Local stories, global pain: TV documentary profiles Troubles young survivors

The Irish Echo
May 5, 2004
By Stephen McKinley

Alan McBride's wife and Leah's grandfather were killed in the IRA bombing of a Shankill Road fish shop in October 1993 in Belfast.

Mark's father was shot three days later in retaliation for the bombing by loyalist gunmen -- one of whom yelled, "do the bastards, do them," as his colleague struggled to clear a jammed round from his weapon, after spraying the workplace with bullets.

These three survivors of the Northern Irish Troubles are brought together in a new documentary produced by RCN Entertainment, in association with the United Nations (www.un.org/works), as part of a series that explores how children around the world suffer the most from the violence and neglect created by adults.

The documentary is 10th in a series called "What's Going On?", which airs on the Showtime channel and which uses Hollywood actors to highlight the plight of kids.

Danny Glover visits Trinidad and Tobago to explore HIV/AIDS; Michael Douglas meets former child soldiers in Sierra Leone; Tim Robbins examines poverty in the United States; Angelina Jolie goes to a refugee camp in Tanzania, and Susan Sarandon interacts with child laborers in Brazil. Other episodes will look at land mines in Cambodia, girls' education in India, and indigenous kids in Australia.

In the Northern Ireland episode, Meg Ryan is host, but stays largely in the background, allowing the children to tell their stories in their own voices.

The stories are heartbreaking and familiar -- but not without some surprises.

Here is Colin McCrory, raised a Protestant and with magazine clippings of the Royal Family adoring his bedroom wall. The freckled redhead is articulate and passionate about the journey he and his family took from hating "Fenians" to education at an integrated school in Belfast.

Northern Ireland's small size and population have often led to intimate tragedies: Colin's father Alfie McCrory was one of the first on the scene of the Shankill bombing that killed nine Protestants -- including McBride's wife, Sharon, and Grace's grandfather -- and the IRA man carrying the bomb that went off prematurely.

In the wreckage of John Frizzell's fish shop, Alfie saw a wounded man on the floor groaning amid the rubble and picked him up. He remembers wondering why the man had surgical gloves on as he helped the man toward an ambulance.

Later he found out that the man was the second IRA bomber and that is when Northern Ireland's uncompromising sectarian hatreds struck home, and the McCrorys were shunned in their loyalist community, untouchable because Alfie had “helped a Fenian”

Now victims of their own community, the McCrorys were forced to check under their car for bombs and to lock every window and door in the house at night.

This story is told mostly by Colin, who expresses utter familiarity with such prejudice and yet also a young person's wonderment at the wrongness of it all. Alfie McCrory admits that if he'd known the man on the floor was one of the bombers, "I'd have let him lie there." (The bomber, who received nine life sentences, was released in July 2000 under the terms of the Good Friday agreement.)

It is Colin who makes the bold decision to switch schools -- from a Protestant school to Hazelwood integrated school, where he learns alongside Catholics.

Poignantly, at one moment he speaks into the camera and says he could one day see himself dating a Catholic schoolgirl.

At Hazelwood, Colin is seen in lively debate with his Catholic friends at the school, arguing that until the Catholic Church relinquishes its desire for Catholic education in Northern Ireland, integrated education will remain a limited project. (Currently only 5 percent of school kids attend an integrated school.)

For Mark Rodgers, whose father was shot at his job in Belfast three days after the bombing, there is only boxing and hip-hop music to take away the pain of losing his dad, simply because, as the priest at his funeral said, he was a "convenient Catholic."

Mark meets Leah and widower McBride at the Wave Trauma Center in Belfast, founded to help victims of violence. Ironically, one outcome of the Troubles has been to establish Northern Ireland as a place of considerable expertise in this field.

Alan McBride works at the center. His wife, Sharon, was blown up in the Shankill store owned by her father, and recovering from that horror led him to seek work in helping other victims, Protestant and Catholic.

While there is hope in this documentary, it is impossible not to be moved by the sadness it vividly recalls, though today even the violence of the Troubles has largely receded from the streets and countryside of Northern Ireland. Patrick Gallagher, now 19, looks into the camera and says: "I was eight when my daddy was shot." Grace Caldwell shows us a black leather wallet and tells us: "This is his wallet. This is all I have left of my dad."

Though the voices, people and scenes are Northern Irish, RCN chief executive David McCourt noted that across the world the same story of heartbreak is being told by children, whether the pain comes because of AIDS, famine, child labor -- or because Protestants and Catholics are raised to hate each other.

McCourt introduced a preview of the documentary hosted at the United Nations last week by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.

Annan said the world's problems often seem insurmountable, and that the "What's Going On?" series is important in showing them through children's eyes, making them simultaneously familiar yet distressing. "It could be a teenager struggling against the stigma of HIV/AIDS, or a girl denied education because she must work, or a teenager trying to forge an identity in the modern world," Annan said.

Also present at the screening was Irish Tenor Ronan Tynan, who appears in the documentary at the Wave Trauma Center to speak to the young people.

When Mark shyly tells him that what he wants to be when he grows up is "a rapper," Tynan exclaims, "Do it!" and for the first time in the documentary, the young man smiles.

Tynan also sings "The Town I Love So Well" in the film and the powerful Brendan Graham anthem "You Raise Me Up."

At the screening, he told the audience that the experience "freed my mind completely," because he said these children "are giving a great example to adults."

McCourt said he was proud to have roots on his father's side in Northern Ireland and on his mother's side in the Irish Republic, and added that the common thread linking the plight of children from Northern Ireland to Sierra Leone to Africa was "a lack of real understanding and tolerance."

"These children want to move beyond," he said.

The Showtime channel will broadcast the "What's Going On?" documentary on Northern Ireland on Sunday, May 9, at 11:20 a.m. and 7 p.m. EST, and again on Thursday, May 20 at 7 p.m.

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