Gone But Never Forgotten

A self-confessed ‘Troubles journalist’, Susan McKay spent most of the last decade reporting from the front lines of the conflict in the North. In the immediate aftermath of a sectarian murder, McKay would often make that “awful journey up the front path” to a deceased’s home to interview close family members for the following day’s paper. Sometimes, her editor would send her back to these families’ homes on the victims’ first or tenth anniversary to do follow-up features. “I began to have a strong sense that whenever the journalist goes away that’s only when the story is really beginning for that family or that person,” she states.

Curious about how people managed to cope with losing a loved one in such appalling circumstances, McKay decided she wanted to explore in-depth the issue of bereavement in Northern Ireland. She got back in touch with some of these families from her reporting days to revisit their stories and document “their voices” in book format. Written from the standpoint of the victims, McKay has produced an alternative history of the bitter sectarian war and its aftermath in her book, Bear In Mind These Dead.
“One of the reasons why I thought it was important to do the book was to capture those voices – before they’re gone. There is sort of a trend at the moment – very much being led from Stormont – of, ‘Let’s leave the past behind and let’s move on’. It’s very important that we don’t get too blasé about that. It’s not an option for many people who are bereaved,” explains the Derry-born writer, who is a former Northern Ireland editor with the Sunday Tribune.
“The book is as much about the people who have survived – the people who lost people – as it is about the people who are killed. There was one man whose brother was killed and he said to me, ‘Our family has never been able to agree on how to commemorate our brother but we feel that maybe this book will be a sort of a memorial to him’. I felt really honoured by that – the idea that someone would approach a book in that way; that they would see the book as being a fitting memorial.”
Revisiting with the victims’ families, McKay was startled to discover that many of these people are – “quite shockingly”– still very much as emotionally raw from the pain today, as they were when they initially received the tragic news ten or even 20 years ago. “It has victims way beyond the number of victims that are recorded on the gravestones,” comments McKay on the estimated 3,500 people killed during the conflict since 1969. “I think the North has a long way to go in terms of people being truly reconciled. We’ve got a peace settlement now and we’ve got people sharing power and running a government, but in the communities that were most wounded, there’s a long way to go before people can really leave the Troubles behind.”
Some families, McKay points out, are still trying to clear their dead relatives’ name within their own communities. “It was particularly hard in circumstances where maybe somebody had been labelled as an informer. That’s one of the reasons why so many people have spent years trying to fight for the truth about why their loved one was murdered. Quite often the story that was put about was not the truth. People have been told versions of why their loved one was killed, which they know would be untrue and they just feel compelled to find out what really happened. People need to look at what war actually is and what it does to people. A lot of them still have questions which I think they deserve answers to. There’s an awful lot of stories like that,” she says.
One good example in the book is the tragic story of how Alice Harper – who lost both her father and brother in the Troubles – has spent all her adult life fighting to clear their names. “In 1979, her father was out on the streets during the evening of internment. He was out on legitimate family business and was an ordinary working man and he was shot by the British army during riots and they claimed that he had bullets in his pocket. Alice knew very well that her father was not involved and would not have had bullets in his pocket. But he had that stigma put upon him,” she says. “Two years later, her younger brother Bernard, who was a boy with a mental disability – which meant that he had a mental age of about eight or nine – was abducted by the IRA and murdered. They left him lying on the side of the street with a cardboard sign tied around his neck, saying ‘Tout’. Alice has spent her adult life fighting to clear the names of her father murdered by the British army and her brother murdered by the IRA.”
Forgiveness is one of the most complex issues in Northern Ireland today. Did she find that families were able to forgive the murderers for cutting short their loved ones’ lives?
“Some people were very vengeful and still as enraged as the day that they learnt that the person had been killed. While others had actually forgiven the person and felt that they had moved completely on with their lives. Forgiveness is a very complicated issue because a lot of people associate it with sort of abandoning the person who was killed – saying, ‘Well, that’s alright then and we’ll forget about it’. But it really isn’t like that. Forgiveness is more about relieving yourself of rage and bitterness. I never asked anybody, ‘Do you forgive the killer of your son or your husband or daughter?’ because I just think it’s a very intrusive question. Some people brought it up. To ask it implies that it’s what people should feel and I don’t think it necessarily is,” she says.
In the book, McKay interviewed Fr Dan White, a parish priest from Glengormley in North Belfast, where there have been a lot of murders, particularly of young Catholics. “He was saying that forgiveness is not inimical to justice – you can and also should seek justice. You can say, ‘I want that person jailed for what they did’, at the same time as saying, ‘I forgive them’. Forgiveness is more about relieving yourself of range and bitterness. But forgiveness is not something that preoccupies everybody and it’s not something that everybody wants or can give. It’s just as important to listen to the voices of people who are angry and bitter, as it is to listen to the voices of those who are forgiving and gentle,” she concludes.