Jim McCann, assistant principal at St. Joseph Elementary School, walked through the halls, pointing like a proud father to the colorful paper butterflies his students made that hung from the ceiling.
He happily greeted each child by name as he passed them. Then he poked his head into a classroom, where students addressed him in unison: “Good afternoon, Mr. McCann!”
The school is in the largely Catholic Falls Road area of west Belfast, which was engulfed for decades by bloody sectarian fighting in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Outside, where multicolored fences provide a bright backdrop to children playing soccer in the yard, gunshots once ricocheted, with army snipers perched on rooftops and armored vehicles passing by.
But since peace took hold here 25 years ago, the neighborhood feels far removed from that past. For McCann, 68, the transformation reflects his own evolution.
The now deputy chief spent decades involved in the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, a paramilitary organization that used violence to try to end British rule in the region. He was convicted of attempted murder and spent nearly 18 years in prison.
Like many members of his generation, McCann’s life was shaped not only by the Troubles, but also by the peace process that finally ended the conflict.
“There is no need for any violence now, and those who are still involved in it are not doing anyone any favors: they are holding back progress,” he said, in his school office earlier this year.
Many Catholics in Northern Ireland have held a nationalist and republican dream for more than a century: to undo the 1921 partition that kept Northern Ireland under British rule and to reunify the territory with the Republic of Ireland. That view has sometimes left them in violent conflict with unionists and loyalists, mostly Protestants, who believe the area should remain part of the United Kingdom.
McCann’s links to the republican movement began after a series of deadly crackdowns in the late 1960s and early 1970s against civil rights marches in Belfast and Derry. In those marches, Catholics protested discrimination by the government and Protestant-controlled police forces.
As tensions deepened, communities divided along sectarian lines and paramilitaries emerged on both sides. Still a teenager, McCann watched as the city around him turned into a war zone. Ignoring his parents’ protests, he joined the IRA.
“It was a very strong community feeling, being part of that and having the community prevail,” he said. “And you knew there was no turning back.”
In 1976, when he was 19, he was arrested while taking part in an IRA operation, riding a stolen motorcycle while another man shot a police officer in the back. The officer was injured but survived. Following Mr. McCann’s conviction for attempted murder, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was released in 1994.
By the time the peace agreements known as the Good Friday Agreement were signed in 1998, some 3,600 people had died in the conflict.
While McCann does not glorify the violence of the riots, he believes it was a necessary part of a fight for a more equal society.
“I have never, ever, ever, ever regretted it and I have always been proud of what I did,” he said. “I have led a very full life even though I was in prison.”
Robert J. Savage, a professor at Boston College and an expert on modern Irish history, said that for some unionists, “the idea of a former IRA prisoner working in a school with young children would not be acceptable. “It would be disturbing.”
While peace has firmly taken hold, memories of the unrest have not completely faded.
“The violence may be over, but there is still this trauma beneath the surface for many people,” Professor Savage said. “And the IRA was part of that violence, and society remains divided.”
There has been “a real lack of accountability” in the years since the peace agreements, he said, adding: “It has been a bitter pill to swallow for people, and not just for IRA victims but also for victims of British attacks. backed security forces.”
In 2021, McCann published “6,000 Days,” a memoir of his stay in Northern Ireland’s famous Maze prison. The book chronicles the daily experiences of hundreds of IRA prisoners who protested through a series of increasingly extreme, sometimes fatal, measures such as hunger strikes. It also describes a high-risk prison break in which 38 men escaped. McCann and 18 other people were recaptured within 24 hours.
The details he shares are clear. For years, the men, including McCann, refused to wear prison uniforms in an act of defiance, and became known as the “blanket men.” They organized a “dirty protest” and smeared the walls with their excrement. They were beaten by guards who threw fire hoses at them.
McCann wrote of the pain of watching 10 fellow IRA prisoners die in the hunger strikes of 1981. For those who sympathized with the republican movement, even those who repudiated IRA violence, the deaths aroused great sympathy and would mark a point of inflection. .
Later that year, the protests were canceled and a compromise allowed prisoners to wear their own clothes.
In prison, McCann formed a deep friendship with another IRA member, Joe McDonnell, the fifth man to die on the hunger strike. Mr. O’Donnell attended St. Joseph’s as a child and is seen as a hero in the neighborhood’s largely Republican community. A plaque near the school gates bears his name. It is a daily reminder to McCann of his friend, the area’s violent history, and hopes for a conflict-free future.
McCann was 38 years old when he was released from prison as part of the peace process. He soon became a father to three children, got married, and then, after earning his college degree while in prison, became a teacher.
“My father was a teacher and from a young age I always knew that was what I wanted to do,” he said. “For all those years, it was what I knew I wanted.”
Many of his students’ families had personal connections to the conflict, and some experienced the worst of its consequences, with family members killed.
“They are a diverse group,” he said of his students, noting that decades of peace have brought immigrant families. “But there is still the separation between Catholics and Protestants. Unfortunately we still have it. “We are still separated.”
Sitting in his childhood home, McCann examined the relics of his life in prison, including small pieces of toilet paper, covered in carefully written little lines of text, where he had scribbled messages to friends and family to smuggle out.
While still involved in the politics of the Republican movement, McCann says he is committed to the peaceful pursuit of that goal.
“I realized that the military side of the fight had run its course,” McCann said. “He took us this far and he wasn’t going to take us any further.”
He has campaigned for Sinn Féin, a party that was once the political wing of the IRA but which renounced violence and participated in the peace process. Sinn Féin, once on the political fringes, has become a force and won the most seats in the 2022 elections in Northern Ireland.
One afternoon in early February, McCann went to the Great Hall at Stormont, Northern Ireland’s government building, to watch Michelle O’Neill, a Sinn Féin politician, make history when she became Ireland’s first republican Prime Minister. of the North, the highest position in the power-sharing government.
O’Neill has described herself as someone who, like McCann, represents “the Good Friday generation” committed to cooperation and peace.
It was a moment McCann thought he might never see.
“It was good to be with people who have spent the vast majority of their lives, certainly their teenage and adult lives, fighting not only to get us to Stormont, but to help us progress towards our ultimate goal, which is a united Ireland. ” he said of the other members of the Republican movement he was with that day.
“But in the meantime, making this a place where everyone can live reasonably happily, it’s a place of equality, it’s a place of opportunity,” he said. “That’s what matters.”