Mervyn, Martin, Jean and Joan

First, this damp May morning, a brief word about our old friend the Reverend  Mervyn Gibson. You’ll remember (or not) that a day or two back I commented on his less-than-totally Christian comment at a Belfast meeting:  “I see they’ve painted a new mural to him [Gerry Adams] on the Falls Road. Sadly, it’s not a memorial mural. In the Irish Times  yesterday, in an article headed “Orange Order chaplain defends ‘memorial’ comment about Adams”,  the newspaper’s Gerry Moriarty says they contacted the Reverend Mervyn and he said “I was wishing no one dead, nor would I.”  That’s it. He said it was a pity the Adams mural wasn’t a memorial mural and yet he wasn’t wishing anyone dead. Surprisingly, the paper doesn’t appear to have followed up and got further explanation of a statement that, on the face of it, is a contradiction in terms. Either that or they could have switched those inverted commas to read: “Orange Order chaplain ‘defends’ memorial comment about Adams”. Where did I get the idea that the fourth estate were the guardians of truth and democracy, when a daft defence of a deeply unChristian wish like the Reverend Mervyn’s is allowed to go unchallenged?

In today’s Irish Times, Fianna Fáil’s Martin Mansergh blows apart any lingering doubts that the Boston Tapes project was a get-Adams affair:

“Anthony McIntyre has engaged before, during and after the project, in repeated polemical attacks on the Sinn Féin leadership’s conduct of the peace process, suggesting a more immediate political, and not just a long-term scholarly, intention.

To give just one instance, in his collected articles Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism, he refers in April 2004 to “the nauseating spectacle of Sinn Féin at the Republican plot”. Ed Moloney in his foreword argues that the Adams-McGuinness leadership employed “ambiguity, deception, dishonesty, betrayal, duplicity etc”, calls their allies “a bunch of authoritarian Stalinist control freaks”, and expresses frustration that Adams and McGuinness have managed to escape “Houdini-like from the straitjacket of IRA violence”.

Finally, for the umpteenth time, last night’s Nolan Show  on BBC NI once again told viewers the tale of the death of Jean McConville and the shattering of the lives of her family. There is something horrible and haunting about that blurred picture of her sitting with some of her soon-to-be-orphaned children. But it’s obvious to a one-eyed man on a galloping horse that this cruel killing has been highlighted above all others because, it was thought, it could be tied to Gerry Adams. I mentioned Joan Connolly, a mother of eight,  and her death at the hands of British paratroopers in an earlier blog. One commenter informed readers that Joan’s death happened when she was caught in cross-fire in a battle between the IRA, loyalists and the British army. If the commenter is right, then Joan Connolly’s daughter Briege Vovle  is a liar. Here is her account of her mother’s death:

“I went down to the house and my daddy was there but my other sister wasn’t back and neither was my mummy. An hour later my sister – she was only 12 – came into the house. We all waited but my mummy never returned home.

As soon as it was light, my eldest sister went around all the centres to see if my mummy was there. She came back crying, she couldn’t find her.

My daddy went to a neighbour’s house and used their telephone to ring the hospital. He asked if a woman with red hair had been admitted and they said, ‘Yes, but she’s in the morgue.’ That’s how my daddy found out.

Our neighbour went with my father to identify my mummy and then they came back home and told us. As you can imagine, with six girls and two boys, eight children and the youngest only three, the house was in uproar.”

The youngest children, my sister and I were taken to a refugee camp over the border.

We were in Waterford when a RTÉ news bulletin came on the television and that’s how we learned my mummy had been buried that day. It was like a nightmare. We couldn’t grasp it. We stayed with relatives but cried to go home. We imagined home would be like it always had been but it wasn’t. It was an empty shell without my mummy.

We had already been through a terrible ordeal but it didn’t stop there. The paratroopers continued to torture us. They used to sing ‘Where’s your mama gone?’ outside our door and you couldn’t walk down the street without them taunting you. We were all so terrified.

The soldiers deliberately targeted the families of those who had been killed. But we all tried to get on with life. I went to school with Mr Teggart’s daughter and John Laverty’s sister – the three of us in the same classroom but we never spoke about it; no one spoke about it.

My mummy was standing talking when the soldiers came out of Henry Taggart Fort and opened up.

She managed to run away but when she heard a young man crying, she left her place of safety. Witnesses heard her say, ‘Don’t cry, son, you’ll be alright. I’m coming to help you.’ She was wearing a skirt, she had a mop of red hair and it was still light but some of the soldiers who shot my mummy claimed they didn’t realise they’d shot a woman.

She took the first shot to the side of her head and she was heard to cry out that she was blind and couldn’t see. Three sisters in a nearby house saw her wandering confused around the field. They knocked the window to tell her to come into the house but when she turned around they saw half of her face was gone.

The autopsy report said if she had been brought to hospital after the first shot my mummy would have survived. But she was repeatedly shot and then left to bleed to death.

The coroner’s report says my mummy was shot, once or twice, in the head, she was shot in the shoulder and the same round came out through her hand and she had multiple wounds at the top of her thigh.

Six soldiers made statements regarding my mummy. Three claimed responsibility for her death. All their accounts contradicted each other. One said he was shooting at someone firing at him from a roof; another at someone crawling in the grass firing at him with a rifle; another says it was a machine gun.

One soldier admitted firing then exchanging guns with another soldier and firing again. I don’t know much about the army but, to me, when a soldier is issued a gun, that’s his and nobody else uses it. It was as if they were trying out different weapons – it was like a sport to them.

If these paratroopers had been held to account there never would have been a Bloody Sunday, or Springhill. But they never were. They were given immunity; they gave themselves immunity. My mummy wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s where we lived. You could see where my mummy was murdered from our back window.”

 Where does all that leave us? With a blood-soaked past that we all confront because of genuine concern for the victims, not so we can use selected victims to political advantage. Either all parties – including the British authorities – opt into a truth and reconciliation process, where everyone, without fear of legal penalty, owns up to what they did during the conflict; or we put a ban on return to the past suffering and injustice and, with clenched teeth, face into the future.