Ealing North
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Steve Pound MP Ealing North |
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Is there hope for Northern Ireland? March 2005 - Gazette Article I like to think that I am pretty thick skinned. In my job you can’t show emotion because you are the person that people turn to for help with their miseries, they don’t want to see you breaking down so you have to be strong and bottle up the feelings that are often agonising. That’s the theory. In Belfast last week I lost it for the first time. I was struggling through the sleet and snow swirls to a house in North Belfast where I was meeting a group working with children whose parents or brothers or sisters had been killed in the troubles. A teenage girl started speaking. She said that the happiest day of her life had been to see Manchester United beat Arsenal with goals by Giggs and Scholes. She and her Dad made the journey from Belfast to Old Trafford to follow their team and the next game was against Chelsea. She told me that she and her Dad weren’t sure that they could afford to see the game but decided to borrow the money and go anyway. They got back home and her father was killed in front of her. The Police covered him with a sheet and wouldn’t let her touch him so she stood and stared at the man she went to football with. Her father lying in the street with a bullet in his head. Someone else told me how her aunt and her father had been blown up in a bomb attack on a fish and chip shop and a boy said that he had never met his father who was killed when he was four months old. How on earth can people cope with this sort of horror? I freely admit that I couldn’t keep the tears back and I still haven’t stopped shaking. The mood in that anonymous house in North Belfast was, of course, sombre. Working with children who have suffered this scale and degree of trauma is draining and the staff burn out after a year or two. I couldn’t have stood it for days – let alone years. The one thing that had kept them going was the thought that the Peace Process that followed the Good Friday Agreement was on track and changing people’s lives in the North of Ireland. Over forty children are numbered amongst the 3,600 people who have died in the Troubles and this doesn’t count the five British Army soldiers who were killed before they saw their eighteenth birthdays. In all 26% of all the victims were aged 22 or under and we cannot count the number of widows and orphans created by the killings in the thirty years from 1969. The peace process is stalled and under greater pressure than ever before. I’m not in the business of blame and recrimination. Enough politicians waste their time on that futile exercise. I wouldn’t wish the experience that I suffered last week to be visited on anyone else but wonder if those who seem to think more of their own ideology or image would be prepared to risk everything that has been won if they could have sat quietly listening to Saoirse and the other children and teenagers saying how they felt that their hearts had stopped at the moment that their father died. They have to have a future and we cannot let another generation see their hopes die with their loved ones in the green fields and back alleys. |
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| Disclaimer | Copyright | Designed by Bassam Mahfouz. Promoted by Julian Bell, The Labour Party, Ruskin Hall, 16 Church Road, W3 8PP on behalf of Steve Pound MP |
