Sitting
with those who have just undergone bereavement is
an unsettling experience. When empathy wells up
within the listener there is still no deep sharing
of experience. The loss of a loved one strikes those
who loved in a way that does not touch others. Gestures
of comfort are always proffered awkwardly, accompanied
by awareness that they are far too sapless to tip
the scales away from grief towards peace of mind.
Where can words find a starting point to address
the huge deficit occasioned by grief? Time alone,
when it can, soothes the torment of bereavement.
In
those instances where the loss of a loved one results
from a gross injustice, then the sense of abject
frustration caused by death can be offset to some
degree by restoring equilibrium, by bringing the
unjust to account. Assisting grieved relatives who
need to speak out, so that their words reach as
many ears as possible, is perhaps the one way in
which the writer's utterances of condolence become
transformed into real acts of solidarity. Suddenly
words of sympathy seem less flat, less passive,
less hollow.
When
I arrived in east Belfast to meet the sisters and
partner of Robert McCartney, murdered by members
of the Provisional IRA, but not by the IRA as an
organisation, almost two weeks earlier, I felt a
need to do much more than merely listen. So many
had absorbed their anguished voices for two weeks,
but at the end had to walk away and melt back into
their own lives. Asking questions of the killers
or those who shield them holds its own fears. Memories
of Robert would always serve as a grim warning,
'challenge our power at your peril.' Being a writer
I had not visited the McCartney home to walk away.
I had to allow their pained words to shape my pen
so that it would prove a weapon every bit as pointed
as that which was wielded by Robert McCartney's
murderers. I wanted my pen to cut and thrust in
the name of justice; to stab through the heart of
the cover-up inflicted on the family and wider community
since the unarmed and defenceless Robert's life
was violently snatched away from him.
At
a time when it might have been easy for the sisters
and partner of the murdered man to lash out in their
grief and anger, they exuded a calm sense of dignity
throughout the three hours I spent with them. There
was no blaming the IRA or Sinn Fein for the murder
of Robert. The women were focussed, at all times
directing their opprobrium towards the men who had
chosen of their own volition, without any prior
sanction or approval from the organisation to which
most of them belonged, to snuff out a human life
because the person whose body that life filled had
the 'audacity to believe' something different from
his killers.
Robert
McCartney was a family man. He devoted his time
to his partner Bridgeen and their two small sons,
Brandon and Conlaed. He had no highly tuned set
of political beliefs, for which he was prepared
to give his own life or to take that of another
human being. He didn't even regard himself as a
republican but a nationalist who voted Sinn Fein
because he felt the party was the best bet to improve
the lot of fellow nationalists. The belief that
Robert died for was simply that others had no right
to lord it over their supposed equals; had no right
to arrogantly order others about; had no right to
hack and kick his friend to death in a scene reminiscent
from a Rwandan village circa 1994.
Paula,
Gemma, Claire, Donna and Catherine McCartney along
with Bridgeen struck me as people who are not driven
by political concerns. Fiercely intelligent and
articulate, they spoke with passion of Robert while
his two young boys, one four the other two, played
gaily, oblivious to their father's absence being
an enduring feature for the rest of their lives.
The six women have their own lives, families and
careers. But their brother and partner had been
snatched away from them and they are not for going
silently into the night. Never once did they utter
as much as a syllable hinting at a need for revenge
in kind. They want Robert's killers brought before
the courts. This is as much about protecting other
innocent members of the community from the killers'
viciousness as it is about having the perpetrators
atone for their murderous act.
There
has been much public discussion in the wake of the
robbery at the Northern Bank about the alleged criminal
nature of the IRA. The IRA described in public discourse
in no way resembles the IRA for which Bobby Sands
died. Yet there was no sense in the McCartney household
that the IRA was a vast criminal conspiracy out
to shaft and exploit its own community. Two of the
sisters in the living room with me had been Sinn
Fein voters, as was their mother. This is a normal
working class nationalist family of moderate views.
Hailing from the Short Strand they had witnessed
too much over the years to be fooled into accepting
media and government accusations that the IRA was
a mere gang of criminals.
However,
the six women know that the organisation has harboured
criminal elements, some of whom are psychopaths
of the type that inflicted the fatal knife wound
on Robert. They are not alone in describing some
local IRA members as being thugs with a long history
of sexual violence, wife battering and bullying
behaviour. They wonder if the Sinn Fein leader Gerry
Adams can have any possible idea of what goes on
at ground level in the Short Strand otherwise he
would never venture his view that no republican
can be a criminal. They are determined that he shall
address the fact that some of his party's election
workers are knife murderers.
As
it stands justice, in the view of the six women,
is being thwarted by the Republican Movement which
has been covering up for its own; hitting out at
PSNI investigators with a venom not directed towards
the murderers; intimidating witnesses into silence,
and forensically erasing evidence of their colleagues
murderous odyssey.
Leaving
the six women to make my way back to West Belfast,
I knew that they would prove a formidable force
for truth. Nonsense that they are out to damage
the peace process shall be swept aside with contempt.
With help from others, the rock upon which murder
and organised lying sits can be toppled by the relentless
quest of six women for justice.
