Depression is an awful affliction many people in society have to deal with. Sometimes it is manageable and sometimes it is downright debilitating to the point a person can’t even leave their bed. 12.6% of children and young people in the North experience common mood disorders such as anxiety and depression which is around 25% higher than in other parts of these islands, reflecting a similar trend in adults here, according to the ‘Northern Ireland Youth Wellbeing Survey’. Depression can stem from anything, from financial problems to work to what mine stemmed from, which was a Loyalist paramilitary attack on my brother.
I was sixteen and living in Carrickfergus. I had met my two Loyalist friends, Nigel and Mark about two years earlier having moved from Glenarm when my dad got a steady job as a courier. Tagging along was my younger brother Ciaran. Unknown to myself, Nigel had bought and used drugs from Loyalist paramilitaries and hadn’t been able to pay for them. One day as we were messing around just across the road from my house, a group of around fifteen men, carrying iron bars and bats rounded the corner of the road we lived on at which point my friend Nigel, who had been using the drugs, bolted, obviously knowing what was happening and what the men were looking for. One of the men walked up to the three of us and asked where the money was, and without even waiting for an answer punched my other friend Mark square in the mouth knocking him to the ground. The one they were looking for, Nigel, was by this stage half way down the road, running flat out in an attempt to avoid a serious beating.
Mark, almost immediately, got to his feet and ran in the same direction as Nigel leaving Ciaran and myself to fend for ourselves. Ciaran is a big guy, even at the age of fourteen he was tall for his age and so while around five of the men ran after Nigel and Mark the rest fell on Ciaran, knocking him to the ground and laying into him with metal bars and bats. I ran to my house, about 20 meters away and grabbed a hurling stick while shouting to my dad “They’re beating Ciaran up, they’ve got him outside”. My dad was in bed due to being on night shift that night.
I ran back outside and began swinging at the men with the hurling stick and put one on the ground, then another. It was then I heard Ciaran’s screams, almost as if I had been coming out of a daydream, back to reality, and I’ll never ever forget them. He was screaming my name, begging me to help him. I could hear it through the thuds from the bats and bars impacting his body – “Help me Michael, Michael help me please”. Ciaran was rolled up in a ball on the ground, with his arms over his head screaming my name and crying for me to help him. I’ll never forget the sound as the bars and bats impacted his body…and then he went silent. They had knocked him unconscious. A gang of around ten men had beaten a fourteen-year-old boy unconscious.
I remember shouting “I’ll take you all, one at a time!”, a silly thing to say when faced with ten men with bats and bars, but that was the one and only time I have ever experienced an absolute rage, the literal physical manifestation of a ‘blind rage’, I was blinded by rage and I would have killed that day without hesitation if I had caught one of them. They began to run down the road in the same direction Nigel and Mark had disappeared in, and as I began to chase them, I heard my mum shouting from behind me “What have you done to my son you bastards?”. As I gave chase, one of the attackers turned round when he realised I was there, and swung a baseball bat at me, completely missing me and smashing the window of a car next to me. With half the street now alerted to what was happening, the majority of it Loyalist, the gang scattered in all directions as if disappearing into thin air…and there was myself, standing in the middle of the street with a hurling stick.
By the time I got back to my brother the two men I had put on their backsides were gone and my mum and dad were with Ciaran. He was bloody and beaten but conscious, just. The police had been called and took 3 hours to arrive by which point Ciaran had been taken to hospital. The police said they would call back the next day when my mum and dad were home, which they didn’t. My parents had to go to the police station to make a statement at which point the police said it would be unlikely there would be prosecutions as no one on the road was willing to tell them what happened. Apparently, no one saw anything. Ciaran lost a year and a half of his memories through memory lost due to the blows to his head
Comments are closed.