeful tone of Daughters of the Troubles is achieved in part through the exclusion of extreme Protestant voices. When the documentary aired on Ulster TV, these voices were not silent; they called in large numbers to label the program "IRA propaganda" and May Blood "not a true Protestant."

Daughters works because it isn't really about Catholics and Protestants getting together -- it's about how the women of the north are getting together to assert themselves in what has always been a man's world. O'Regan remembers how the men in her family would be asked whether they wanted more bacon, or potatoes; if they did, the food was taken off her plate. Blood tells us how on Sunday afternoon the girls worked while the boys played cards.

Today these women are beginning to perceive that while their men have been out playing soldier, the social fabric of the six counties has unraveled into relentless unemployment (30 percent for 18-to-25-year-olds), poverty, crime, and teenage pregnancies that put single mothers on the dole -- problems that Northern Ireland's elected representatives (almost exclusively male, of course) have not made it their priority to address. In response, neighborhood women's centers are springing up. We see Geraldine O'Regan talking to teenagers, dispensing common sense and instilling self-respect. May Blood is a prominent member of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition.

Real change, however, is not likely to come until women take their new-found empowerment to the ballot box. The population of Northern Ireland, it's pointed out, is 52 percent female, and now that voting reforms have brought about universal suffrage (reforms that resulted in large part from those civil-rights marches), women are in a position to make their voices heard. If they choose to stand together the way Geraldine O'Regan and May Blood have, Ireland may yet be a nation once again.