Senator Maurice Hayes, Chairman, The Ireland Funds Advisory Committee reviews 'Lost Lives'

- Lost Lives
David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thorton
Mainstream Publishing

In the troubles the names of the competing chiefs are writ large, whether politicians or paramilitaries or both, and those of the victims are forgotten by all but their nearest and dearest. Who now can recall the name of the first victim of the troubles, all of 30 years ago, or indeed the last. Who now remembers that the first member of the RUC to die in this phase, Constable Arbuckle, died at the hands of loyalists, as indeed did the last; Constable O'Reilly. Now that the peace has begun to be put together, there is a growing need to remember the victims, and to consider the plight not only of those who have been left behind, the relatives, family and friends, but the seriously injured, often carrying severe physical disablement and psychological trauma as their memento of a struggle that was never glorious, but generally sordid, mean and demoralizing.

Up until now there has been no concerted effort, no agreed formula by which to remember and honor the dead or to comfort and support the living. A main difficulty in any official programme to do so is the tendency to interpose political and politico-moral judgements.

Very few wars end in a draw, in very few cases do the survivors remain on the battlefield, and in fewer still are victors and vanquished named on the same memorial. The former Archbishop of Canterbury got himself into a lot of trouble at a ceremony to remember the British dead of the Falklands War when he prayed for the Argentinean dead also. Even 50 years after World War II it was difficult to arrange the joint remembrance of Allied and Axis dead as having made equal and complementary sacrifices.

In Northern Ireland the dilemma is expressed in the form of a denial of moral equivalency. There are good dead and bad dead depending on which side the speaker supports. For some, the good dead who deserve to be honored are the innocent victims and members of the security forces, working to enforce the law; others are terrorists, outside the moral code, not to be mentioned in the same breath. For others, the bombers and snipers are the heroes, risking and giving their lives for a noble cause; innocent victims are the regrettable casualties of war, and the others are members of an oppressive war machine who became legitimate targets on or off duty when they first put on a uniform or accepted a contract to carry out minor repairs to a police station.

Four Belfast journalists, having labored for eight years in collecting information and creating a database, have published a book* which lists all the fatal casualties of the troubles, 3,357 in all. They are David McKittrick, Journalist of the Year with The Independent In London, Chris Thornton, Security Correspondent of the Belfast Telegraph, Seamus Kelters of the BBC and Brian Freeney, historian and columnist in the Irish News. They solve the problem of moral equivalency by journalistic objectivity, by treating everybody the same and by setting down as accurately and as dispassionately as possible the circumstances of each death, the organizations involved, the perpetrators, if known, and the outcome of any subsequent inquiry or trial. Survivors too are treated with dignity, recognizing, in the words of Rev. Ian Paisley, quoted here at a funeral ceremony for one of the Omagh victims, "There is no difference between a broken mother's heart when it is a Roman Catholic mother and the broken mother's heart who is a Protestant or a Mormon."

devastation in Omagh

Having labored for eight years and produced over a million words and a thousand pages of text, the authors struggled to find a publisher. Eighty turned them down, and in the end publication at a reasonable price became a possibility only because of The Ireland Funds and the Joseph Rowntree Trust. They are all there, the victims, the grandfather and the babe in arms, the octogenarian in the pub and the twins in the womb, the last Viceroy of India and the Pakistani char-wallah, the lawyer and the litigant, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief. There is too the appalling roll-call of disaster, the sites of slaughter which dot the Ulster countryside in a litany of shame and suffering. There are indeed clusters, in West Belfast and South Armagh, in the Murder Triangle of Mid-Ulster and the multiple interfaces of North Belfast. There is the Abercorn Restaurant, the Four Steps Inn, McGuirk's Bar and Graham's Bookies Shop, the Shankhill fish-shop, the Miami Showband, Halls Mills, Teebane, Ballygawley, the Mountain Lodge, La Mon, Loughinisland, Claudy, Greysteel, Narrow Water, Enniskillen, Omagh, Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, bloody every day, the bloody punctuation marks of the story of thirty years of strife.

As well as providing an account of each episode, the book sets out in statistical tables the classification of casualties, of who did what on whom. These make fascinating reading. The Provos, which, the grafitti informs the world, "Rose from the ashes of Bombay Street to protect the nationalist population", actually managed to kill more Catholics than any other single agency, and more than all the crown forces put together. The RUC, who have been demonized in republican propaganda as a trigger-happy force actually suffered six deaths for every one they inflicted-303 dead police officers against 52 killed by the police. There is the appalling escalation of killing post-internment, with half of all deaths taking place in one five year period in the mid-seventies.

The years since the ceasefires have been relatively quiet, despite the protestations of those who say nothing has changed- the random murder of drug-dealers, the persistence of loyalist attacks on Catholics, the atrocity perpetuated by the Real IRA at Omagh; the single most murderous incident of all the grisly catalogue. The casualties of Dublin and Monaghan are here too, as well as those of London, Guilford, Birmingham and Warrington as well as those who died on mainland Europe. There are too, secondary casualties, who died on hearing the news, but no telling the numbers who lived for years with the grief or found they could not live with it. There is the Romeo and Juliet story of the beautiful and gifted young student who committed suicide after her boyfriend had been murdered in a random attack on his father's shop. However this is not simply some gory body-count, a prurient revisiting of the savagery of yester-year. David McKittrick describes it as an alternative history of Northern Ireland, -one from the bottom up.

The first victim listed is a man called Joseph Scullion in 1966, an inoffensive drunk weaving his way home along the Falls Road when he was picked-off and shot by a gang of loyalist gunmen looking for the blood of any Catholic. The same gang shot a young Catholic barman, Peter Ward, having an after-hours drink in a Protestant bar, and generally thought of as the first to be shot in anger. His killer, Gusty Spence, survived to become an architect of the peace process and a remarkable force for reconciliation and politicization in the loyalist ranks.

In a moving passage, he is told by the victims' mother twenty-five years later, as she expresses the heroic charity of so many who have suffered grievously, "I forgive you on one condition. That you do everything you can for the peace of the country. Nobody should suffer as I suffer, for I never forget my Peter." To flick through these pages is to retrace one's own steps over a minefield, to meet again friends and friends of friends who have perished, the children of friends who have died by their own hand or who have died as policemen or as paramilitaries. There are the innocents-more of them than anything else-who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in a cross-fire when out on an errand, shot in mistake, stopped on the road and shot without warning. There is the awful scream of the man who broke down a door in East Belfast, shot the occupant dead, and ran out shouting, "Christ, I've got the wrong house." Or the cynical rhyming slang of the loyalist bomber who killed an old Protestant lady by mistake, "I done a funny wonder (blunder)." There are the sad figures shot as informers, the disappeared, the scores killed in internencine warfare between and within warring factions, the small figures obscured by the death of the mighty. In remembering Mountbatten, who, apart from his family, thinks of Paul Maxwell, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy working for the summer on the boats. Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the murdered Ambassador now has a prize named after him. Who now remembers Judith Cooke, a junior civil servant who died in the front seat. Apart from Catholic policemen and Protestant members of the UDR, one very vulnerable occupational group was the judiciary -mainly Catholic judges. Maurice Gibson, a Lord of Appeal, blown up with his wife at the Border; Martin McBirney, a civil rights lawyer, shot before breakfast, at the same time as Rory Conaghan, a judge of ferocious integrity, was shot before his eight year old daughter; William Staunton, shot leaving his daughter to school; William Doyle shot driving an old lady home from mass; and Mary Travers, shot down while attempting to defend her Magistrate father, who was also riddled, but survived. Then there was Pat Finucane, murdered too, before his family, with the suspicion of security-force collusion, and Rosemary Nelson. Oddly enough, the groups which rightly condemn the latter when civil rights activists meet around the world, have little time to spare for murdered judges.

A browse through the very complex index throws up amazing connections. One man claims responsibility for involvement in up to sixty murders, including the Miami Showband. He was associated too with another strange figure, Captain Robert Nairac, old-boy of Ampleforth, a cross between Biggles and Lawrence of Arabia, an undercover soldier, himself one of the disappeared, and implicated by a former colleague in British Intelligence as having been involved in some way or other in a series of unexplained killings. He was also awarded the George Cross. This book is more than a memorial. It is a powerful series of parables on the absolute futility of violence. Those who lived by the sword died by the sword, but they tended to take with them countless others who only wanted a quiet life and to get on with their neighbors. Politically the sacrifice and the strife were futile. Not for nothing is the book called Lost Lives.

You would have to look hard at the fine print of the Good Friday Agreement to find something which was not on offer at Sunningdale, 3,000 lives ago. There is no political advance which could not have been more easily, more quickly and more cheaply achieved by the original Civil Rights Movement. This book should be in every school in the land; North and South-with a fresh page turned every day and a public reading of one of the stories, so that future generations might profit from our folly, and might ponder the cost of violence and the sacrifices made by many, willingly or unwillingly, in achieving the present uneasy peace.

This article first appeared in Connections Summer 2000 issue