Twist Of Fate

I WAS born in Belfast on 18th June 1974. A few hours before my birth a bomb exploded in Lurgan, Co. Armagh. It claimed the life of an RUC Constable, John Harrison Forsythe. He was the 1,146th person to die as a result of the Troubles. During the course of my lifetime another 2,491 people have been killed. Some of those deaths are indelibly imprinted on my memory. Others, shamefully, barely registered, even in adulthood.
Beyond the 3,637 total deaths (to which the qualification 'at the time of writing' must still apply), beyond the tens of thousands of physical injuries, it seems to me now that a psychic wound was inflicted on the north's entire population. People were murdered. And we paid little heed. Evening news reports of killing became a well-worn soundtrack to my teenage teatimes. Another death. Pass the salt, please.
My background was normal (-ish) by the standards of the north of Ireland. One of the often overlooked facts about the conflict is how localised the great majority of the killing, and suffering, was. I grew up eight miles from Belfast, and, though I went to a school in the city, it was on the largely quiet and prosperous south side. My mixed, suburban community was never convulsed by the war.
Even so, I doubt if there is anyone in the north who has not been touched by the violence which has stained recent history there.
I turn the pages of Lost Lives. Memories sharpen again . . . Me aged seven, my mother's cheeks damp with tears. When? July 31st, 1981. Why ? Thomas Harpur, victim No. 2,351, a friend of my father's, with whom he shared a passion for cricket. Always ready with a wisecrack, apparently. From Sion Mills, Co Tyrone. In England on holiday, he once explained the village's location to a bemused Japanese tourist as "three miles the far side of Strabane".
I was told that story by my Dad. All I remember is a wiry, smiling man, hazily defined in my mind's eye. He was, I now read, described by a local SDLP councillor as "a pleasant man who never bothered anyone." He went to visit someone who lived on a nationalist estate in Strabane. Harpur had left the RUC three years previously. Two IRA gunmen shot him dead at 8.30 on a summer evening.

Years later, home from college, I was on a week's work experience for the Belfast newspaper, The Irish News. One of the reporters, John McGurk, gave me more encouragement than anyone else. John covered the regular beat of the city's journalists, and also wrote the paper's pop music column. I subsequently got to know him a little better. When I was in Belfast we'd meet for coffee, and talk about music, records, gigs. He was friendly and generous, always interested in how things were going for me. He never told me the story he tells in Lost Lives, though other people had, in hushed tones, sketched the outlines.
In a 1996 interview, he recalls events from 25 years before, when he was ten years old. He was playing a board game with friends above his family's bar:
"I have vague memories. It really wasn't a case of the lights going off. It was like something out of a really bad horror film. I remember tumbling in air and space and this massive rush of wind and noise. It must have been a matter of seconds. I couldn't remember anything else because I must have been unconscious for a while . . .
"The worst thing about it was that I was nearly sure that I heard my sister crying for help, because there wouldn't have been any other young female stuck there. It's possible that it was my imagination. It's possible that she was already dead. But that's what I remember."
John's sister, Maria, was aged 14 when she died in the bomb explosion in the family bar. His mother, Philomena, was killed too. And James Crombie, aged 13, one of the people he'd been playing games with moments before. And his uncle, John Colton. And Edward Keenan, a 69-year-old retired docker. And Sarah Keenan, Edward's wife. And Thomas McLoughlin, 55 years old, a foreman labourer. And David Milligan and James Smyth and Francis Bradley, all dockers in their fifties. And Thomas Kane. And Philip Garry. And Kathleen Irvine. And Edward Kane. And Robert Spotswood. Fifteen people died in the rubble of McGurk's Bar. Seven years later a member of the UVF received 15 life sentences after he was convicted of the bombing.
As I became more involved in journalism, I heard more people tell their stories. There are certain things, and people, you can't forget. Like Geraldine Finucane, a decent, determined woman, talking quietly in the kitchen where she had watched a gunman pump 14 bullets into the body of her husband, Pat. Or Neilly Rooney whose son Patrick, aged nine, was killed by the B-Specials. Neilly had brought all his family into one room of their flat in the Divis Tower as riots raged outside. A stray bullet hit Patrick in the head. Neilly told me about seeing his son's brains slide down the wall. He didn't mention that he had to scrape the brain away with a saucer and spoon. Nor that a year later, he and his wife named their new child Patrick, in memory of the boy taken from them.

For all of these experiences, there is one entry in Lost Lives which is most personal to me. Yet the man whose death it records, I never knew. Victim 2,168 was John Donaldson, a 23-year-old, shot dead on October 12th, 1979:
"The junior solicitor was shot by the IRA when he left Andersonstown RUC Station on a motorcycle," the authors relate. "A yellow Ford Transit van which had been seen circling the area several times passed him on the Andersonstown Road and gunmen opened fire from the back.
"The van, which had earlier been hijacked in the Twinbrook area, had both of its rear windows removed. It was found abandoned in Islandbawn Street off the Falls Road. The IRA later said they had shot him by mistake."
I know this last line to be true, because I know who the intended target was. That person subsequently became one of my closest friends. I know the reason why they were targeted, too, though, 20 years later, it would still be dangerous for me to reveal that here. My friend also rode a motorcycle and had to go to the RUC station that day. For no apparent reason, when he emerged onto the Falls Road he turned in the opposite direction to John Donaldson. Luck saved his life. Ill-luck ended the 23-year-old's. On such random twists of fate have hundreds of lives turned.
Hundreds of lives extinguished - wrong place, wrong time, caught in the crossfire. Were it not for Lost Lives they would, even in death, barely make the footnotes of history.

I have lived in Dublin since January 1996. I wasn't sorry to put some distance between Northern Ireland and me. There is too much bigotry, too much murderous hatred woven into society's fabric there for my liking.
In this city and elsewhere, my Belfast accent continues to elicit the same question from almost anyone who meets me for the first time: "What was it like growing up there?" And I always have the same reply: "It didn't affect me that much." Relatively speaking, that's true. Any emotions I felt about the events described above are negligible by comparison with those who truly have suffered.
Still I think of Neilly Rooney, his eyes boring straight into mine, talking about his son: "The back of his brains were blew out. His brains actually slid down the wall." Thousands of others have their own stories of loss, pain and incurable grief. I can't begin to understand how they must feel. I was lucky. n