Speakers: Rev. Dr Harold Good, Brian Feeney and Seymour Crawford TD
Chaired by Michael Reade (LM/FM)
“The Consultative Group on the Past was established to find a way forward out of the shadows of the past. ….The main themes which emerged from the consultation were the desire for reconciliation, truth and justice. All were agreed on one thing: that such a conflict should never happen again. Ways should be found to deal fairly with the outstanding legacy of the past without it dominating the future….One key principle emerged: The past should be dealt with in a manner which enables society to become more defined by its desire for true and lasting reconciliation rather than by division and mistrust, seeking to promote a shared and reconciled future for all’
(Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (Eames-Bradley) 2009, p. 23)

Welcome: Julitta Clancy: “Good morning and thank you all for coming here today. On behalf of the Meath Peace Group, I would like to welcome you here to Dalgan Park and I hope at some stage in the day you might get out and enjoy the air and the walks here because it is a beautiful place and it is also less than a mile from the Hill of Tara. … We look forward to the discussions here today and we hope to learn from each other, to network and share our experiences. I would like to thank our guest chairs - Michael Reade from LMFM who will chair session I (’Dealing with the past and healing’), Roy Garland (Irish News columnist) who will chair session II (’Peacebuilding in practice’), and Ronnie Hassard (Ballymena Academy) who will chair session III (’Empowering young people’) in the afternoon. Finally I would like to introduce Councillor Liz McCormack, Cathaoirleach (Chairperson) of Meath County Council, who has very kindly come along today to formally open our seminar. Thank you.”

Opening of seminar: Cllr. Liz McCormack (Cathaoirleach, Meath County Council)
“Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to be with you today and my sincere thanks to you for inviting me to open this seminar. I am delighted to be associated with this occasion as I believe that there is nothing more important than lasting peace on this island. The political progress of the past decade has opened up the prospect of a future where people can live and work in harmony, and respect each other’s political, religious and cultural differences.

“The peace and reconciliation process has enabled the forging of links between communities North and South. It is wonderful to see the development of strong cross-border partnerships, and, like the Meath Peace Group, it is often about ordinary people grasping an opportunity to promote dialogue, learning and the building of a greater tolerance for diversity. I would like to commend the work of the Meath Peace Group volunteers and congratulate you on your success to date in promoting peace, raising awareness, and helping to change the mindset of people on both sides of the border. However, it is your work with our young people in Meath that is particularly close to my heart. I would like to pay tribute to you for communicating the peace message to young people through the transition year programme in secondary schools, and I am delighted to see that there is a session on this topic on your agenda today. We have come a great distance in the peace process and every day we see the benefits of the hard work of those people who made it all happen. We see the trust and understanding that has been built across the communities. Long may it last!

“Finally, I would like, on behalf of my fellow Councillors in Meath County Council, to wish you continued success with your work and with your seminar today. Go raibh míle maith agaibh. I will now leave you in the very capable hands of Mike Reade who is going to chair the first session.”

Michael Reade: “Thank you Cathaoirleach, and congratulations once again to the Meath Peace Group for organising what looks like a most interesting day, a long day as well I think. There are many eminent and interesting speakers to hear from today. … We have three speakers here and you can read about them in the programme rather than delaying you with details of their biographies now [Editor’s note: see biographical notes at end of this report]. We are going to ask each of the speakers to speak for about 15 minutes and then the rest of the time will be allocated to questions and answers. So without further ado, we will ask our first speaker, Reverend Harold Good, to come to the podium. I met him once before in Belfast and he told me a fascinating story of being bundled into a van - in Dundalk I think it was? - you didn’t know where you were going at the time, but when you arrived you saw one of the most historic things that has happened on this island and that was the decommissioning of the arms of the provisional IRA. I think you will all be very interested in hearing what Reverend Harold Good has to say here this morning.”

1. Rev. Dr. Harold Good: “Thank you very much indeed, Mike, for your welcome, and to Julitta and the group for the invitation to be here today. Your reputation as a peace group and the work that you have been doing in helping people towards an understanding and an awareness of the more total picture has been so important – in all those years since 1993 when you first formed this peace group.

Gift of peace: “Following that decommissioning experience, Barney Rowan, a well-known journalist in Northern Ireland, interviewed some of us for a book in which he asked me, “Tell me, why do you get yourself involved in this kind of thing?” In reply I said something which I thought was inspirational along the line of , ‘because I would like to have some part in leaving our children the gift of peace; my grandchildren and the children of their generation….’ My daughter told me that one evening she was reading this book to our 10-year old grandson - a strange bedtime story to read to your 10-year old ! - and said to him, ‘isn’t that a nice thing Grandad said - that he would like to leave you the gift of peace?’ Young Gareth paused for a moment, looked at his mother and said, ‘ I hope he will leave us some of his money as well!’ I think we all realise that there is no more precious gift that we can leave to our children and to the children of another generation than the gift of peace. I will have to watch my time because once you get a Methodist preacher in front of a captive audience they never know when to stop!

Dealing with the past: “Your theme is - ‘dealing with the past, reconciliation and healing’. I want to begin with two thoughts. First of all, I always feel a certain discomfort when we talk about dealing with the hurt and the pain of the past, because I personally have not lost a loved one in this conflict. I have known people and I have had friends, and I have conducted funerals, but I have not personally known what it is to go through that deep dark valley of the shadow where you have lost a loved one at the hands of some person of violence. So I do not know how I would respond. None of us know. We can be academic about how we would react in a situation, and we know how we would hope we would react, but we do not really know. So I tread softly in case I tread on someone’s very personal grief, and there may indeed be someone within this audience who knows what I am talking about in a very personal way. The second thing I want to say is that on this island we are not alone in agonising over this issue of how we deal with a painful past. The last time I was asked to speak on this subject I was returning from Canada and had planned use the time on the flight to write my notes – it’s a good place to shut off the rest of the world, you are high up and you can be inspired ! As I was waiting to board my plane I bought the Vancouver morning newspaper. You can imagine my surprise when I read the headline - “Are reconciliation and truth compatible?” Almost identical to the title that I had been given for my talk in Belfast ! There it was, the same question, “Are reconciliation and truth compatible?” That headline was all about the issue of how Canadians are seeking to come to terms with what had been inflicted upon the indigenous people in Canada. More recently I was on a holiday and met a Roman Catholic priest from the United States. A most interesting man who I have since invited to come to Ireland because he has something to share with us and maybe we have something to share with him. His present ministry is centred upon helping the Native Americans - those we would call the American Indian people - to deal with hurt and pain that has never been dealt with in a way that is going to release them from their painful history. In describing this not-so-buried hurt and pain and why he is now making it the focus in his ministry he said, ‘my predecessors in the parish that I am working in, they just didn’t seem to understand ……’ We know of other situations - I just recently read a book called the Sixth Lamentation which is an historical novel about the confusion at the end of the last world war when the people of Europe were trying to come to terms with what had happened during those awful years.

Personalising the question: “What we need to do on a day like this, when we are talking about how do we deal with the hurt and the pain of the past and how do we find healing, may be to personalise the question. Just take a moment, as I do, to reflect on some experience in your own life when you felt huge pain, and felt that maybe you were the victim of some injustice, some hurt which has never gone away. It is still there. Think about how you personally have tried to deal with that in your own life. To bring it down from the macro to the very personal may well be the starting point for us in trying to think our way through how, as a society, we are going to deal with the hurt and the pain of our violent past and move forward to a place where healing will not just be an academic concept, but something that we can offer to one another.

Recently I read – and I commend it to you if you have not already read it - David Park’s book, The Truth Commissioner. It is a novel based in Northern Ireland. It is a speculative kind of novel as to ‘what if’ we had a truth commission and the impact upon characters in the story who are archetypal people. We can read into those fictional people, stories and tragedies with which we are familiar, all too familiar. I commend it to you. And some of us will have seen that BBC programme ‘Five Minutes of Heaven’, with Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt. A very powerful drama indeed. But I would have to say that both this book and that drama left me with more questions than answers ! Maybe that is what the author and what the producers intended: raising the questions that we must think our way … and continue to think our way through.

There will be always be different expectations and aspirations,
and different ways of dealing with the past: “It would be very nice if we could come along with neatly tied up answers to this issue. I wish I could come and do that for you. But we are on this journey together. One part of me subscribes to the ‘leave well enough alone’ argument, particularly after I watched that drama and I read that book. ‘Forgive what we can and forget what we can’t forgive’, as one fictional character is quoted as saying. This part of me wants to say, ‘let’s draw a line, let’s put the past where it belongs’. David Porter of the Evangelical Contribution in Northern Ireland ( ECONI as we knew it), tells how he brought his father home from hospital after a serious operation. With him came a very largely written instruction on his father’s papers: ‘ Don’t touch the wound’. Don’t touch the wound. For some people that is the way they choose to deal with their pain. ‘don’t touch my wound’. But another part of me recognises that that is not the way for everyone. There are those who demand truth - whatever truth may mean to each of us - and there are those who will never be content until their questions are answered. We know from other situations - quite apart from our conflict - there is a restlessness for many people until they find the truth for which they seek. For example, the adopted child. Some of us have them within our own families. There are those who don’t want to go to the past, don’t want to know. ‘You are my mother; I don’t want to know any other.’ That makes it easy for us as adoptive parents. But there are others for whom there will never be a peace within until they discover something of their past. We think also of the tragic cases of those who have suffered from child abuse, for some 40 and more years on. I remember someone with whom I counselled and it was 50 something years on! Nobody had ever touched that wound. That wound looked like it had been healed but for her it had just been covered over. So different people have different expectations and different aspirations and different ways of dealing with the pain of the past. All we know is that there are those who will never be at peace until the past has been dealt with in a way that brings them peace within. But we must also recognise simply getting the facts or the answers to one’s questions may not in itself bring healing. That in itself is another aspect to this difficulty.

We cannot avoid dealing with the past: “A few months ago I was in Auschwitz for the first time. As you walk through the door into what is grimly called the ‘Extermination Block’ there is a sign which reads: ‘The one who does not remember history, is bound to live through it again’. Now what does that mean in our context ? Simply that the individual, the family or the society who does not remember history is bound to live through it again. So, in my view, in our journey towards reconciliation and healing we cannot avoid dealing with the past, be it individually or collectively. The question for me is not whether but how. I will refer to but two approaches.

Healing through Remembering: “Many have already engaged in this search, such as through the Healing through Remembering programme of which I am a founder member. Some of you are familiar with it and some of you have participated in it and we have done a lot of work together. Should you want to think and read more deeply this [HTR report] is but one of the many documents that we have published and are readily available for the asking. This all came out of a visit to South Africa where I met Alex Boraine. He was the Vice-Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we invited him to come and help us to think our way through as to how we might begin to respond to these questions.

The Eames-Bradley report: “Recently we have had the report of the Eames-Bradley commission [Consultative Group on the Past]. Sadly, it got off to a difficult start because of one particular recommendation out of many, but it has formed the basis of a discussion to which we as a society will return in some way , when the Secretary of State chooses that moment. It is not for me to either defend or to dismiss the Eames-Bradley report - but recently I travelled all the way to Bristol to speak on a television programme called the ‘Big Question’ and was given thirty seconds to summarise it ! I did so by identifying three things it asks of us as a society:

It asks us as a society to take collective responsibility for the circumstances which gave rise to the conflict.
It asks us a society to take individual and collective responsibility for the hurt we have inflicted upon each other.
It asks us as a society to take individual and collective responsibility for the healing of those hurts.

Taking responsibility for the circumstances which gave rise to conflict: “Is there anyone here who was born in 1912 ? I don’t think so. I am probably about one of the oldest in this room. I don’t feel it, but maybe I am! Anybody here born in 1916 or 1922 ? We are getting closer to where some of us came in, but we can all say, like Pilate: ‘it is nothing to do with me, I wasn’t there, somebody else has to take responsibility for the circumstances which gave rise to this conflict’. Would that it were as straightforward as all of that . It is now time that we as a society, and the institutions in our society of which we are a part, will make a start by putting up our hands. The institutions of State in both parts of this island; political parties and the churches, whatever be their name or sign. I for one have for long been saying ‘let us stop our pious preaching until we ourselves are prepared to practice what we preach’. We are always asking other people to take responsibility. Of course we in the churches are not alone responsible for the circumstances which gave rise to conflict, but if any sector of society needs to put up a hand, it is the sector from which I come, accepting responsibility for our sins of omission as well as our sins of commission. I was very moved by a story which I read about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There was a cut-off point of 12 Noon on a particular day which was to be the last moment that people could come to apply for amnesty. At about 11.30 am a group of young adults came to the door of the Commission’s Offices and said they wanted to apply for amnesty. When asked ‘for what’ , they said ‘for doing nothing’! So too we as a society must accept responsibility for what we have done or left undone, said or left unsaid. I as a preacher keep thinking of that uncomfortable parable where Jesus talks about judgement upon certain people who responded by saying ‘but when did I see …you are holding me accountable….. but when did I see you hungry and naked ….. ?’ Did we not fail to see that which we did not wish to see ? Did we not fail to hear that which we did not wish to hear?

Taking responsibility for the hurt we have inflicted upon each other. “I doubt if there is anyone here who has ever handled a gun of any kind, and certainly not in hatred in this situation. I can understand the reaction to the recommendation of a £12,000 acknowledgement payment. I can understand the hurt and the confusion. But this recommendation was trying to do something very important. It was trying to say that we, as a society, must take responsibility for each other’s hurt. That is a difficult one. In the TV programme I referred to in Bristol, there was a Rabbi who spoke about something that had happened after the Holocaust. In one particular country families were given a compensation payment. What did they do with it ? Many of them never cashed the cheque; they framed it and put it on the wall! What they wanted was acknowledgement.

Acceptance as a society of responsibility for the healing of the hurts: “This goes beyond the enactment of equality legislation – which of course is of fundamental importance. I had the privilege of serving on the first Human Rights Commission and it was hugely important for us to promote and encourage the enactment of legislation which would make everybody feel secure. But we need something beyond that for the healing of the hurts.

Change of heart: “I have to stop now because I have all sorts of things I was going to say ….. but maybe we can bring them up in conversation. In closing, let me just tell a couple of ‘quickies’. Last year I shared a platform with Rolf Meyer in the Basque country. Rolf, formerly Minister for Intelligence in the old Apartheid government of South Africa, was a negotiator in the talks between the government and the ANC. He said: ‘let me tell you about the nine steps we had to take’. After steps one to eight he said number nine was a change of mind. I thought to myself ‘what could come after that?’. And I should have known, as a preacher I should have known - and as a human being I should have known - number ten was a change of heart ! So we are going to need something more than legislation. We are going to need something more than a change of mind, which is very often more to do with pragmatism than anything else. When we were struggling with the programme of early release for prisoners it was a very difficult issue for most people. One evening I invited Brian Currin, a South African lawyer, to speak to a group of people from the churches who were struggling with the morality of this part of our peace process. Somebody asked, ‘but what about justice?’ Brian replied, ‘this isn’t about justice; you can’t go to a widow or an orphan and say ‘we are doing this in the interests of justice.’ Then he said - and listen carefully - these are his exact words - ‘this is about giving all parties to the conflict an opportunity to share in a new beginning whether you believe they deserve it or not.’ That is a huge thing to ask of any society, but I would suggest that until we come to that moment we will not be able to offer each other the healing of which we speak and for which we long. As I see it, until we have that change of heart and find ourselves able to offer – unconditionally – the opportunity to share in that new beginning ‘dealing with the past, reconciliation and healing’ will remain largely academic questions. Thank you for listening.”

Michael Reade: “Thank you very much Reverend Good …. Our next speaker as you will see is a published writer, award-winning author, himself a politician with the SDLP for many years, now writing with the Irish News, Brian Feeney”.

2. Brian Feeney: “First of all I’d like to thank people for inviting me here. I’d also like to congratulate the Meath Peace Group for the dedication they have to keep going for years and years when there is very little obvious or visible reward. It is certainly something that I admire, that the people stick at. So congratulations.

There isn’t going to be reconciliation in our lifetime: “I take a different approach from Harold [Good]. Let me start by telling you an anecdote from politics. Harold Macmillan, who was a very successful Conservative Prime Minister of Britain, entered the House of Commons after the First World War. He was badly wounded in the First World War and he tried to get into the House of Commons a couple of times and made it about 1922, and he asked Lloyd George - he saw Lloyd George when he [Macmillan] was a student at Oxford and he saw Lloyd George when he was speaking at the Oxford Union - so he went to Lloyd George and said to him, ‘I am thinking of making a maiden speech in the House of Commons; is there any advice you would give me because you are regarded as one of the greatest orators in the House of Commons, in the country in fact?’ Lloyd George, modest as ever, said to Harold Macmillan, ‘well, when you are an international statesman like I am, you can make two points, but bearing in mind you are speaking to the House of Commons, I would advise you to make one point!’ Now this isn’t a reflection on the gathering here today, but I intend to make one point and that is that there isn’t going to be reconciliation in our lifetime. It isn’t going to happen.

“Let me try and explain why I think that. First of all I should say that the part of Belfast that I represented was the worst in the North of Ireland. About 15% of everyone killed in the Troubles was killed in my area, which included wonderful places like Ardoyne and the New Lodge and Unity Flats and so on, Ballysillan – though, mind you, I wouldn’t have gotten many votes in Ballysillan, in fact I don’t think I would have even got out of Ballysillan if I had got in.

“To illustrate how long the effects of sudden violent death last, I will give you an example of one character who used to walk his dog around and around for miles every day until people complained that he was actually going to kill the dog, because he simply walked the dog from one end of the day to the other. Somebody asked me to approach him and see what he was doing with this or what was wrong. The guy was deranged, and I discovered he worked for most of this career on the railways in Northern Ireland and was a loner and spent his time alone working along the lines. Then when he retired he just started walking the dog. And they reckoned the reason he became deranged and spent his life alone - he is dead now – was that when he was five, in 1922, a knock came to the door - he lived in the Docks – and he went to the door with his mother and she was shot dead, and she fell on top of him and he had a lot of difficulty getting her body off him. Now that was 1922, and there are a lot of people in Belfast and Northern Ireland who still remember things that happened their parents in 1921/1922 and nothing has ever been done about it.

Victims’ groups and government agenda: “Let me try to explain why I think it is not going to happen in our lifetime. At the moment there are over 60 victim groups in the North, of all shapes and sizes. Why are there 60 victims’ groups? Why can’t they join together? Why can’t there be one victims’ group? Why can’t there be one organisation? Why do people join one of these 60 groups and not another one of these groups? Most of the groups have an agenda. They’ve got a number of distinct agendas. Some people want to continue the conflict by other means. They want to prove that the British Forces were mainly to blame for what happened: they engineered agents, they played dirty tricks and so on. Some people want to prove Republicans were mainly to blame for everything that happened: that they started it and they caused everything. The British have an agenda as well. The British Government has an agenda which is not to have any successful victims’ group or any successful way of dealing with the past.

“Some of the groups simply act as the local support group and they just get on with it quietly, you don’t hear about them. They maybe organise themselves in one little area, part of Belfast, part of Derry or Omagh and just get on with it. The government in the North is throwing money at these groups, millions of pounds in a really cynical and hypocritical fashion. Partly the money is to keep them quiet, to keep them going and to allow them to talk to themselves, but never to get anywhere. The government has never set up a professionally staffed organisation – one professsionally staffed organisation - to help these people.

Human costs of the conflict: “When we were writing the book, Lost Lives, and dealing with the relatives of people who were killed, there were about 3,700 dead. You need to multiply that by about 6 to talk about the people who are closely affected by someone who has been killed, so you are getting up around the 20,000 mark of people who are closely affected. But those 3,700, the number who were killed, doesn’t take any account of the thousands who were injured, seriously injured, lost legs, other limbs, blinded and their relatives who were also affected because a son, a daughter, a husband, whoever, lost limbs or was blinded. There are all sorts of figures about that, maybe 15,000 people seriously injured - multiply that by 6.

Government failures and fiascos: “So, in a small population, a huge number of people affected, but the government has never set up a professionally staffed organisation to deal with those people. The result is we have got a lot of self-help groups, in effect, who are funded by the government. They call themselves victims’ groups but these small groups that operate in the local area or deal with a specific set of issues. In some ways, they are quite damaging because they actually counsel each other. So you have individuals counselling each other who have no qualifications whatsoever for counselling, producing no discernible results.

“Other groups spend a lot of time agitating for inquiries, for investigations. The government funds them too. The government has no intention of having any more inquiries or investigations, but they fund these groups who keep asking them to have them. As I say, it is a disgraceful exercise in cynicism. There has been a complete failure by the Northern Ireland Office and the Stormont Executive to deal with this issue, this whole issue. A lack of leadership, fiascos like four commissioners [Commission on Victims and Survivors], who have no power at all. They have no power. The four commissioners have no more power than anyone else in this room, and you can see why each of the four was appointed.

“There is no political aim in the Northern Ireland Office because the Secretary of State for the time being is sent over to Belfast where there are no votes for him, so it doesn’t really matter. It is the easiest job in British politics. You can do two or three jobs at the same time as well as being Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. You will always be supported in the House of Commons, they have sympathy for you, because you have to go over and deal with those Irish. For the last decade, at least, successive Secretaries of State have simply kicked the problem into the long grass and we have just seen that again with the Eames-Bradley proposals. They are never going to happen. The first thing that the Secretary of State said was ‘Ok, we are just not talking about the £12,000′, and that was that. So that is not going to happen. But the rest of it isn’t either. They are now entering a period of consultation, but the Eames-Bradley exercise kicked the victims’ issue into the long grass for two years. They will soon think of something else to kick it into the long grass for another couple of years.

Division and dissension remain deep: “But the final point that I want to make to try to drive this home, and succeed in demonstrating my reputation as the man who put out the light at the end of the tunnel! Division and dissension remain so deep. One of the reasons you can’t have a single organisation is that some people won’t sit in the same room as others. When we were dealing with the Lost Lives book, when it was published, people came to us and complained: ‘my husband’s name is on the same page as that guy who did such and such. I don’t want that to happen. I want you to move it .. Why can’t you arrange that book in such a way that the security forces are at one end and the IRA are at the other? I am not having my husband’s name on the same page as that man’. You can’t get people into the same room , so you can’t have one organisation.

Truth and reconciliation: “Some of the groups genuinely hunt the holy grail of reconciliation. Now it hasn’t happened anywhere. There have been something like 200 truth and reconciliation groups all over the world after conflicts, Chile, South Africa and so on, the famous ones and others, but no one has successfully defined what it means - is it a handshake, is it to satisfy one person, two people whatever?

“But the failure of any kind of political direction or any kind of political will in the North encourages people to believe that if they go on doing this, that ultimately there will be some kind of reconciliation or healing, there will be some kind of successful resolution. But nobody says how you measure that. Nobody has worked out how it can be measured. Harold’s point - is there any compatibility between truth and reconciliation? Can you have one with the other or can you only have one of the two? But it may be that people have to reconcile themselves to the fact that you are dealing with a politico-ethnic problem or an ethno-political problem which is similar to the sort of thing that went on in Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia, between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, or Belgium - where it just simmers below the surface between the Flemings and Walloons and it isn’t ever going to be reconciled. But the government in the North will never admit that. They will never do anything to bring it forward. They so far haven’t done anything to indicate that they are prepared to produce a result. They suffer all these groups. They give them money, they encourage them, but they encourage them to do something which the government has no intention of letting happen.

Michael Reade: “Thank you very much, Brian, a sobering note for us all there. But I will move to our final speaker who I think will be well known to everybody in the room - Cavan-Monaghan TD for Fine Gael, Seymour Crawford.”

3. Seymour Crawford, TD: “Thank you very much, chair. I would just like to thank the Meath Peace Group for twisting my arm and encouraging me to be here today. I always admire the work of groups like yours who put so much effort into trying to bring people together and to discuss thorny issues as obviously anything to do with the building up of trust and peace is. I couldn’t help thinking there, Brian, whenever you were talking about the different areas you covered, you mentioned a place called Ballysillan. You may be interested that at least 48 people from Ballysillan recognised that Dáil Éireann exists and paid a very welcome visit to it only a few weeks ago. So things are moving on.

“To give you a little background of mine: some of you know that I am a member of Dáil Éireann for my sins at the present time - I represent the Fine Gael party there - but others here in this room who know that I was involved in farm organisations, and even before that Macra na Feirme. For some reason, I got involved in public life at a very early age, although my father or family circle had no involvement in farming politics or otherwise. We were coming through very difficult times in the ’60s in this country, farming-wise and economically generally, and I suppose at that point I saw there was no other way to try and improve things other than to get together and work together and try and build up organisation. I come from a Presbyterian background, my own brother is a Presbyterian minister in Moira, south of Belfast, for 23 years and my uncle before him was a Presbyterian minister in the Derry area many years before that. …

Times have changed dramatically: “Before I agreed to come here, I didn’t know that one of my nearest colleagues would be nominated for the European elections and as a result I haven’t had any time to put too much thought together on this theme. But last night I was in Donegal and we finished up canvassing in a wee village called Raphoe. I left there about 9.30pm and drove back through Lifford, Strabane, Omagh, Ballygawley and into Monaghan. I didn’t see a single member of the army - south or British - a single member of the RUC (now PSNI) or a single Garda …. It brings back a memory of a visit to Raphoe vocational school in 1982. I was then chairman of the national livestock committee of the IFA [Irish Farmers Organisation], and also involved in Europe as chairman of the European Committee on Beef and Veal, and I was there as a guest speaker organised by the late great Neville Chance. Neville Chance was a former army man and he started everything on time so we got going at 8 o’clock and I spoke for 20 minutes but when I was finished I emphasized the fact that I was apologising for having to leave to go to Dublin for 8 o’clock the next morning. The press man came over to me and said, ‘Seymour, you’re obviously up here for some time and you haven’t heard that Strabane and Clady are both gone up in smoke, in fact it is all across Northern Ireland, you’ll have to go by Donegal town and Leitrim.’ As it happened, I went to Donegal town and I decided to head back by Pettigo. I talked to the RUC and the British army and explained my difficulties, and they made a few calls further on and I was directed on through Enniskillen. But I was stopped 6 times between Pettigo and the border at Clones, and the Gardaí were also in Clones. Now anyone that says times haven’t changed, they have changed dramatically. Whatever we do in this country, we must make sure that that never, ever, ever happens again. I appreciate both the comments of Reverend Good and Brian Feeney - coming from different directions - but don’t let us forget what has happened and what has moved forward.

Don’t ever let us give up hope but it means making an effort: “One of the first people I met here today was a fellow called Billy Tate over there - and I don’t think Billy will be annoyed if I tell a little bit of our story. We haven’t met all that often, but we met in the parochial house at Ballyoisin [Co. Monaghan] right on the border. I think it was 1995 or sometime around that, 1994. I waited for the vote in Dail Eireann and left there sometime around 9 o’clock and arrived in Ballyoisin sometime after 11pm. The idea was that we were trying to bring together the Catholic schools south of the border and the Church of Ireland/Presbyterian type school in Aughnacloy, where Billy was the principal. Billy can speak for himself later on [session III] but he comes from a fairly tough background around Portadown. Fr Sean Nolan, who still is the priest in that area, was a good personal friend of mine, born and reared in the same parish. We set up the initiation of a link between those two schools that was funded through the peace funds and has built up a tremendous organisation, not just through the schools but through the community there ever since. So don’t ever let us give up hope, but it means making an effort. It means trying, it means encouragement.

Need for healing and need to be positive: “I can say clearly, as Reverend Good has said, that I never personally lost a direct blood relation but I have certainly lost a lot of very good friends in the Troubles down through the years. I suppose I am one of the few politicians that can say I have stood at the graves of both sides of the divide, and the tears were no different, because there were tough times in the Fermanagh/Monaghan/Cavan border areas back in the early part of the Troubles where many people were murdered. My next door neighbour’s brother was a publican up in the area that Brian talked about, and he was murdered solely because he was a Catholic publican. I was also at his funeral because his brother was one of my best friends. So I saw both ends of the situation. But the biggest eye-opener I got was when I was doing business with a lorry haulier in Co Monaghan late one evening, and when we were finished at 10 o’clock or about that, he said to me, ‘come on over to the house for a cup of tea.’ And of course I was talking about my involvement in the British-Irish Parliamentary Body and all that, and the wife was quite critical. And I said, ‘well you know there are over 3,500 dead, we have to do something, we have to move forward.’ And she broke down in tears, and she said, ‘if your brother was one of those, you wouldn’t forget either.’ Her brother was one of the ones murdered in the wee church at Darkley [November, 1983], just because he was there saying his prayers. Like the situation in Ballyoisin, I didn’t get out of the house too early that night, it was 2 am or afterwards whenever I left that family and, thank God, we are great friends ever since. We talked it over. There is a lot of healing to be done, there is no doubt about that, but I think we can’t be negative about it, we have to be positive about it.

British-Irish Parliamentary Body: “I suppose my involvement in the British-Irish Parliamentary Body since 1993 has opened my eyes to that whole situation. That’s a group of 25 members of the Westminster Parliament and 25 members of the Oireachtas, and we now bring in the other assemblies as well. It is criticised often in the media as more or less a talking shop, but I can tell you one thing: it built up tremendous understanding of each other over the years. That meant that when people spoke in Westminster or people spoke in Dublin it wasn’t totally bashing the Irish or bashing the Brits. And that is the importance of it. But above all we had committees, and I visited every one of the areas in Belfast that were involved in the Troubles - the Falls, the Shankill, right across the whole areas. And across in Derry or Londonderry, whichever you would like to call it, we dealt with all the groups there, and we saw how the funding through IFI and peace funding was dealt with.

We have moved further along: “Certainly it has moved forward a lot since that. Everything is not perfect and I know there are more walls today than there were when the ceasefire was brought about. But there are people that no matter what you do, you will never satisfy them, and I well remember the night of the [IRA] ceasefire [1994], and the day after the ceasefire we had a debate in Dublin on that ceasefire. I remember for more reasons than one as the whole Beef Tribunal was to be discussed in the Dail that week and it was moved back a bit on the agenda and disappeared literally altogether as a result of the ceasefire. And we welcomed the ceasefire, but at the time I didn’t welcome the fact that the Beef Tribunal was buried, that is another story. But I remember being asked to speak for a few minutes that night on the discussion and I made the point that one of my old school friends would not be forgiving or would not be forgetting what had happened. I had no contact with him good, bad or indifferent, but Jim Dixon, one of the victims of the Enniskillen bombing [November, 1987], came on the radio at 1.30pm the following Sunday and said almost identically what I had thought he would be saying. But even Jim Dixon - and I would meet him at other issues today - has moved forward quite significantly, and certainly groups like this here, and groups like what had been set up and funded by the organisations, they are allowing people to let off steam and they are doing good. … But I just can’t help emphasizing that we have moved further along.

Raw wounds all across the community: “Now the last thing I want to speak about is the Paul Quinn murder [October, 2007] because that is an area that is quite difficult. When I was involved in farm organisations, I built up a tremendous relationship with the Ulster Farmers Union and the Northern Ireland Producers Organisation. I made it clear to the Ulster Farmers Union if I was dealing with them I was dealing with the others and vice versa. But the minute I got involved in politics I found doors were closed. It was a difficult time between politics North and South. But I built up - again through quiet meetings - a relationship with Ken Maginnis, MP (UUP) who represented Fermanagh/South Tyrone, and Seamus Mallon, MP (SDLP) who represented the other border areas with me. We all knew we were meeting each other, and we all did a lot of work quietly behind the scenes. But the idea of me going into a place like Crossmaglen [south Armagh] to speak at a meeting would certainly have been totally and completely unheard of. Sad and all as the Paul Quinn murder has been, I was able to go into Crossmaglen - with Fergus O’Dowd, TD, and other colleagues from the Labour Party and from all the Northern Ireland parties - and at least talk to the people. Now I saw at first hand the raw wounds that are there amongst the people of that area. Those wounds are in specific areas right across Northern Ireland. I have relations living in Lisburn. I have other relations living in other areas in Northern Ireland and I know firsthand exactly how difficult it is, but I still believe that through discussions and efforts, as we ourselves have been involved in, in Glencree and other places behind the scenes ….

DUP: “I will finish off by saying that I will never forget our first meeting with the DUP. Reverend Good asked about anybody here using arms and I think I saw one hand going up back there. I was in Glencree with people who had used bombs and guns and everything else, and we were able to sit and talk it through and try and move on. The DUP were possibly the most difficult because they didn’t want to admit that they had done any wrong but we stayed… after about 24 hours opportunities [were opened up] and we did get some of them to discuss things openly. One of them didn’t, I will not name him here today, but he knows well who he is, he was extremely angry with me because I raised questions quite bluntly about the involvement of some very senior people. Six months later, he was the first man to walk across a room and talk to me and shake my hand and say how important it was that we opened the raw discussion that needed to be opened that day. I hope today’s event will create some more thought, some more ideas. We didn’t come here to sit at the top table to agree with each other. Hopefully we can move the peace process forward, because that is what is important in the end of the day. Thank you.”

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Michael Reade: “Thank you. We will take some questions and answers now. Seymour, I think you were talking there about some of the more positive aspects of it all, in particular I suppose the way people view what has happened on this island and have changed in many respects. I think you gave a good example of that with the people of Crossmaglen and how you were welcomed in there the time of the murder of Paul Quinn [2007]. Although lots of the news focus on Northern Ireland is to do with the flow of shoppers these days, there are things like the Paul Quinn murder, and the recent killings by republican dissidents, which remind us of our past. If you have got questions I will come to you in a moment, but I did want to ask Harold Good about these dissident killings, because you were talking about people being forgiven - are the dissidents deserving of that forgiveness? There is a consensus on the island that these people are in a minority. We spoke with Republican Sinn Féin on our own radio programme recently [’Loosetalk’, LM/FM]and we got a flood of calls and different people articulating the same point in many ways but all using the same word that what they were hearing was distasteful.

Rev. Harold Good: “We would need to get back for at least one whole day to just begin a discussion on what we mean by forgiveness. So I don’t want to give any bland answer to that one. But what I would say is that if we want to address the whole difficulty and threat of dissident republicanism, dissident groupings from any quarter, I think we have to do what we have done over all these years, is begin to try to engage with people. I recently was asked about this and I said ‘in my vocation my door is open to anybody.’ I wasn’t expecting my phone to ring the next moment or the next day to have a knock on the door from representatives of the dissidents but I do believe that we have got to seek ways of engaging with them as we have over all of these years engaged with others which has been a part of bringing us to where we now are. And I just don’t want to talk glibly about forgiveness except to say that forgiveness begins with an openness to being ready to try and understand where that person is coming from. That is the beginning on a journey towards forgiveness, to be open to understanding: I can’t forgive you until I understand where you are coming from; I have no right to ask you to forgive me unless I have the opportunity of helping you to understand where I am coming from and what led to what I did.”

Michael Reade: “Don’t these recent killings demonstrate how difficult it must be for people to forgive, because I think it is probably easier to look at something more recent and say, ‘that is an unforgiveable atrocity’, but for the victims in these circumstances surely the loss is just the same as those who died during a perceived war?”

Rev. Harold Good: “Absolutely, and I think there are some people - we have got to be very careful about making people feel guilty about not being able to forgive because none of us know
what would we be in that situation, how we would feel, and you have two people in Enniskillen - you had Gordon Wilson and you have Mr Dixon, and they responded in quite different ways to the same atrocity. I think that what has happened recently must have just reawakened all the memories and the hurts and the pain for a lot of people and the fear, and we mustn’t allow that to paralyse us,
and we must be very sensitive to what that has done to people who have suffered grieviously over these years and be there for them.

Michael Reade: “I would like to go to the floor now, to Margaret Urwin because we heard the question asked when Reverend Good was speaking: whether there can be reconciliation without truth, and I think this is something that you’d have something to say on, because you have been campaigning for truth for the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombs for so long.”

Q.1. Margaret Urwin [Justice for the Forgotten group]: “Thank you very much Michael, thanks for giving me the opportunity to respond. I would really like to compliment the three speakers on the work they have been doing over the years, helping to bring about a ceasefire and helping to talk to both sides of the community. But I suppose I would have to say I am disappointed really on two counts, having listened to the speakers. I really felt, number one, that you would have dealt more with the Eames-Bradley proposals …. I was disappointed to hear Brian [Feeney] say that they are unlikely to be implemented. Obviously we would feel that, particularly when the Northern Ireland Affairs committee are now again second-guessing Eames-Bradley. And we were there when they appeared before the Good Friday Agreement committee [Joint Oireachtas Commitee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement] of which Seymour is a member. I was disappointed that you didn’t deal more with the proposals.

“And the second thing that I was disappointed with I suppose was that there are victims in the 26 counties, the Republic of Ireland as well - there were at least 131 people killed in total south of the border. Now that may seem a very small amount compared to the number of people killed north of the border which obviously it is. But the people south of the border… I think it needs to be an all-Ireland, just like the Good Friday Agreement peace process: you had a bi-national approach, you had the British and Irish governments involved together from the very start and they worked together, and that is how they got everybody, all sides, on board, and that is how we were able to get to a ceasefire and eventually to the Good Friday Agreement. I think the British went on a solo run in appointing the Eames-Bradley committee without any reference to the Irish Government. Now I think that has left the Irish Government very sore. But I think it is extremely important that if the Legacy Commission is to be established - which is the most important part for us of their proposals - that it has to be a joint enterprise between both the British and the Irish governments. …. I think it just won’t take off unless both are involved.

Truth and reconciliation: “And just in terms of reconciliation …. Brian talked about victims’ groups in the North, and I am representing today a victims’ group here. We represent not just Dublin-Monaghan bombings but also families of the Dublin [incidents] in ‘72 and ‘73, families from Dundalk, Castleblaney, Belturbet, the Miami Showband family - although they were killed north of the border, their families live here. And we also work with the Historical Enquiries Team and a number of families have asked us to assist them on that front as well. So I think in terms of reconciliation and the question, ‘can you have reconciliation without truth?’ I don’t think you can have reconciliation without truth. I think you have to have truth first, and I think after that you have a hope of reconciliation coming. But I don’t think you can actually have reconciliation unless somebody says, ‘yes, I am responsible for that’, and ask forgiveness, and then I think there is a chance of reconciliation.

Michael Reade: “Responsibility - but is accountability necessary, do killers need to be jailed?”

Margaret Urwin: “No, I don’t think that is going to happen. I mean under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement…”

Michael Reade: “But that is the difficult aspect of it, for people to learn the truth and to accept the truth and then to move on knowing what the truth is?”

Margaret Urwin: “Yes, but I think the majority of people have accepted…I mean the people we represent - you are talking about at least 30 years ago, 35 years ago, so it is not going to happen that anybody is going to be convicted of the murders. Nobody is going to be convicted. We saw what happened in the Omagh case, where that was much more recent, but it is just not going to stand up in a court of law so people are not going to be convicted and the majority of people have accepted that. Just in terms of early release: that was very difficult for people, but of course there are an awful lot of others who never went to jail at all who got off scot free, like all the perpetrators of the atrocities of the victims that we represent.”

Michael Reade: “Let’s go back to the table and Deputy Crawford - maybe you would talk to the questions that Margaret has raised and your impressions on the Eames-Bradley recommendations?”

Seymour Crawford, TD: “Well for a start off I appreciate the comments made, but in 15 minutes to try to cover everything …. The first thing I want to say is - and I have said this before - when I got elected to Dáil Éireann, one of the first issues I tried to deal with was the Monaghan bombing. I went to all of the families concerned there and talked to them and - with one exception - they wanted to move on with their lives at that time.”

Margaret Urwin: “Sorry, what do you mean by ‘move on’?”

Seymour Crawford: “To simply get on with their lives. They didn’t want me to be raising it at the time…”

Margaret Urwin: “Yes, but all of the families subsequently became involved.”

Seymour Crawford: “Sorry, I am telling you exactly as I found it. Like Archie Harper, he was murdered in that bomb, I was extremely close with his family. The McNally brothers - Dan and Eddie McNally did all my work with machines, they were extremely close with my family. So I was talking with people that I was extremely friendly with and I knew exactly. …At national level, in Dáil Éireann, it is dealt with by our party leader - whether John Bruton or Enda Kenny or whoever - and when questions were put down they were put down in their name, not in my name. But I have worked with those groups and I understand fully how some of them feel today. I certainly have some understanding of what they went through. Now on the Eames-Bradley report, as you say we have had them in at the Good Friday Committee in Dáil Éireann, we have had them twice at the British-Irish Assembly as it is now known, we met them privately a number of times as an executive of the Assembly. They were given an absolutely impossible situation to deal with. Now clearly the issue that was highlighted as a result of the report was the payment, and I can tell you from a direct family point of view, I rang a cousin’s husband about his sister’s serious illness and he wasn’t interested in talking to me about that, he was so het up about the fact that £12, 000 sterling would be paid to any of those people who had bombed or their families. So that really spoiled a lot of good things in that report. But the major issue is - and it is typical of many governments - that it is now being put back to another group to actually discuss, and that is the sad thing about it, that it isn’t really being allowed to move forward. Actually Lord Eames and Denis Bradley are no longer in existence as far as that is concerned. So it is a problem and it is something that we will certainly continue to try to deal with at both the Assembly and at the Good Friday Agreement committee in Dáil Éireann. But I just want to clarify the situation on my involvement because it was been quoted umpteen times that I have never asked any questions about it in the Dail, that I had no interest in it or whatever. I certainly have a very, very keen interest in it. I was involved with many of the people, many of the families, and continue to do what I can from advice in what way they want it to go.”

Q. 2. “Steven McColl, Ulster Unionist Party, a question for Brian Feeney. Thank you very much for your contribution. I greatly appreciate it, but is it inevitable that we will revisit the past from what you said and if not, why will we not? Will we go back to violence?”

Brian Feeney: “No I don’t think so. I think Harold Good was quoting a placard he saw in Auschwitz which is actually a translation of a Spanish philosopher, a man called George Santayana, who said ‘those who don’t understand the past are condemned to repeat it’, and I think that the people who were combatants on both sides have certainly re-examined everything that happened over the last 30/40 years and they have changed. They have changed their attitude, they have changed their outlook and I am pretty certain there is no going back, certainly from the current generation of leaders on both republican and loyalist sides. I think that there is a very serious problem with the dissidents, and this is a growing problem, partly because they don’t have any coherent leadership, but also because it is happening at a time of serious social and economic distress. And there are a great many teenagers, mostly youths who have too much testosterone seething through their arteries, and no work to do, and no education, and too much access to drugs, and they are very, very easily led by men who are only ten years older than them who are prepared to go out and do all kinds of things, and as you have seen in the last month, a lot of hoax bombs, burning vehicles, that sort of stuff. The people who have learned from the past, it really is up to them to step in, and I mean the people on the republican side in particular. It is up to them to step in and stop this getting off the ground again. And I know, certainly in the last week, the leadership of Sinn Fein have tried to begin to do this by holding a series of public meetings. The first one was in Galbally on Wednesday night, and Galbally isn’t exactly the centre of the universe. For those of you who don’t know where it is it is in East Tyrone, but it is a really republican heartland. And Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Michelle Gildernew (Mid-Ulster Assembly member), they all went there on Wednesday night and they had a public meeting. They are having a public meeting in West Belfast tomorrow at lunch time to try and address these problems. To answer your question, no, I don’t think we will go back to where we were. The causes have gone, there is no public support, in fact there is public revulsion at what the dissidents have been doing. So we are not going to repeat the circumstances that existed 40 years ago because the circumstances aren’t there anymore.”

Michael Reade: “There is a maturity, as Frankie Gallagher [UPRG] put it, restraint on the part of the UDA etc?”

Brian Feeney: “That is right. I think both sides - loyalist and republican - have come through a whole series, well some people talk about it as an epiphany. But it was over a long number of years where they were meeting various groups, and mediation groups. They were taken away to South Africa to talk to people who had been through similar difficulties ….”

Michael Reade: “Isn’t that where the risk lies? That is where people would be fearful of there being a risk, that something would provoke a retaliation that sets off another spiral?”
Brian Feeney: “That is the problem, but, as I say, there certainly is no appetite on either side among the leadership of the mainstream groups to go back.”

Rev. Harold Good: “One quick comment. I take what you are saying on dissidents, and I take entirely what Brian has been saying about the social aspects of it. But there is also an ideological aspect, a deep-seated ideological aspect to it, as well, it’s Irish history repeating itself. Irish history repeating itself: ‘we have been betrayed’. If it wasn’t Michael Collins, it is Martin McGuinness. Similarly on the Protestant/Unionist side: ‘here is a man who told us for all these years that the world is flat and now he is suggesting that it might even be oval and if you wait long enough it might even be round’, and that is very difficult for people to cope with, that they have been committed to a leadership that has told them something all of these years and now appears … and so, dissidents, the ones we are fearful of are the ones who will put it into physical force, but there are dissidents who are out to destroy in other ways.”

Michael Reade: “Do they have an argument when they talk about the Sinn Fein leadership selling out? What is the difference between the dissidents now and the early days of the provisional IRA?”

Rev. Harold Good: “The world has changed, and I think we have all changed and they haven’t quite understood that. But 90% of today’s conflicts in the world are attributed to unresolved conflicts of the past. If we don’t deal with this we are going to be returning to it. ….”

Steve McColl: “But we have to go back to the mindset… you know ‘ the Brits are still here’ - The mindset is still there….”

Rev. Good: “Yes, but the people have said that that’s not to be expressed by force.”

Michael Reade: “We are going to watch the time. But we go to Julitta now.”

Julitta Clancy (Meath Peace Group): “Thank you very much for all your input. Margaret [Urwin] raised the question of Eames-Bradley. It is a very complicated document. There is a lot in it. We actually did invite the members of the Consultative Group to address us but we couldn’t get anybody from there, and we found it difficult to get politicians to talk about it. We have put up some short summaries of the Eames-Bradley findings and recommendations on our display board outside; there are some good things in the report but, as Seymour said, unfortunately the compensation issue got everybody’s attention. But I want to go back. Harold Good, you mentioned three things that we have to take responsibility for: the circumstances that gave rise to the conflict, the hurt we inflicted on each other and the healing. I would go along with you on that but it seems to run at odds with what Brian was saying [that there would be no reconciliation in our lifetime]. You also mentioned the issue of ‘unresolved conflict’ and that is very important. Only recently in Fermanagh, at a dialogue meeting organised by the Tempo Historical Society in Dooneen. there was a gentleman at the back who said, that, while he could not condone the actions of republican dissidents, ‘until the British leave this island there will be no peace’. That and similar sentiments are out there, so there is a need for groups all around the country to address this. Now just to go back to the Eames-Bradley report: I was disappointed there was really no mention in it of the south at all - apart from mentioning the cooperation of the Irish government - and it was like as if we have nothing to do with it. If the group was set up to deal with the past, it should have been asked to look at the whole context as well as the challenges, because we [in the south] are a major part of the problem and of the resolution of it.

“And Brian talked about the victims groups, in a certain way you are a realist, Brian, and you are telling us how it is, but for us to expect some of those victims groups to sit in the same room together is a little bit far-fetched when many of us haven’t been able to do it. And it has taken us a long time. I know we hear the more noisy ones on the radio, but many of the groups are doing really good work, courageous work, support work and outreach and other areas. And we do need to open some of these wounds and look at what we have done to each other. And there are, as Brian said, young men that are being led into this again. We have met and discussed with dissident groups in the past - there is an ideology there that needs to be addressed, and people have to just keep at it engaging and engaging. So I am delighted to hear that the Sinn Fein leadership are doing that….”

Michael Reade: “We will just get another couple of people and then maybe respond to all three at the same time…”

Q.4. Marie MacSweeney (Drogheda): “… I will address this question to Reverend Good. Reverend Good, you mentioned a film recently, a fim starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt [Five Minutes of Heaven]. I think the message, if there were to be a message in that film, was that the person who needed to forgive, the victim, couldn’t do it through the mechanisms that had been set up and was only able to do it when he saw the vulnerability and the powerlessness of the person who had caused this misery. And I am wondering if that is reflected at all in real life, in that sometimes victims approach the person, the perpetrator and they are met with a confident, unrepentant swagger, and I am wondering would you comment on the difference between the film and real life. Thank you.”

Q.5. David Murray (Cookstown Churches Forum). “There are a couple of points I would like to make. The first one is to Brian Feeney and perhaps the other members – that government can’t do anything. The British Government has done a lot. Patten has been put in place [Patten Commission on Policing] We now have the PSNI. When Patten was doing his consultation I wrote a letter in and suggested that the title should be the Police Service for Northern Ireland. I am an ex-RUC officer and I am very proud to have served in that force, and I am very proud to have served with all the men and women who served through the period. Now some of us did things that were wrong - the same with the UDR where I served for 20 years. But by and large the people were doing a job that was essentially necessary. So the government is doing something, it is putting situations in place so that people can actually share the organs of government. But the reconciliation can’t come from government, it must come from us. We have to do the reconciling. I think part of the reconciling, as a sort of unionist with a small ‘u’ from Northern Ireland, I think that Eire has to move forward as well. The last Constitution produced in Ireland is a fantastic document. But let’s move beyond that. What about the Garda? How many Northern Protestants are serving in the Garda? How many northern Protestants are serving in the army, or the civil service, or the teaching profession? If we want to get together in Ireland as Irish, the Irish have to come and meet us.

Identity: “And I don’t consider myself English, and I get very angry when people say I am English or British: I am British and proud of it, I am also Irish and proud of that. One of the things that I find difficult is that a man called McGuinness - two men called McGuinness - held guns during the troubles, both on opposite sides. One was a major in the UDR, a friend of mine, and the other was what we call a terrorist in Derry. Both are now in government together. Now that is reconciliation in a big way. The other thing is about names: ‘Hume’ and ‘Adams’ are both lowland Scots names, not Irish. And we have to forget this ‘I am Irish and you are British’ or ‘I am Irish and you are English’. Forget it. We are all Irish. We are all in this together. If we can’t sort this out in this country, what right have we to tell any other country in the world how to sort their problems out? As I said I get very angry about being called English or British by someone who says ‘I am Irish’. Because Martin McGuinness is as British as I am, I mean if he takes money out of his pocket it has got the Queen’s head on it, and he goes to the bank, it is a British bank. He sits in a British parliament in Belfast. He is British, he is also Irish, and so am I! And I have every right to be Irish, and I don’t want some wee skitter from the Falls Road or West Derry telling me that I have no right to live here. That is not on. Let’s get it together. So start with the government and give us the tools to do it and we have to work then at the bottom and reconcile. Now I said I had two points and that was one of them, and I have forgotten the other one! Thank you.”

Michael Reade: “We have had three speakers there. We will conclude on the points that were raised and maybe in reverse order. Seymour Crawford, as the gentleman said, there was cross-border trade we know. People coming from Northern Ireland to claim their dole in the Republic. What are we doing as a state to invite unionists or Protestants into areas here such as the Garda Siochana as the man suggested, or what should we be doing?”

Seymour Crawford: “Well first of all I’d like to just make two comments on cross-border cooperation. One is in that tragedy, the Paul Quinn murder, a relationship has been built up between the PSNI and garda, like never was had before. The fact that the garda were able to go in to South Armagh and work with the PSNI to visit homes and do all that shows what can be done through cooperation. The effort to curtail the laundering of diesel and other fuels last week again is important from an economic point of view and also to stop the funding to some of the organisations that certainly would have abused it in the past. Now the issue of people getting involved, I suppose that is one that I feel fairly sore about because one of the first things that I was asked when I was elected to Dáil Éireann, was by a Northern Ireland journalist working for RTE asking ‘how does it feel like to be a Presbyterian representing such a small group in Dáil Éireann?’ I said, ‘Sorry, I was elected by the people of Cavan-Monaghan to serve them, not on any religious basis but because I put my name forward, solely for that reason. There are three Jews in the Dail, are you suggesting that they are representing just the Jews?’ He said ‘that is racist, cut, cut!’ I said: ’sorry it is no different than the question you asked me.’ So you know there is need for people to put themselves forward to apply for these jobs and I believe if they apply for them, there are a lot of people working in Dublin in the commercial side, and I don’t believe there is any reason why if they apply for the gardai or the army that they wouldn’t be brought in. There are an awful lot of people living in Northern Ireland working with the Irish Army, as we learned when the army barracks in Monaghan was shut. We were given the addresses - not individual townlands - but that somebody lived in Tyrone, somebody lived in Armagh and elsewhere. There is no reason why it shouldn’t be the other way around.”

Michael Reade: “But surely you have to have a recruitment campaign to take that a step further?”

Seymour Crawford: “Absolutely, I have no problem with that whatsoever and I know it is something that I will certainly bring up. If we go back to the Sunningdale Agreement back in the ’70s, there were people then who realised that there was a need for cooperation. But unfortunately it took another 30 years for others to actually read that agreement and re-devise it. I am proud of the fact that my own party was part of that and led the way on it, and all other groups now realise that being involved - as the DUP and the Sinn Fein are involved in Stormont today - is the only way forward and hopefully we can sort that out.

“Going back to the issue of the Eames-Bradley report, there was an independent report carried out by the Victims’ Commission under the auspices of the late John Wilson. In fact that is where part of the payment issue has actually come from. But even in that, and with all the efforts that John Wilson made, and he certainly made genuine efforts, the Coulson family - where the late Billy Fox was murdered [March 1974] - wasn’t part of any agreement or any settlement through that because they were not related to the person who was murdered that day. Yet they carried that, and Mrs Coulson especially carried that issue to her grave and she got no compensation, so I know what it is like and I have dealt so often with George Coulson and his wife and I don’t apologise for naming them but they were extreme victims of a situation where Billy Fox was murdered in their yard., the house was burnt down, they were left homeless, everything, and yet they weren’t recognised as victims. So you know there are a lot of issues that are very hard to resolve. But I will certainly bring up issues that you raised.” [Editor’s note: John Wilson of the Victims’ Commission addressed MPG talk no. 32 on 24 March, 1999. The Commission’s report, ‘A Place and a Name’, was published in Dublin in July 1999]

Michael Reade: “Reverend Good, I think the question about television drama versus reality is a very interesting one in that you could possibly answer that in every way feasible because pain is individual to people, and maybe that is a very strong indication of the scale of the problem because you haven’t got a specific problem - what you have, in terms of bringing reconciliation to people, are thousands of different problems.”

Rev. Harold Good: “As I said, that programme raises for me many more questions than answers. That is not a bad thing. I think we do need to be struggling with the questions because there are no neat answers, and I was thinking about the tension between our thoughts for the perpetrator and our thoughts for the victim in that programme because you kept moving from one to the other in your sympathy. I was taking part in something in Corrymeela a while ago and there was a speaker there - he wasn’t actually from here - but he was saying, ‘perpetrators have short memories and victims have long memories’. And I challenged that because in my experience perpetrators and victims have very long memories and there are people who may appear to us to be nonchalant about where they have been, and what they have done, but I can tell you that is not just as easy as it might appear, for all kinds of reasons. The appearance can belie what lies beneath the surface and … if we are serious about the healing of the hurts and healing of this land we have to be conscious of the damage that has been done. We can argue that many have damaged themselves - and they have - but if we are serious about a process that is going to take us forward, we have got to try and assure we don’t leave anybody behind. We are all very human and there are people we would like to leave behind but the history of this island has been one of disaster when we have sought to leave each other out, to leave each other behind. Now there are people who will exclude themselves from any process, and we can only take people so far, but we must ensure that we do everything we can, as a society, in this journey not to leave people behind. I want us to be positive as we go from this room and it sounds trite to almost say it, we have said it so often, but to see where we are, we have got to remember from where we did start. And when you make that comparison - as to where we are now and where we started on this journey - it is a very new and different place.”

Michael Reade: “I will just ask Brian Feeney for a few last words and our apologies to the next session but I hope they will understand. We were a few minutes late starting and I hope you will agree it was worth staying with our speakers. Brian, you had this issue of the victims’ groups. You were saying there are 60 of them, some of them have vested interests, there are agendas at play, but, as Julitta says, many of them are doing very valuable work.”
Brian Feeney: “Absolutely. I mean there is no dispute about that. My opening remarks really were to congratulate the Meath Peace Group for persevering for years and years. I want to get back to the overall point that I was making. I didn’t say the government couldn’t do anything. On the contrary, what I say again is that the government is behaving in a very cynical and hypocritical fashion. Yes they did set up a Patten Commission on policing, they set up a commission to reform the Crown Prosecution Service, they set up a commission to deal with the released prisoners. All that sort of stuff and that was all done. What I am saying is that they have kicked the issue of victims, and dealing with the past, into the long grass. They have repeatedly found ways to avoid dealing with this issue. I give the example of the four commissioners which was an outrageous piece of nonsense, just a political smokescreen. The Eames-Bradley commission to me was yet another example of that. As Margaret Urwin said quite correctly, that was set up, it was a solo run by the Northern Ireland Office. It is not going to succeed. From the republican point of view: they never accepted it because it was set up by the British Government, and their position was that they were one of the actors in the tragedy and that therefore they couldn’t set up a Commission at their own behest. So, as I said, I don’t think Eames-Bradley is going to run but it will be another couple of years of consultations, and part of the problem of course - to be charitable for a very brief second or two - part of the problem is that every so often there is an election and we get a new Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State then undoes what his predecessor has done and he tries to make a bit of a splash by bringing in what is known in the Northern Ireland Office as a ‘new initiative’.”

Michael Reade: “Thank you. We will conclude the session there and allow you a very short break. I am sure you will join me in thanking our speakers here this morning, Harold Good, Brian Feeney and Seymour Crawford.”

Cllr. Phil Cantwell (Meath Co Council): “Chair, perhaps in the light of what we have been discussing, we could have a minute’s silence?”

Michael Reade: “Yes, absolutely.” [Minute’s silence held]

End of session I

Biographical notes on speakers – session I:

Rev. Harold Good, OBE, was ordained a Minister of the Methodist Church in 1962 and has served in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the U.S.A. In 1968 he was appointed to the loyalist Shankill Road in Belfast. In 1973, he was appointed Director of the Corrymeela Centre of Reconciliation and in 2001 he was elected President of the Methodist Church in Ireland. Harold has held several appointments in the public and voluntary sectors:- Human Rights Commissioner, prison chaplain, chair of the N.I. Association for the Care and Re-settlement of Offenders, member of the Coiste Steering Group and founder member of Healing Through Remembering. Throughout the long years of conflict he has been deeply involved with people from both sides in the search for a peaceful resolution. As a result, and having earned their trust, he and Fr. Alec Reid were chosen to be independent witnesses to verify the de-commissioning of IRA weaponry, and in December 2005 they were jointly honoured by the Basque Government with the Rene Cassin Human Rights Award. Harold Good was awarded an MBE in 1970 and an OBE in 1985; in 2007 he received the World Methodist Peace Award and in 2008 was awarded honorary doctorates from Queen’s University of Belfast and the University of Ulster.

Seymour Crawford, TD (FG, Cavan/Monaghan) has been a Dail Deputy since 1992. He was Fine Gael spokesperson on Food & Horticulture from 1993-1994, and on Food, Horticulture & Disadvantaged Areas in 1994. He has been a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Body for several years and is currently Vice-Chairperson. Since 1965, Seymour has been a member of the Irish Farmers Association, serving as representative for Co. Monaghan (1965-79), Chairman of the National Livestock Committee (1979-84) and Vice President of Ulster/North Leinster Committee (1984-88). He represented the Livestock Committee on COPA in Brussels between 1979 and 1986 and was a Chairman of the EC Beef & Veal Advisory Committee from 1981 to 1986. He was a Board Member of CBF (Irish Livestock & Meat Board) from 1979 to 1986. In 1986 Seymour received the Bastow Award for services to meat and livestock matters.

Brian Feeney, a political columnist with the Irish News, is a leading nationalist commentator and frequent broadcaster and lecturer on Northern Ireland affairs. A historian by profession, he is Head of History at St Mary’s University College, Belfast. He was an SDLP councillor for thirteen years. Since 1990 he has worked in many conflict areas in eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East training political parties, developing policy strategies and monitoring elections. He is co-author of Lost Lives: the story of the men, women and children killed in the Northern Ireland troubles. In 2001 the book won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs award for its contribution to reconciliation in Ireland and Europe. Other publications: Sinn Fein: A Hundred Turbulent Years and A Pocket history of the Troubles.

Meath Peace Group report: Session I recorded by Denis Finegan and Judith Dunne
Transcribed by Judith Dunne; edited by Julitta Clancy