Voices
Gail McConnell was once a happy three-and-a-half-year-old, an only child, living with her parents off the Belmont Road, close to the Stormont Estate in Belfast. All changed on the morning of March 6, 1984. Two IRA members came to kill her 35-year-old father, Bill. He was a target because he worked as an assistant governor at The Maze Prison.
Gail and her mother, Beryl, were at the front door waving goodbye as he prepared to leave for work. He was doing his daily routine of checking the underside of his car for booby traps when the two gunmen shot him and left him to bleed to death.
Thirty-four years later, in a Belfast Telegraph interview, Beryl recalled: “At the time my husband was murdered I didn’t know anything about who these people were but I was praying for them, thinking what they have done is a very serious thing, and I was praying: ‘Please Lord, don’t let them murder anybody else’.”
Nowadays the little girl who saw her father shot dead works in the English department of Queen’s University Belfast. Gail McConnell is also a published poet.
Last Sunday night, she featured in an event at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Her contribution was in video format. It was all the more powerful because it was filmed, close up, in black and white.
The packed theatre was silent, as Gail McConnell began to speak:
“I was 17 in the spring of 1998, reading Irish history and studying politics at school. Our current affairs society hosted representatives of the DUP, Sinn Féin and the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition to try to understand the range of perspectives on the place we call ‘home’. We had a sense of politicians as change makers and we were quietly optimistic about the future that the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement might offer.
Had I had a vote, I would have ticked the “Yes” box and I would have done so in the knowledge that I was voting for the early release from prison of one of my father’s murderers.”
*****
Linda Ervine was another Belfast woman who featured in the Abbey Theatre event.
She is the sister-in-law of the late David Irvine, a former loyalist paramilitary, who founded the Progressive Unionist Party and supported the Good Friday Agreement.
She explained how in a loyalist community, she grew up without a word of Irish, never heard it spoken and didn’t even know it existed. That changed just over ten years ago when she was introduced to the language at a taster session with a cross-community women’s group.
She explained how she fell in love with Irish when she came on it. She said she has realised that the language “does belong to me and it is part of who I am; as a Protestant from East Belfast, learning Irish hasn’t taken anything away from me but it has enriched my life.”
She concluded by saying: “Go raibh míle maith agat to the people who brought about the Good Friday Agreement and allowed her to do that”.
*****
Another Belfast native, Michael Longley, also graced the Abbey stage. He explained how he wrote his poem “Ceasefire” in 1994 when rumours of an IRA ceasefire were circulating. The inspiration for it was “the dignified Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was murdered in the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing”.
Longley’s sonnet draws on the section of Homer’s Greek epic poem, The Iliad, where the old king, Priam, travels to the camp of Achilles to beg for the body of his son, Hector, whom Achilles has killed in combat. Longley’s poem finishes with the unforgettable lines:
“I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”
As the 83-year-old poet made his way from the stage, violinist Aoife Ní Bhriain, began what was an unforgettable performance of Locatelli’s “The Harmonic Labyrinth.” It was masterful because it captured a sense of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations – what the chairman of the discussions, Senator George Mitchell described as “the 700 days of failure that led to one day of success”: the strains, the setbacks, the brink-of-failure moments, the stretches well beyond the comfort zone and finally the blessed relief.
*****
During her Abbey Theatre contribution, Gail McConnell also spoke about the aftermath of what we call The Troubles.
“Intergenerational trauma is the ongoing legacy of that conflict. And 25 years on from 1998, I am more conscious of that than ever before. Many of the 18- to 25-year-olds I teach tell me they feel the impact of the conflict keenly. This is a generation born after the Agreement, a generation who cannot recall history being made in its ratification but a generation whose physical and mental health are impacted by a violent conflict that predates them; a generation who still live through that ‘after’.
We owe them so much. The politicians elected to govern in Ireland, in the UK and in a devolved Assembly that hasn’t been in session for over a third of its life – seven years – owe them so much.
25 years on, let us hold them in mind, for whatever comes after.”
*****
The Abbey event, Gail McConnell’s contribution included, was delicately sculpted by Alan Gilsenan to give a sense of Ireland’s journey over the past 25 years: Where it has come from, where it is now and what the future might hold.
A critical element in the story of change, south and north, is how we have learned to say “yes” or even “maybe” to what were “no” and no-go areas of our lives.
Challenging and shedding what for past generations was taboo, restricted or forbidden, refusing to tolerate what is unacceptable, taking risks and daring to hope are more and more the instincts of citizens, north and south.
There will be a sense of that energy in the next fortnight around the visit of the US President, Joe Biden. Miraculously, a solution has emerged to the Brexit conundrum that offers Northern Ireland the opportunity to indulge in its uniqueness in a positive way. The Windsor Framework arrangement also provides the UK and Ireland to repair their relationship as neighbouring islands.
Eventually, the DUP will catch the wave and reluctantly say “yes”’ If the party fails to do so, it as well as its support base will be the losers because the momentum is against them.
Last weekend, Ulster rugby supporters travelled across the porous border and mixed comfortably with their Leinster rivals while their teams did battle in the Aviva stadium. A fortnight before, the talents of all four provinces, including a cohort of new citizens, blended to allow Ireland win the Six Nations championship and retain their unthinkable status as the world’s number one rugby team.
Mayo have won a National League title and the championship season beckons.
On this Good Friday in Easter, the season of renewal, on so many levels, there are genuine grounds for hope about “whatever comes after”.
Images courtesy of RTÉ and the Department of Foreign Affairs. The Abbey Theatre contributions of Gail Mc Connell, Linda Ervine, Michael Longley and Aoife Ní Bhriain are included in this piece.
