The Long March

A 30 year old exile returns to Belfast at the height of the H Block campaign after nine years in England. A former civil rights activist, disillusioned by the failure of the non sectarian left in the early 70’s, she finds herself drawn into the periphery of the H Block struggle when researching a book on the Northern Ireland legal system. In the course of her work she encounters the families of men ‘on the blanket’ and a wanted INLA man. She faces hostility because her father, a trade unionist, refuses to support the protest and because of her own anglicised manner.

ROSE: What’s she doing out there Joe?
HELEN: I still remember that time when we thought we were beginning a new journey: the long march. What we didn’t see was that it had begun a long time before with someone else’s journey we were simply getting through the steps in our own time. What we didn’t see was that we never had a time which we could call our own.
JOE: She appears to be looking at the moon.

Extract courtesy of Anne Devlin

“The Long March is an attempt to tie in a major historical moment with the lives of ordinary people because in Northern Ireland politics is the grammar of social relations”.
Anne Devlin 1982