- Written by Fergal Keene
- Former Northern Ireland correspondent
Every time a politician or anyone else starts talking about the history being made in Northern Ireland, Gael McConnell becomes alarmed.
She has suffered too much and wasted too much time to have much faith in rhetoric.
She wants hard work and action, she told me.
“This is supposed to be just another day in government,” she says of today’s restoration of power-sharing and the election of an Irish nationalist first minister.
“Our politicians should be paid to do their jobs.”
Days like today, unfolding in front of the camera, will come and go. Her father would still be dead. Like 3,500 others lost in the riots.
“My thoughts are with them today,” she says. Gail was three years old when the IRA came looking for her father. It was a quiet, late spring morning in March 1986, and William McConnell was checking for booby traps under his car. That was his daily routine as an assistant prison warden. His wife Beryl and daughter Gail came to the door to see him off.
But the threat wasn’t under the car. And when it emerged from her house across the road, her mother’s warning was too late. Two masked men with guns opened fire at close range, covering the distance within seconds. William, 35, died instantly. He held her, carried her, held her, and her body lay bleeding in the driveway.
Years later, Gail learned that she had run back to the house when the shooting started. And it wasn’t until she grew up and became an award-winning poet that she found the right word to describe what the IRA bullets had done to her father’s body: perforation. to make a hole in the flesh.
image source, Gail McConnell
Gail McConnell and her father William
By then, she was the mother of a young son from her relationship with her American partner, Beth, and was acutely aware of the trauma that was passed down through generations. Northern Ireland continues to have high rates of PTSD and one of the highest levels of antidepressant use in the world.
“Trauma is an ongoing reality for so many people. Young people born after conflict say they feel the effects of conflict acutely. It’s passed down. We’re facing a mental health crisis.” Suicide rates are high here. ”
But as a gay woman who advocates for gender issues, climate change and the rights of victims of violence, Gail McConnell represents an outward looking Northern Ireland. It is a place where identity is no longer defined entirely by religious or constitutional affiliation. New communities are forming that are not bound by the stereotypes of the past, and immigration is increasing significantly. Research shows that the number of people living in so-called mixed relationships between Catholics and Protestants has tripled since the late 1990s.
“I really want to have hope,” Gail says. “I’m just a little bit more aware that we still have a long way to go.”
Gail McConnell says intergenerational trauma is common in Northern Ireland
A healthy dose of caution is wise. The peace wall separating Catholics and Protestants in the so-called “border zone” remains largely intact. Only about 8% of pupils are educated in integrated Catholic-Protestant schools. Although militia groups no longer pose a significant threat to peace, they are active in drug trafficking and can still instill fear in local communities.
Mr Olawe was jailed for eight years for taking part in IRA bank raids in the 1970s, but now looks back on the operation with regret.
“At the end of the day, the IRA struggle didn’t work. We still live in Britain. We still live under British rule. In my opinion, all the murders, all the time The suffering in prison, all the suffering was ‘all those tears were in vain…’ The IRA campaign kept the flame of a united Ireland alive.
“Was that enough? No, it wasn’t, considering the number of people killed. In my view, it was all a terrible waste.”
Richard O’Lough says IRA campaign fueled division in Ireland
The IRA had been fighting against the idea of partitioning Ireland since 1922, refusing to take seats in a “partitionist” parliament. That all changed with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Sinn Féin now claims that joining a devolved government is part of the path to a united Ireland.
Does Richard O’Rowe believe that a united Ireland is closer today?
“There is a lot of work to do. We have to put together a program that is attractive to all citizens, especially trade unionists. It has to be confrontational.”
He said it was vital that there was no triumphalism in Northern Ireland because “triumphalism always has negative consequences”.
And what is your message to your former comrades and enemies who now sit at Stormont? His words echo those of Gayle McConnell.
“Be kind, be conciliatory to those on the other benches, and work together to make life better for the poor people in the back streets.”
Constitutional issues will not go away. But it would be a mistake to think that that is the only important issue.
Forty years after I first worked there during the turbulent years, I return to Belfast to find a much changed city. It’s not just police and military patrols and security fences that have disappeared. With the burden of daily fear gone, this place can breathe. New conversations about different futures are now possible.
In the words of Ulster poet Lewis MacNeice, there is hope that “the sun will shine soon”.