Day Three: Perspectives from Across the Divide: Shared Grief Lingers Decades After the Good Friday Agreement
BELFAST — During our last day in Belfast we met 10 people, all of whom are an integral part of creating and keeping peace in Northern Ireland. We spoke to victims on both sides of the conflict, senior members of paramilitary groups during the Troubles, leaders of ethnic and religious minority groups in Northern Ireland, singers, teachers and columnists. This was all organized by our wonderful host, Gary Mason, who had a leading role in establishing the Skainos project, including a community center that provides spaces for integration and conversations between people on all sides of the conflict, in East Belfast. That is where our day began.
While we were there, Brian Ervine, a playwright, songwriter and former loyalist politician, graced us with a song titled “Her Majesty,” which tells the story of the RMS Titanic, built in Belfast. The room was silent, and a soft smile lit his face as he belted out the song without any accompaniment: “They said that she would last forever,” he sang. “Even heaven could not sink her, they never knew they never knew.”
Working Towards Peace
After a quick tour of Skainos, we met with two people who lost loved ones in the conflict, Alan McBride and Linda Molloy. While on opposite sides during the Troubles, they’ve since connected through the grief they both experienced. Now, they work with WAVE Trauma Centre, an organization that connects victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland to share and process trauma together.
McBride is the coordinator of WAVE and a survivor of the conflict who grew up in a Protestant community. On Oct. 23, 1993, his 29-year-old wife, Sharon McBride, was killed while working in her father’s fish shop on Belfast’s Shankill Road when two members of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA) walked in and placed a bomb on the counter. Eight others also died.
After her death, McBride sat by his wife’s grave with a pen and paper, writing love letters about who she was as a person, wife and mother. For years he sent those letters to Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein from 1983 to 2018. Sinn Fein is the political arm of the IRA. He said the letters were a way to test a theory, to see if members of republican paramilitary groups were also just normal people. Initially, Adams didn’t respond to any of the letters. However, when McBride decided to send a letter in the Gaelic Irish language, almost an olive branch to the Irish Adams, the Sinn Fein president responded. He said he knows McBride is hurt, but Sinn Fein is doing the best work toward reconciliation. McBride wondered how that could be true when there were so many killings.
McBride also shared a post-Good Friday Agreement story of his daughter, who was two years old when her mother died. His daughter later became friends with a Catholic girl whose family invited the two of them to their house for a barbecue. It was July 12, an important date when Protestants commemorate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James II at the Battle of Boyne in 1690. As McBride listened to the sound of his Protestant daughter’s laughter mingle with the laughter of her Catholic friend, he said he knew what part of Northern Ireland he wanted to be a part of.
Linda Molloy has also chosen to be part of a Northern Ireland working toward peace and reconciliation, even though she has never received closure for the killing of her son, John. She choked down tears as she shared how 18-year-old John was stabbed to death walking home alone from a pub on Oct. 10, 1996. He was ambushed by a gang of Protestants.
Police told Molloy they’d help her find justice after her son’s killing, but nearly 30 years later, the case hasn’t been solved. Like McBride, Molloy also found solace in writing. She read aloud a poem she wrote for her son, bringing several of our group to tears.
Her poem is titled “For Myself”:
How long since I gazed
Upon your face
Listened for your voice
Watched that slow smile
Oh! To turn back time
You just a little boy
Full of life, full of joy
Should I, could I
Have paid more heed
As you vied for attention
In a family of five
I wonder how it would be
To once more walk with you
Talk to you, share your dreams
Would you have taken a bride?
Would I have grandchildren
At my side?
They cut you down
Eighteen years your lifespan
Will we ever know the truth?
The tide of time ticks by
WAVE sends a cool breeze
A consoling calm
It holds me, carries me
As I work towards peace.
More Than Their Past
Students also sat together at the Skainos Centre with two men who were leading members of the republican and loyalist paramilitary groups. The men asked to stay anonymous because they now work together to have conversations across the divide. They’re more than their past, noted Mason.
Though they disagreed on some remembrances of the Troubles, they’ve since also learned to understand the other’s perspective.
“For us, it was a colonial conflict,” said the republican. He was quick to add, though, that for a Protestant, republican paramilitary groups killed someone from their community, their neighbor.
Republicans never thought about the loyalist communities when they debated reunification of the Irish State, said the republican. In 1976, however, after he was charged and sentenced to 10 years in prison for participation in a paramilitary ambush, he debated other republicans on reunification strategies from the perspective of a loyalist.
“We had to learn to compromise, see the world from other people’s perspective,” he said.
When the republican leader went to the polls to vote on the Good Friday Agreement, he didn’t want to say yes. He didn’t think the agreement went far enough to abandon the republican agenda, but he trusted republican leadership. “I voted for it,” he recalled saying to his wife after he left the polls in 1998. “I hope I’m right.”
“We’ve all done terrible things to each other,” the loyalist said. He also voted in favor of the Good Friday Agreement referendum, but said he wouldn’t vote for it today. “We’ve just stopped killing each other,” he said in reference to continued sectarianism in Northern Ireland. “If only it was so simple.”
The younger generation, whose parents grew up during the Troubles, doesn’t even know why they fight each other. We discussed how crowd psychology often replaces individual thought.
They offered two anecdotes to show changes and obstacles in Northern Ireland’s progress for peace. The loyalist said he went to a chapel to see his son marry a girl who speaks Irish. He said he wouldn’t have believed that possible 20 years ago. But the republican often resolves conflict among the younger generation; he recently mediated after an 8-year-old boy threw rocks at an officer.
Caught Between Truth and Justice
Later in the afternoon, students met Paul Nolan, Ph.D., an independent researcher in Belfast whose work focuses on the peace process. He spoke to the class about policing and accountability in a post-conflict country. The Good Friday Agreement called for a “new beginning to policing in Northern Ireland,” and Nolan noted how that finally came to fruition with the Police Service in Northern Ireland, founded in 2001.
Though Catholic participation in the police force has increased, and PSNI is surveilled and held accountable more than any other police force in the world, Nolan said, but problems persist.
Police office staff is still predominantly skewed Protestant, paramilitary groups continue to exist—especially loyalist groups in large numbers—and the legacy of the Troubles continues to plague police leadership.
After the Good Friday Agreement, 1,186 murder cases were still unsolved. Police were caught in the middle between truth and justice, Nolan said. As outlined in the peace agreement, those convicted of murders related to the Troubles prior to 1998 probably won’t spend a day in jail.
Today, Nolan said, a lot of loyalist anti-Catholic sentiment has shifted to anti-immigrant, and the country has seen a rise in racist hate crimes.
Just before we spoke to Nolan, we had lunch with two men who shared with us their experience as Muslims in Northern Ireland in the face of rising anti-immigrant hate crimes associated with people of color.
Raied Al-Wazzan, Ph.D., executive treasurer of the Belfast Islamic Centre, came to Belfast in the 1990s to study at Queen’s University, arriving in the middle of the Troubles. Zein Ibrahim, also Muslim, was born and raised in Ballymena, a heavily unionist community. Both have experienced being treated differently because of the darker color of their skin and their religion.
Ibrahim said the way he identifies himself has recently changed. Growing up, he introduced himself as Northern Irish, but in the past few years, he is more aware of being an ethnic minority in a predominantly white country. Often when he introduces himself, people question how he is Irish because he has dark skin. He explains where his parents are from, that half of his family is white and Northern Irish and the other half is Sudanese. To avoid the follow-up questions, Ibrahim starts with the entire explanation when he introduces himself.
Al-Wazzan explained that because more immigrants and asylum seekers are coming to Northern Ireland, prejudice and hate crimes against people of color, such as someone pulling off a woman’s hijab, have increased.
The Muslim community is in a unique situation where they are part of the swing vote, Al-Wazzan said. He referred to a possible border poll, a vote on whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or join the Republic of Ireland. He doesn’t want a border poll because as a larger majority in the minority religions, Muslims would make a big impact in a swing vote. He worries that either side would blame Muslims, whichever way the vote goes.
For a border poll to be successful and peaceful, he said, “You have to solve the hate crime first.”
A similar sentiment was shared during dinner by two other men who said peace conversations must come before and along with a border poll or else there will be more killings and injuries.
Students from the class concluded the day at the Hoose Restaurant in East Belfast, a predominately loyalist part of town, where they spoke with Mason, Alex Kane and Chris Donnelly. Kane is a columnist and political commentator and was previously a communications director for the Ulster Unionist Party; Donnelly comes from an Irish republican background and is also a columnist and political commentator as well as a Catholic school principal in West Belfast. The two imparted advice to the student reporters on journalism as well as answered questions on the use of the label ‘the Troubles’ (Donnelly said the term is more neutral than “war” or “conflict” or “terrorist campaign versus the State”; Kane said the word makes the era easier to discuss), crises of identity, and the future of peace in Northern Ireland.
Donnelly said currently 7% to 8% of Northern Ireland’s schools are integrated, meaning both Catholic and Protestant children attend. These schools are essential because much of the housing in Northern Ireland is also segregated. He explained that either the school the children attend or the community they live in needs to be integrated. Earlier in the day we met Linda Ervine, who runs an integrated preschool called Naíscoil na Seolta in East Belfast. The school’s opening in 2021 was delayed a month because of violent threats from people against integrated schools. Naíscoil na Seolta focuses on children becoming bilingual in English and Irish, no matter their background. Despite the threats, the school opened and continues to grow.
Kane, a self-dubbed pessimist, said there’s relative polite peacefulness now because one day, both people in Ireland and Northern Ireland will have to make a very difficult decision, and peace won’t last. He also referenced the prospect of a border poll.
Donnelly believes one seems imminent, but Kane said problems need to be fixed before a referendum occurs.
"You don’t resolve an identity crisis after a border poll," he said.
Photo at top: At the Skainos Centre, Linda Molloy, overcome with grief, tells students the story of her son John’s murder. (Photo by Rosario del Valle)
Edited by Liza Monasebian and Karen Lindell