Good Friday’s Children

Write about a child witnessing a major historical event.

Good Friday’s Children 

 My name is Patrick Sweeney. 

I was born on Good Friday 1998. Sometimes I wonder if it was a good Friday. In Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Huck remembers that it’s Friday, an ‘unlucky’ day, and they put off treasure-hunting until later. Sometimes I wish I had been born on a Sunday because ‘the child who is born on the Sabbath Day is bonny and blithe and good and gay’.

A funny thing happened today. Our English teacher was filling in our pink forms to enter us for the GCSE English examination and she exclaimed, ‘Gosh, I had no idea most of you were born in 1998. Do you realise that you were born in the same year as the Good Friday Agreement? The revelation didn’t cause much of a stir in the class. The teacher, Mrs Bradley, asked if we knew about the peace process in Northern Ireland that culminated in the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and if we understood its significance. A few mumbled something about having studied the Agreement in their history class, but most of the students just looked blank. Not to be bested, Mrs Bradley took it into her head there and then to set this as our discussion topic for our talking and listening practise. She told us that we were lucky not to have lived through the Troubles and not to have gone through those terrible years of killing and mayhem. Her words fell on deaf ears; all everyone wanted to do was to get the class over as quickly and painlessly as possible. 

When I returned home that evening I picked up the Belfast Telegraphas Mrs Bradley had said we should read the paper every day because it tells us what is going on in the world and it would help us learn about the various types of articles journalists write. You’d think it was just words but, no, the words are doing things, important things. There are news articles and these are found at the beginning of the paper. They tell us about the big things that are happening in the world. There are feature articles, and these are more detailed and are usually about something topical. Then there are editorials, letters to the editor, columns and so forth. Mrs Bradley says it is very likely we will be asked to write a newspaper article in the exam. I hope we do as I don’t like surprises. One year the task was to write a radio broadcast – that’s pretty frightening. We also have to remember the 5 Ws: Who, What, Why, Where and When and GASP which means Genre, Audience, Purpose and Style. 

I brought the Belfast Telegraph home with me the next night (it’s free in the college), and I read the headlines: ‘The Raining Champions’. There was an amazing picture of James Nesbitt, a famous actor from here, and one of Rory McIlroy, the most famous golfer in the world. Rory was sheltering under a black and white golf brolly with a NIKE logo printed on it and wearing a hat and fleece which were both emblazoned with the NIKE logo too.

There was also an interesting article in the paper about the welfare crisis at Stormont. Since Mrs Bradley had mentioned that we were going to focus on the peace process for our talking and listening I had decided to get a heads-up on its history. It was amazing that I was able to find out some information right away. I had thought I would have to do some online research on the Good Friday Agreement, but I was surprised to find that the paper I lifted from college had an article which mentioned the political situation – it felt like Groundhog Day.

But whether a series of new bodies envisaged in the December accord between the five Executive parties and the British and Irish governments ever get up and running remains in doubt, due to a destabilising Stormont wrangle over welfare reform. (28 May 2015)

I am not interested in politics but I am interested in language, and I noticed that there seemed to be a polarity of words in this sentence: ‘accord’ versus ‘wrangle’ – it seems a bit odd to have them both in the same sentence, and ‘getting up and running’ versus ‘a destabilising Stormont’ creates a weird contrast too. I have learned about paradoxical language and ambiguity in Shakespeare. After the witches had messed with Macbeth’s head he lost his moral compass and declared, ‘This supernatural soliciting | Cannot be ill, cannot be good’.

Anyone who knows me knows I like a challenge, and so I have decided I will carry out a full and thorough investigation of the Northern Ireland peace process – its background and inception, its implementation and its aftermath – and conclude whether or not it was a good thing to be born on the day the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Salman Rushdie’s hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, in his Booker Prize winning book, Midnight’s Children, was born at midnight on 15 August 1947 in Doctor Narlikar’s nursing home when ‘clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting’. Saleem tells us that he ‘had been mysteriously handcuffed to history’ and his ‘destinies indissolubly chained’ to those of his country. Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, gave the following address to the Indian nation on the brink of midnight on the 14 August 1947, Independence Day:

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

I was glad Mrs Bradley had highlighted the fact that we were born in the same year as the Good Friday Agreement, because like Saleem in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, we had been ‘handcuffed to history’ and nothing would ever be the same again.