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Good Morning
I left Northern Ireland in the mid 1980’s to study in Scotland never intending to return because of the conflict here… And over a 14 day period in March 1988 there were 3 momentous, connected blood-soaked events, that summed up the reasons I left, but ironically played a part in my ultimate return. They began with the shooting of three IRA members by the SAS in Gibraltar and culminated with the brutal death of 2 British soldiers at a funeral in West Belfast. The middle event was on this day that year, when a loyalist gunman Michael Stone attacked the funeral of the three IRA members in Milltown Cemetery with hand-grenades and a handgun, killing three mourners and injuring more than 50 people.
In many ways those 14 days epitomised for me and many the history of our conflict, and indeed of conflict in general. One death leading inexorably to another, and much of it increasingly playing out in the eyes of the media. But what we didn’t know was that behind the scenes various people including a priest and politicians were setting in train a chain of event that brought about the IRA ceasefire and lay the groundwork of the subsequent peace process.
Sometimes what we see up front is not the whole story. Here two things were going on in parallel: the public bloody business of atrocity and reprisal, a seemingly never ending cycle of recrimination and revenge, and a private, courageous process of political bridge-building. The former has never been fully resolved, and the latter needs to continue.
God of the whole picture, give us hope in the face of despair, wisdom to see beyond the immediate and the obvious and the courage to do the right thing. AMEN