The scale of the Northern conflict, more than 3,700 dead over 30 years in a population of just 1.5 million, is impossible to comprehend. I focused on my own parish
The Linen Bleachers statue in Lurgan, Co Armagh. The visual message is that in order for the linen not to fall, the two characters must co-operate. Photograph: Heritage Lottery Fund, Northern Ireland. My thesis was that as a Catholic growing up in the North in the 1970s and 80s, the prejudice I had faced had far more to do with my religious and ethnic identity than my class. No one ever called me a working-class bastard.
If you Google Gilford pub bombing, however, the algorithm redirects you to the 1974 IRA Guildford pub bombing in Surrey, adding the insult of erasure to the fatal injuries sustained by its three victims. How faint a trace our commonplace atrocities leave on the historical record and national consciousness, yet how indelibly they mark the lives of loved ones left behind.
While the immediate families of victims must of course be allowed to grieve and remember their loved ones in private and as they see fit, wider society would benefit, I believe, from a greater understanding and appreciation of the trauma that two generations endured. It is by sharing our stories that we build a ridge of common ground from which good things can grow. The Troubles were a blight on all our lives and while things are so much better now, the spores are sadly still in the air.
Bereavement in the early days is like being caught in a flood. You force yourself to float so as to cope with the knowledge of the depths below you. But as the waters recede, the challenge changes to one of conservation, the suddenly urgent need to construct irrigation channels to preserve the precious memories that earlier had threatened to overwhelm you.
A partially obscured sign for Mill Street in Gilford, Co Down, where Richard Beattie, Billy Scott and Sylvia McCullough were murdered in a INLA bombing Victims and their families are at the heart of this book. While working on it, I was often asked whether I found the conversations and the subject matter difficult. I usually answered that I found it deeply moving rather than distressing. It was akin to attending a wake or a funeral. Any sadness I felt was as nothing compared to the lifelong grief of the neighbours who were sharing their stories.
The first victims of the Troubles in Tullylish parish were three British soldiers, blown up by a booby-trap bomb in a house they were searching in Bleary. It had lain empty since the previous August when its occupant had been interned, along with hundreds of other Catholics, a policy designed to crush the IRA but which had spectacularly backfired. Local children, who had been using it as a den, had a narrow escape.
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