Trevor Ringland’s father used to say it was the first ten seconds. Ringland’s father was an RUC man who lived and worked in west Belfast. The ten seconds he spoke about began when he turned the key in his car’s ignition and when that time elapsed, he had some confidence – albeit fleeting – that this morning wasn’t the morning he’d be blown up.

It is part of a thought experiment his son sometimes engages in as he imagines the Northern Ireland of his childhood and insists that nothing justified the violent place it was.

“Imagine that every day, every morning, when you wake up, you have to look under your car. And as my father said, when he started the ignition, he says it’s the first 10 seconds or the first 100 metres. Then every time you open your door at night, you have to check who’s on the other side of the door. Then when you go to work, throughout that day, people are trying to kill you. And you will actually see some of the people and know some of the people who are trying to kill you, and you can’t do anything about it. Do that for a week. And then imagine doing that for 30 years.” Ringland says.

The trauma of this and of thousands of scarred lives in all communities is what Ringland wants to break away from.

There was little counselling for members of the police force then, so the families were the counsellors which in its own way extended the suffering. Misery handed on, the stress and grimness spread around. It explains why when I ask Ringland later how he would describe himself, he searches and is silent for a long time. He is a former rugby player and a one time unionist politician. He is a solicitor and he works with Co-Operation Ireland. He is British and he is Irish, he says. He is European, but he is mainly, he says, a parent trying not to hand on history’s baggage to his children.

“If my father had been shot north of the border, and they’d escaped south of the border, they wouldn’t have been extradited north.”

Understandably for someone who owes sport so much, he looks to those moments when he played rugby for Ireland and felt as if an island was united in support of him as evidence that it is the politics not the people that have got in the way.

“I just think we got our relationships wrong,” he says, “That’s just really what I’m saying. We’re not facing up to that. It’s the strutting peacocks of political ego that we played to. I always say the most important incident in the First World War was the Christmas truce when the soldiers came out of their trenches and didn’t listen to their leaders. And the big mistake was having discovered that these others are okay, they let their leaders put them back into the trenches. And so there are issues at the minute, we have to be very conscious of finding a way to work through them, but I think there’s enough constructive people here to do that.”

Ringland sees the advancing talk of a united Ireland as one of the unhelpful issues at the moment, especially if it is framed with an impatience that unionism needs to hurry up and agree to it like everybody else. “If the problem with unionism is that you exist then that’s not a very healthy way to build an island for everyone that lives here,” he says.

For Ringland, more of a reckoning is needed with the past before anyone considers further upsetting the equilibrium. The apologies for Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday by the British government were needed, Ringland knows that. There could be others too which would act as a corrective on the island. He thinks about his father and how the people who wanted to kill him and his colleagues would find it hard to be extradited from the south and he wonders if that attitude needs acknowledging or even a statement of more substance.

“Friends of mine, if they’ve been shot north of the border, if my father had been shot north of the border, and they’d escaped south of the border, they wouldn’t have been extradited north. Also, the perception rightly or wrongly, that there was a different attitude to the IRA down south. And I make that comment knowing that there were very, very good garda and Irish army guys who were very strongly, very clear on the IRA violence and how wrong it was. And there’s this sort of acceptance that the use of violence to promote a united Ireland was somehow okay and they were freedom fighters and to not have the clarity around. Then to me, the Irish government do have to apologise as well, for the mistakes that they may, just as a British government have to apologise for the mistakes that they made,” he says.

Ringland goes back further too.

“I call the decade of commemorations we’re currently going through as a decade of failures, because everybody at the outset failed in their stated ambition. And I think one of those failures was that the use of violence came to the fore during that period,” he says.

“I think that we certainly are going to have arguments about what happened a hundred years ago, and the use of violence, but whether or not that was justified is something you can have an interesting discussion about. But what we can’t have an interesting discussion about is whether or not the use of violence was justified in trying to unite the two parts of the island. Because I just think that that violence has caused more problems, more misery, more hardship, made things more difficult, alienated people from each other. And I think if we’re looking to the future to make sure we never repeat that period of violence again, then we really have to look in the mirror and challenge ourselves about the use of violence. And that that applies to unionists as well, from the unionist family, who were too easy to resort to violence as well.”

At a time when the threat of violence reappears and a new generation seems to view the past through a different prism, Ringland wants to make the nuanced argument that Northern Ireland is not as bad as its portrayed but also to be under no illusions about the violence. “There’s nothing romantic about violence,” he says.

*****

A story about his father that gets him thinking. One day his father arrived at Trevor Ringland’s home which was about 60 miles from where his father was a divisional commander in the RUC. Ringland had heard that a grandfather and a granddaughter had been killed. “I find my father is in my house when I got home. And I could see he was upset, you know, he laughed, but he wasn’t laughing. He said we had to find a man’s head, he said, and he had to keep his men looking through the hedges, because the head had been severed from the body.”

He remembers another time a loyalist explosion that killed several people and his father trying to decide who among the families would be strong enough to view the bodies. “He could have been directly killed about four or five times, and indirectly, a whole stack of others. And that’s every police officer and every soldier in the mess we got into.”

For Ringland, the idea has always been clear – move further away from the mess. “I think that the challenge going forward is how do we value each other’s children as if they are our own and take decisions on that basis.”

His father worked and lived in west Belfast and Ringland tells a story which illustrates how he approached his job. He was friends with Paddy Devlin, a founding member of the SDLP and a man remembered as a street fighter. When Devlin’s mother died, Ringland’s father said he would attend the funeral, a risky decision for an RUC man. Devlin informed him of this and that he could be shot if he went to the funeral. Nevertheless, Ringland’s father and his second in command attended the funeral and felt pleased – and brave – for having done so.

“They went back into the police station feeling very brave about themselves. And a couple of months later he was out for a drink with Paddy who used to hyphenate words to get the F word in sometimes, and my father started to boast about how brave he’d been and Paddy says ‘I don’t know why you’re feeling so effing brave, I got you a 24-hour pass’. And he had organised it so he wouldn’t be shot.”

Most of the time the violence worked to entrench people in their positions, an entrenchment that takes a long time to come out of. The IRA’s violence alienated unionists from their own sense of Irishness, he believes, and while Ringland could tap into that through international rugby, others might not have found it as easy to believe there was goodwill towards them.

Brexit has, of course, upset the equilibrium as well. Ringland voted Remain but he is sure, too, that the fall out has been used for political ends. The protocol can be worked through, he says, and doesn’t need to be weaponized, just as he believes the border didn’t need to be.

“I think unfortunately that was used during the discussions that somehow a border on the line that runs between North and South would somehow justify a return to violence. I think that was very unfortunate to bring that in, because it somehow suggested that it was ever justifiably used in the past. But I don’t think there’s anything in the protocol to justify the use of violence. But what we have to do is show that proper discussion works. And that just a threat of violence is not responded to. But it also has to show that genuine concerns are met. And if we go back to the start of the Troubles, there were genuine concerns and if those genuine concerns had been met, maybe quicker, then it would have prevented any violence emerging, but the violence was never justified either,” he says.

“So common sense has to prevail. There are genuine issues and genuine concerns there and they have to be listened to. I think it goes back to my earlier challenge, which is that if you value each other’s children as your own, then you will look and try and take decisions so that both those children do well equally. We really do have to take on board some of the genuine concerns that are being put forward but also challenge those that aren’t genuine. And also challenge those who are using things in an opportunistic way. I think there’s just an element of political nationalism, who decided to use Brexit to promote a united Ireland agenda.”

A compromise

Ringland thinks a united Ireland might follow in thirty years if the relationships are built on and understanding improves. But even then he wants it to be open-ended, not necessarily the assumed answer. Northern Ireland was a compromise, he believes, and a compromise is still required.

“My advice right at the top has always been build relationships and just keep building relationships and 30 years from now if our young people want to move from just a really good relationship to marriage and let them do that. But they’ll do it as friends but not on the back of hatred.”

He went on a charity cycle with his son a few years ago for Co-operation Ireland where they visited the sites of the Easter Rising and on to northern France.

“I came back with four principles. The first was if a poet talks of blood sacrifice, then make sure it’s his blood first. And if he says, Let’s go to war, then tell him to stick to poetry.

“The second is if a politician takes you to war, then make sure his children are the first ones out of the trenches, because only then will you know that he’s explored every avenue to avoid it.

“The third was keep your children out of the hands of generals if you can. And somebody said that’s not fair on the First World War generals because they only prosecuted the war in the way they knew best.

“So the fourth principle was, well, who puts your children into the hands of the generals? It’s the politicians. So politics has an awful lot the answer for on this island and historically and if it gets it wrong, again, going forward, then it’ll have an awful lot to answer for in the future. Because we have a people that consistently show they can have a very good relationship, whether there’s constitutional change or not.”

This is what Ringland believes, that the people of Northern Ireland have been failed by their politicians. “I say that the people are less polarised than they’ve been in the past. But the politics too often shows itself more polarised. And the challenge for us as a people is to depolarize the politics before the politics polarises the people again, because you look back, and you look at the ability of politics over the centuries to actually drive people apart.”

Ringland goes on a cycling holiday across Europe most years. “In my travels across Europe on our bikes, we’ve been in Germany a few times. I like Germany, I like the people. And the thing I respect about them most is that they faced up to their past and challenged their hatreds. And I really do think on this island from the top down, we have to really look in the mirror and start challenging our hatreds.  And if we do, I think things will be brilliant for this island.”

He believes there is a lot to be gained by this approach and very little to lose.

“The worst outcome – if you follow the sort of arguments that me and many others like me are making – is you have a united people. And that’s not a soft thing. That’s a genuine thing.”