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certainly became a socialist during that period in South Africa. I went to the galley and I got milk, cheese and whatever else out of the freezer and brought it out, and the first guy I went to, a black guy sitting there, drinking a bottle of cold tea, he says, ‘No.’ He wouldn’t take it, he was so proud, and I suppose I was being naively charitable, but I felt compassion for them and, in my naive way, I was trying to help. I was told to go away, which was good. These people … didn’t want my charity. It affected me so much. And as soon as these guys finished work, the beer was there, in a massive big barn. And … as soon as they got paid, [they went] into the beer hall, and I’ve no doubt, the people that owned the fruit going on that boat also owned the beer hall. And they wondered where the drink problem in Cape Town [came from]? You were allowed ashore, obviously when you were in dock, especially me being a deck hand. We were all lined up and told that there were certain areas that we were not allowed to go to. One of these areas was called District Six in Cape Town. We were told to stay away from it or we’d be killed … But being curious, as I was, I went to District Six. Cape Town was a sprawling big city, all the amenities were there for the white man. I searched out District Six which was a massive area of cardboard-box houses. I remember the cornflake boxes, vividly, in this field where people were living and I was really affected by that … in the city centre of Cape Town, where there was anything you wanted there [and] just a mile or so outside the city here was a sprawling slum, where people survived, didn’t live! They survived there. This had a bigger impact on my thinking as a socialist than reading books, or studying revolutionary tactics. That had a deep effect on me as regards fair play and socialism. When we left there and went to Mozambique, and it was even worse. The Portuguese were there at the time, in a place called Lourenço Marques [now Maputo]. I’m not sure if the conditions have changed in Mozambique, but then it was total and utter depravity, poverty and oppression. Going back onto the ship you realised just how lucky you were. Yet we weren’t supposed to experience that; we were to stay in our wee cosy, white shells, in the city, where we were safe. I just didn’t become a rebel in 1970. I didn’t become a gunman in 1970. I didn’t become a revolutionary in 1970. That process was being built up over the years, and years of seeing privation, years of seeing exploitation, years of hunger and sadness and love .
     
    Notes – 2
     
4 Tim Pat Coogan, Ireland in the Twentieth Century , pp. 299–300.
5 Michael Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State , p. 91.
6 Ibid., p. 92.
7 David Sharrock and Mark Devenport, Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams , pp. 5–21.
8 Peter McDermott, Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms , 1920–1922, pp. 99–103; Dorothy McArdle, The Irish Republic , p. 478.
9 http://buckalecrobinson.rushlightmagazine.com
    * A local fish-and-chip takeaway.
    † Former editor of the Irish Press and author.

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    It had taken Gerry Adams some time to make up his mind finally about which side to join when the IRA split in December 1969 and the new Provisional IRA came into being. Although he had attended meetings prior to the split at which critics of the Goulding leadership had aired their grievances and began plotting a takeover of the Belfast Brigade, he clearly had divided loyalties; while sympathetic to much of the Goulding ideology and tactics, both his mother’s and father’s families and many of his and their friends had quickly switched over to the Provisionals. After all, his parents’ generation and background were the same as Billy McKee’s and it was no surprise that they saw the world, especially that little bit of it in the north of Ireland, through a similar lens.
    In early January, Sinn Fein