Children of Irish Strife Enjoy a Holiday From Hatred : 6-Week U.S. Trips Ease Nightmares of Poverty, Violence

The homecoming chaos at the airport amuses and sometimes dampens the eyes of Her Majesty’s customs agents.

An Aer Lingus jumbo jet, making a rare touchdown at Belfast, rolls up to the gate and delivers a thundering herd of sunburned, mosquito-bitten Northern Ireland youngsters unbelievably burdened with skateboards, Cabbage Patch dolls, baseball gloves, Dallas Cowboys caps, stereo cassette recorders, huge teddy bears and, this time, a 10-speed bicycle.

One redheaded lad in a Budweiser T-shirt dragged home a regulation-size hockey stick to an uncertain future in the Glens of Antrim, where no lake has frozen over since the Ice Age. A dark-eyed colleen, no taller than the luggage cart she was pushing, had three enormous suitcases filled with new clothes and gifts, plus a Gucci cosmetic case she refused to entrust to an older sister.

And, as always happens in this land of homes and families broken and burned out by decades of sectarian strife, there was one little boy, age 9 or 10, all decked out in New York Yankee pinstripes and plastic batting helmet, whom no one had come to meet. The tears glistened but before they rolled down those freckled cheeks, Denis Mulcahy gathered him up in his massive arms and got two elderly nuns busy making phone calls.

3,000 Children Hosted

In the past dozen summers, thanks to the generosity and scrounging of the organization headed by Mulcahy, a detective on the New York City bomb squad, 3,000 needy youngsters from the Protestant and Roman Catholic ghettos of Belfast, Derry, Newry and murderous border villages like Crossmaglen and Jonesboro have had a holiday from hate in America. This year two charter flights were needed to transport 641 children.

“We’re not trying to convert anyone,” Mulcahy said in describing the aims of Project Children, which won him a presidential citation. “We’re just providing a six-week vacation from violence for these innocent victims of the terrible troubles that have gone on too long and that they are too young to understand. Maybe along the way they’ll see it is possible for people to live together in peace and love.”

Despite the well-scrubbed, angelic faces, this was not the Vienna Boys Choir arriving at Belfast airport. Some of them were as tough--but as brittle inside--as the paving blocks hurled back and forth across the bulletproof neighborhood fences hand-lettered in the language of hate: “Prods Out,” “No Pope Here,” “British Bastards,” “Ulster Has Awakened,” “Up the Provos,” “Red Hand Commandos.”

Their baggage tags bore the names of places made infamous by Ulster’s bloodstained headlines: Shankill Road, Divis Flats, Ballymurphy, the Bogside.

Street-Smart Kids

“These kids got street smarts to spare,” said Mary Jane Noone, wife of a Wall Street lawyer, who for several years has opened her Short Hills, N.J., home to some of those refugees of Northern Ireland’s sectarian storm.

She came down to breakfast one morning to find a crew-cut 11-year-old working off his jet lag “with a cigarette and a can of beer lifted from the fridge in the basement.”

Another Belfast visitor arrived in so deep a depression that he never spoke during his six-week stay, except for a few grudging grunts when playing with the neighborhood children. But on the last day of his visit, as he was packing his suitcase to return to a dreary row house near the notorious Crumlin Road jail, he broke the sound barrier to say, “Mary Jane, I love you.”

The children, most of them between 9 and 16, have lived all of their lives with “the Troubles” that resumed in bombings and bloodshed in British-ruled Northern Ireland in 1969.

Some Awoke in Fear

In America, some awoke in fear and trembling to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, mistaking the noise for gunfire or bombs.

“I don’t know how they live with this, but every summer they break my heart,” Cathy O’Hare of New Rochelle, N.Y., said as she bid a tearful farewell at Kennedy Airport to Lisa Cullen, her “little tomboy from Derry, who played a great second base” and petite Marylou Cunningham, an 11-year-old from Belfast, “who couldn’t do enough to help around the house.”

On the Saturday after she returned home, Marylou boarded the prison van for the weekly half-hour visit with her father at the Long Kesh internment camp, where he has been an inmate since she was just a year old.

O’Hare, Marylou’s “American mother,” remembers the day she and the young girl set out to buy the father a Statue of Liberty T-shirt in gratitude for the Celtic harp he had carved for them in the prison workshop.

“Oh, not that big,” Marylou said when shown a medium-size shirt. “Where other men have muscles, Daddy just has wee, skinny arms.”

But for some, there is no getting away from “the Troubles,” even in America. Roisin O’Neill, 11, received a letter from her mother that shattered her peaceful summer in the Livingston, N.J., home of insurance executive Ron Buswell.

“My dear Roisin,” the letter said, “I am sorry to tell you we have no home anymore. On the 10th of July we were put out of our home. The house is wrecked but we are all right. We are staying with Gretta.”

An accompanying clipping from a Belfast newspaper told how “on the night of Thursday, July 10th, the corner house of mother of three Lara O’Neill, which faces Loyalist houses in Avonbeg Close, was targeted by a mob of at least 40 Loyalists.” The masked intruders, the story continued, “began smashing every window and pounded the front door with hatchets,” while the “terrified mother ran upstairs to her daughters Lara, 9, and Geraldine, 7, and pulled a duvet (a comforter) over their heads to protect them from flying glass and fled with them barefoot from the house.”

‘Marching Season’

This was the start of Ulster’s “marching season,” from which Project Children tries to separate the youngsters by 2,500 miles of ocean, and mountains of affection.

On July 12, the Orange Order paraded in memory of Protestant William of Orange’s victory over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne. On Aug. 9, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, observed the 15th anniversary of the imprisonment without a jury trial of hundreds of terrorist suspects at Long Kesh.

The Protestants were out again on Aug. 12, in rousing memory of the “Apprentice Boys,” who slammed shut the gates of Derry on the Jacobite forces in 1688. Then on Aug. 15, the Catholics celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Mary, a time for piety and intense patriotism.

This summer, the most violent in a decade, the drums and bagpipes were accompanied by riots in Belfast, Derry and Portadown, which left more than 200 civilians and police injured and dozens of homes, pubs, factories and buses destroyed.

Killings Mount

While the children were away at play in America, four soldiers, four policemen, three Protestant and two Catholic civilians were slain, bringing the number of sectarian killings in the province to 47 since the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed, giving the Dublin government a consultative voice in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

“We weren’t allowed to watch the news from Ireland on the telly,” said 15-year-old Gillian McDowell of Armagh, Ireland, who spent the summer in Baldwin, N.Y. “But we knew from the newspapers that terrible things were happening.”

Like so many Irish children, McDowell’s only fears in America were learning how to swim and coping with a strange cuisine. “I thought I was going to drown, but I finally did learn.” Her roommate, 14-year-old Patricia Carroll, also from Armagh, never could bring herself to eat lobster. “I felt so sorry for the poor creature.”

Halfway through their American experience, the young Irish visitors and their host families gathered for a picnic on the grounds of the Salesian seminary in Goshen, N.Y. While the youngsters demonstrated their new-found prowess at baseball, the surrogate parents discussed their charges like London nannies pushing prams around Kensington Pond.

Eating Habits, Language

“Mine are terrible eaters, they could exist on spaghetti and french fries,” Irene DeCamp said of Simone Keenan, 13, and her sister, Tamara, 10. “The older one won’t eat chicken; the younger one doesn’t like lamb, and neither would eat my Irish soda bread. They don’t eat fruit. They can’t stand corn on the cob. But they want a Coke for breakfast.”

“Our Andrew could live on hot dogs and potato chips, but he won’t go near a pizza,” Frank Donnery of Windsor, N.Y., said of 11-year-old Andrew Drummond from Belfast.

Then there was the language barrier, that nasal Northern Ireland accent. Sherry Gaffney related an early conversation when 10-year-old Eileen Hay arrived in New Rochelle, N.Y., from Belfast:

“I’m sorry, Eileen, but I don’t speak a word of Gaelic.”

“Neither do I, Mrs. Gaffney.”

‘Pins’ and ‘Tips’

Sherry laughed again at the memory of it: “My God, she was speaking English. I soon learned that when she had a “pin” in her foot, it was a pain, and when she asked to watch “tips” on TV, she meant cassette tapes. Yet in her first letter home, she told her mother she had a tough time understanding us.”

Meanwhile, out on the mound, in perfect imitation of Oilcan Boyd’s languid, loose-jointed windup, 10-year-old Gerard Bellen of Belfast “strook out a thourd straight bah-der,” the last victim an 11-year-old girl from Strabane who had nicked him for a home run her last time up.

This summer, for the first time, Project Children brought over handicapped youngsters. Tom Buoye, who for the past six years has welcomed Ulster children to his West Orange home, asked this year “for a child no one else would have.” Over from Belfast came 11-year-old Mike Mullin, “a dynamic little guy” confined all his life to a wheelchair with cerebral palsy.

All Smiles

Buoye never loved a kid more. “Mike smiles from 8 o’clock in the morning until he goes to bed,” Buoye said. “Everyone should have his personality.”

During Mike’s last week in America, Buoye had him examined by a children’s disease specialist at a nearby hospital. The diagnosis was that since the boy could crawl, there was a chance he might walk if an operation were performed. Mike was willing, so Buoye got on the phone to Mike’s parents in Belfast.

“We didn’t ask what it would cost,” Buoye said. “Mike will come back in a few weeks and we’ll see how the operation goes. I didn’t want to get his hopes up too high.”

Mike held back the tears at leaving, but Buoye didn’t when the lad looked up from his wheelchair and said: “Tom, if you help me to walk, maybe someday I’ll walk Kelly for you.” Kelly is the family dog, who now misses Mike as much as any of them.

Lasting Relationships

Many host families lavish more than hospitality and gifts on their summertime guests. Some bring them back year after year, pay their way through college, follow up with phone calls, Christmas presents, even visits to their homes in Ireland.

Joe Barry, a Democratic councilman now running for mayor of Bloomfield, N.J., has raised thousands of dollars for Project Children in addition to hosting Protestant and Catholic youngsters. It was he who “put the bite on” President Reagan to contribute to Project Children. The President twice sent $500, the cost of bringing over a child.

This year Joe Barry “walked the Atlantic,” volunteering as a chaperon on the return flight to Belfast. He then drove a rental car to the Magherafelt home of 15-year-old Patricia McBride, his most recent house guest. She had lost her father and a brother to assassins’ bullets.

“It was like Christmas with all the relatives gathered around and Trix (Patricia) handing out the presents she had bought for them,” Barry said. “Then one of her surviving brothers came in and calmly hung up his bulletproof vest.”

Changed by Trips

Don Henderson, a teacher in Derry’s Bogside who helps select the children who will most benefit from an escape to America, notices a significant change in them when they come home. “They’ve never had such attention before, all that affection and hugging,” he said. “Irish parents aren’t very demonstrative. You can see it at the airport. Nine times out of 10, they pick up the suitcase and not the child. These kids are used to being ignored. But now they’re important to someone. Sometimes they come back almost cheeky, but more confident of themselves.”

For seventh-graders, Henderson points out, the trip to America comes at “a crucial time when they face the 11-Plus exam, which determines whether they will follow an academic course, with a shot at going to college, or be relegated to a technical school.”

“Only 25% pass,” he continued. “I used to be able to predict those who would make it. But now I’m not always sure about those who have been to America, maybe had their own room for the first time, or got away from an alcoholic family and picked up the reading habit.”

Terry Phillips, also a teacher in Derry, wonders if coming back from America isn’t sometimes too disillusioning. “One kid not only went to Disneyland but was taken on a cruise of the Greek Islands, only to come back to the most miserable hovel in the Bogside,” Phillips said. “It must have been like the picture tube suddenly going dead on a lovely TV show.”

Malachy Doherty, who teaches at a rare mixed primary school for Catholics and Protestants in Derry, is optimistic about the children coping back home. “The important thing,” he said, “is that they have had a vision of a better life. They know there is something more than the squalor surrounding them.”

Rampant Unemployment

“Jobs are what are needed,” said Seamus McCormick, who coaches the Sacred Heart boxing club in Jonesboro. “Unemployment is running at 22% in the province. Can’t your politicians expand our immigration quota or issue more green cards? You let everyone else in.”

At a town hall reception honoring Denis Mulcahy and Project Children, Chairman Eugene Markey of the Newry and Mourne Council expressed gratitude on behalf of the local youth. Then, pointing out the window to where three policemen had been killed the week before by gunmen in butcher smocks, he confided: “There just aren’t that many opportunities for Catholics and Protestants to get together in this country anymore. That’s the beauty of this children’s crusade you Americans have so ingeniously put together.”

Markey, a Catholic independent on a 30-seat council that includes three Sinn Fein members and at the moment is boycotted by the Unionists, dreamed aloud about the long-range effects the American holidays have on his divided community.

“Maybe someday a Protestant and a Catholic will be sitting here in this council room,” Markey said, “and one will suddenly say to the other: ‘Enough is enough. No more killing. Once upon a time in America, we were friends together.’ Please God, it’s got to happen.”