By Clare Campbell
Daily Mail
11 October 2008
The gripping stories of life in the shadow of Ulster’s terrorists
Eamonn Holmes, 49
Eamonn Holmes: ‘I was in the yard when soldiers carrying rifles jumped over the hedge’
I was eight when the Troubles began, sparked by a civil rights march through Derry in 1968. The demonstrators, all Catholic like my family, felt discriminated against when they applied for jobs. It was a peaceful march, but the response from the Protestant-dominated police quickly turned mistrust into hatred between the two communities.
My first realisation that this conflict was more than just name-calling or stone-throwing was about three years later. My brother and I were on our way home one evening when I heard a sound I didn’t recognise. It was the noise of roof tiles cracking as they fell from burning houses. Protestants and Catholics had become so afraid of living in the area, they were setting fire to their homes as they abandoned them.
I also remember playing football with my brother on the streets on Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, when the IRA detonated bombs across Belfast. We lived on a street high above the city, and as we looked down, we could see plumes of smoke and knew something was going on, but we had no idea of the scale of the attack. By the end of the day, 20 bombs had exploded. In just 75 minutes of violence, nine people were dead and some 130 were mutilated or mentally scarred by what they had witnessed.
Yet we just carried on playing, only stopping at the noise of a particularly loud explosion to shout, ‘What’s that?’ to one another before continuing with our game. We were oblivious to the death and mayhem that was taking place all around us, until, one by one, some of the other children with us were collected by their parents, each with news of someone, a friend or a relative, who’d been killed or injured in the attack.
British troops quickly gained a reputation for being heavy-handed with Catholics.
One evening, I was playing in the backyard with my brother, when four or five soldiers armed with self-loading rifles jumped over the hedge. We stood there with our mouths hanging open, and feeling as if we were suddenly in a movie. They took us off for questioning and to check our identities. Once the soldiers had satisfied themselves that we weren’t doing any harm, they marched back to their Saracen armoured car without saying another word. My parents didn’t believe us when we told them what happened that evening. But I’ll never, ever forget it.
As a family, we tried to carry on as normal, but even getting to school safely was a challenge. I don’t think we ever had a week that wasn’t disrupted by the school bus being hijacked, a riot, or a barricade, a powercut or a strike. The area around my school, a Catholic grammar called St Malachy’s, was caught up in some of the worst of the Troubles. This part of town - New Lodge, Lower Shankhill, the Crumlin Road and Ardoyne - was known as the Murder Triangle. But for us children, once we had entered the school building, all talk of politics stopped. It was a place of learning and a place of peace - an oasis, it seemed to me at the time, in a sea of turmoil.
Forty years on, the new Northern Ireland, so different in so many ways, remains much the same underneath. People say, ‘Why talk about the Troubles? Why bring back those memories?’ But I think we have to remember so we never go back there again.
Andrea Catherwood, 40
‘The adults acted like it was a scene from Carry On Up The Khyber’ says Andrea Catherwood
One of my very earliest memories is of my mother’s reaction when she saw me playing barricades on the stairs with my baby brother. She was horrified that we were being ‘affected by the Troubles’. Today, it’s impossible to see how my generation couldn’t have been affected - even defined - by the violence.
Back then, however, there was a belief that it might all be ended by the next political initiative or, failing that, Christmas. Of course, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, no one could have conceived that the Troubles would last as long as they did. I was brought up believing, or at any rate repeating, the mantra that we were not ‘affected by the Troubles’.
We lived in probably the most affluent area in Northern Ireland, a district called Cultra on the North Down coast. We had what was, by any standards, a beautiful family home surrounded by rolling grounds. Our neighbours, both Protestant and Catholic, were mainly barristers, judges and business owners. Yet we were there, as were many of them, because we had left other districts that had become too dangerous.
We’d moved to Cultra after the head office of my father’s business was blown up twice and my uncle’s house burned down. My father had bulletproof glass in the windscreen and driver’s window of his Jaguar, and we were all shown how to check under the car for car bombs, which we did every morning before slinging our hockey bags in the boot and heading off to school.’
‘If you didn’t carry on as normal you were “giving in to terrorism”’says Andrea Catherwood
Much later, when, as a foreign correspondent, I was shown the same checks on a hostile environment course, I was shocked that I’d taken it all so casually as a child. My parents, I now realise, worked hard to protect us from the Troubles. ‘Business as usual’ was a much repeated phrase, as was the idea that if you didn’t carry on as normal you were ‘giving in to terrorism’.
Sometimes, I think the adults around me acted rather like that scene from Carry On Up The Khyber, where everyone is sitting around a dining table passing the port as the cannonballs come crashing down through the ceiling.
All of us who grew up during that time were marked by the Troubles to some degree.
Hatred has a corrosive effect on everyone, not just those most closely touched by it. But we’ve seen acts of bravery and forgiveness too.
I am immensely optimistic about Northern Ireland’s future, more so than many people who live there. I know there are still many hurdles to face and we can’t begin to wipe out the pain of the past, but I have an overriding belief that those who grew up in the Troubles must work towards making sure this hard-won and at times uncomfortable peace doesn’t slip away again.
James Nesbitt, 43
James Nesbitt had a near escape when a bomb destroyed his family’s car
My father was a primary school headmaster from a big working-class Protestant family in Ballymena. When I think of my childhood in Ulster, I remember the happiness of marching through the streets of Belfast on 12 July (the anniversary of the defeat of the Catholic King James in 1690), and the fascination of seeing the British troops’ tanks.
Being a Protestant, I subconsciously knew they were on my side. But now I can see how terrifying it must have been for Catholics. Later, as I grew up, I had friends on both sides, who had lost spouses, children, brothers and sisters, and I felt guilty for not realising all this before.
In 1973, when I was about eight, my father went to pay his car tax at the town hall, leaving my sister and me in the car. We both fell asleep, waking suddenly to the sound of an alarm bell, and a warden shouting at us, ‘There’s a bomb! Quick get out!’ My sister and I immediately went with him, only to turn and see my father fighting his way through the crowd to reach us. I will never forget the look of fear in his eyes.
Then there was a sound like a dull thud.
A bomb had gone off in the car parked next to us. I tried to take in what was happening, but was too young to fully understand. All I noticed was that the eggs my grandmother had given us earlier were still intact in the boot, even though our car had been almost totally destroyed.
Later, when I came to Britain to go to the Central School of Speech and Drama, I hated finding myself described as a ‘Paddy’. It didn’t seem to matter whether I was Protestant or Catholic. We were all just lumped into one category, and an unpopular one at that. That was an eye-opener for me, the idea that British people seemed to understand so little about us.
I salute those men on both sides of the divide who put down their guns and decided to put on suits and go into government. It was a courageous decision, and I think they’d find it hard now to go back to the balaclavas. I may be being naive, but I hope that at last they’ve realised the utter, cruel stupidity of fighting, and killing, over cultural identity.’
Gloria Hunniford, 68
Gloria Hunniford covered the bombings as a young reporter
My family lived in a place called Hillsborough, about 14 or 15 miles outside Belfast.
One evening, in 1969, we were watching the television when we saw the news coverage of British troops arriving in the city after the riots following the marching season. It was hard to take in the enormity of what was happening. Even though the intention of the British government was primarily peaceful, it still felt as if we were being invaded.
As a young reporter, I covered the story of the bombing of the Abercorn restaurant in central Belfast in March 1972. It was full of women and children: two were killed and 139 injured or maimed. It was the first time I’d experienced the aftermath of a bomb at close quarters, and I was absolutely horrified.
The emergency services had just removed the dead and injured when I got there, but all around me were their possessions, leather handbags with their contents spilling out over the road; teddy bears with charred faces - people’s everyday lives broken and tossed aside by the force of the blast. I really felt the futility of the conflict that day - women and children who had become victims, simply because they happened to be out shopping on a Saturday afternoon.
By the time my children, Caron, Paul, and Michael were teenagers, I’d come to believe that there could never be a Peace Agreement because I’d seen it broken too many times.
For the sake of our children, we tried to live as normal a life as possible. But I had to make my children aware that they weren’t allowed to go up certain roads at night and I had to know exactly where they were at all times.
I can’t see Northern Ireland ever going back to a time of violence again. We’ve travelled too far along the road to peace. But no one who went through it will ever totally forget the horror that was on our doorsteps, the tragedy of what happened to our country.
Patrick Kielty, 36
Patrick Kielty was just 16 when his father was shot by loyalist paramilitaries
I was 16 when my father, a prominent Catholic businessman, was killed by Loyalist paramilitaries who burst into his office and shot him.
My memory of the moment I was first told of his death is like trying to remember a car crash. I was putting up posters around the school for Comic Relief when I got a message that the headmaster wanted to see me urgently. I thought I was going to be told off for not asking permission first. But when I got to the school office, one of my father’s business partners was there too. I knew immediately something must be very wrong.
I can’t remember what words they used to tell me my father was dead. All I know is that I didn’t really believe it until I got home to my mother and brothers - I’m the middle child - in Dundrum, Co Down. Then it hit me properly, becoming horribly, terrifyingly real. It was probably the moment I knew I had to grow up, to look after my mother, and to be strong for the rest of the family. In a sense I felt I had to take my father’s place.
I knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. Dad was a businessman in a small village. He employed both sides of the community and was friends with Catholics and Protestants. Even the police issued a statement on the day of his funeral to say he was a totally innocent victim. There were rumours going round at the time that he might have been killed because he’d refused to pay protection money to the paramilitaries.
I still miss my dad today. He was much like me in character - full of life and fun and laughter. He wouldn’t have wanted my life to be blighted by his death. But I do wish that he’d lived to see my successes, my house and my lovely family. His loss is not one that can ever be replaced.
‘I still miss my dad today. He was much like me in character’: Patrick Kielty (centre) at his father’s funeral
Four years after my father died I was working as a stand-up telling jokes about the conflict. In a sense that was my way of fighting back. I didn’t start doing comedy because of my father’s death, but it did give me a licence to make jokes against that backdrop of continuing violence. No one could tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about after my father was killed. But mine was not the only family in Northern Ireland to lose a husband or a father.
At the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, I got a call from Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary Mo Mowlam to say, ‘The men who murdered your dad are going to be allowed to walk free.’ By then I’d met Mo and become friends with her. But I knew it wasn’t a courtesy call. She wasn’t asking, but telling me kindly that this was going to happen whether I liked it or not.
I realised I had to look at the bigger picture then, convince myself that if this was for the good of my country, I had to forget my personal grief and take a leap of faith that Mo was doing the right thing in releasing these men. She was. There are children growing up here now who don’t remember British troops on the streets, and who are more used to Starbucks and sushi bars than sectarian violence. It will take a generation, but I do believe the peace will last. Those who did grow up with the violence have a more jaundiced view because they still look at the city and remember places where bombs went off, and relatives were killed.
Barry McGuigan, 47
Barry McGuigan found that Catholics and Protestants became united as sports fans, offering hope for Ireland’s future
My family came from Clones, Co Monaghan, a small town just over the border into the Republic. But it was in the North, ironically, that I made my name as a boxer.
One of my first big fights was in a Loyalist working men’s club in the Shankhill Road, at that time known as a killing zone for Catholics. But extraordinarily, the Loyalist Ulster Defence Force not only guaranteed my safety but even provided me with a personal escort.
After that first fight, the Loyalists formed a Barry McGuigan Supporters Club, making me welcome in Belfast, from the age of 15, in areas where Catholics would normally have been too terrified to set foot. That had a profound effect on me, giving me a feeling in the ring that I could be a representative of the possibility of a united Ireland.
In London, in 1985, I became World Featherweight Champion, but of far more importance to me personally was the fact that my homecoming to Belfast was welcomed by Protestant and Catholic fans alike. I remember thinking that if they could come together through sport, then there was hope for the future and the prospect of a peaceful Ireland.
My insistence on remaining non-sectarian also enabled me to marry my wife, Sandra, a Protestant, the same year, whereas another Catholic might have received abuse.
But the bitterness was set to get worse before it got better. I’ll never forget going into a restaurant five years later, in a mainly Loyalist area of Belfast, with my wife and eldest son, Blain, who was then about two. There was a family sitting next to us with a boy of a similar age. The two boys started sparring about who had the best car. Then, suddenly, I heard the other boy say triumphantly, ‘Well, my daddy’s a Protestant.’ My son turned to me and asked plaintively, ‘What’s a Protestant, Daddy?’
I didn’t say anything to the other family, but I was deeply shocked that a child so young could have already inherited such prejudice. Since then, I’ve continued to believe that the key to lasting peace is through integrated education. Only by growing up together will young Catholics and Protestants ever learn to accept one another, free of the mistrust and suspicion we’ve lived with for so long.
The Troubles I’ve Seen, ITV1, 27 October.
About 400 to 500 people gathered for the demonstration, organised by the group Pobal.
TO TRACE the roots of the march we are commemorating here this afternoon, I think we have to return to the disastrous decision taken in Downing Street and forced upon Irish people at the point of a gun to partition this island.
The only way any unionist politician will ever hold any semblance of real political power now or in the future is in partnership with nationalists and republicans.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands