For the second column in a row, I review a book about the North. It costs twenty-five pounds to buy but what else can I do but recommend it - within minutes of publication I started to satisfy an ache that has been there since Francis McCloskey died in Dungiven in July 1969, the first casualty of the last thirty years. Deaths came tumbling in one after another after that, and I lost count and trace, and there were times I didn't even know somebody had died.
Lost Lives documents every single death of the war. It is a massive sombre cemetery of print. It is, ironically, majestic and consoling. Now we know. Now we can reach for the book when a name comes up, when a relative cries out decades later. In this book is found the name, date of death, place of death, political or religious affiliation, political or military or paramilitary affiliation of the killers, the circumstances obtaining in the days, hours and months before the person died. Nobody died without a reason. There was always a reason, however unpalatable.
This book is like a jigsaw. Every piece fits into another one. A narrative picture emerges in a way no other book or documentary or movie or song has managed to convey. This is the book to read. For those of us who were there, this is the book that will help, ultimately, to make sense of it all, that will remind us forever why it happened, that will help us never to forget.
Though I have never forgotten him, it was not until I read Lost Lives that I recalled exactly the circumstances that led to the death of Hugh Herron, the ninety-fourth person to die. Had I been asked before now, I would have said that he died in Derry in 1969, just after the soldiers arrived. I would have said that none of us could figure out why he went looking for soldiers that night. I would have been absolutely wrong about that. Now I remember.
He was a good-looking, manly fellow, a bit of a lounge lizard, always down in the City Hotel, hanging out as we all did in those days, talking politics. In my failed memory he had too much to drink, and went out for no reason at all to kill a soldier - an armchair general, when there wasn't even an IRA to talk about. We paid him not a blind bit of heed. Next morning he was dead. He had procured a point 22 rifle, that you shoot birds with, gone up to the city jail and called out drunkenly to the soldiers billeted inside. One of them, on sentry duty, shot him dead. In my failed memory, we asked ourselves why the soldier couldn't have treated him as an obvious drunk.
This book reminds me that Hugh went looking for soldiers on August 9th, 1971, the night of the day internment was introduced. I had forgotten that entirely but now - of course. That's why his blood was roused. There is a dreadful relief in remembering that his death was not entirely brought on by foolishness or drink or a psychopathic soldier. It was dark, ten civilians had already been killed, (nine of them by soldiers) and a local soldier was to die before the night was out, killed by republicans. Hugh died in a hail of death. In a terrible, comforting sense he did not die alone on August 9th.
I have often wondered what was the name of the loyalist who died escaping from Long Kesh. I wrote about this anonymous fellow months later, using the circumstances of his death as a metaphor for the North - he hid in a garbage collection lorry, its crushing mechanism activated and he was ground to death between the metal teeth. Born into a political cesspool, I wrote, treated as fodder by his political masters, died in a garbage truck, still being treated as rubbish. Now I know his name. Benjamin Redfern, death number 2642, from Antrim, Protestant, married with one child, a member of the UDA, was crushed on August 1st 1984. See William John Chivers, no 680, and Joseph Mc Auley, no 687, the book instructs the reader to cross reference his fate.
All right then. Redfern killed Chivers, a married Catholic father of two in November, 1972, ( the year of Bloody Sunday), hours after a Protestant member of the UDR was killed by the IRA. One month later, Redfern killed McAuley, a single, Catholic Antrim farmer as McAuley walked the road at nine in the evening. That same night, a bus-driver was killed by a loyalist bomb in Dublin, even as the Dail was debating the draconian Offences Against the State Act. The bomb pushed the government and opposition to the right, beginning a huge crackdown on civil rights. Redfern, operating with a roving gang in a car, belonged to the UDA, and was the only one convicted in 1979. A union jack was draped over his coffin and his minister, the Rev William McCrea of Paisley's DUP, conducted the funeral service.
The book is full of cross-references like the above. It is a million words long. Everything leads into everything else. It is the first book of its kind, the only one ever, anywhere in the world, to document every single person to die in a specific conflict. It took the four authors, led by David Mc Kittrick, six years to compile. They combed files, trawled books, interviewed eye witnesses and relatives. Thus, the father of nine year old Barbara McAlorum, whose mother is deaf: "My wife was screaming 'Get up Barbara, get up' but we could she was dead. Her head was lying in the jigsaw puzzle I bought her." The cross reference of Barbara, number 3537, is number 3532, Gino Gallagher, chief of staff of the INLA, who was killed two months earlier during an INLA feud. A fortnight after she died, a relative of Barbara was caught in possession of a gun, on his way to visit a wounded INLA man.
The detail of how some people died is not related directly to their names, in order to spare the grief of family survivors - one bombed body was identified by an artificial leg, all that remained of a human being. The authors have resurrected the forgotten dead.
This book is an act of redemption. It will live forever. n
* Lost Lives by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton is published by Mainstream Press, #25.