Transcript
I was born and reared in an area not far from here. So, although I’m not from the Shankill, I’m from another area of North Belfast. And this is a community that I lived in, very similar to the boys you’ve heard about during this course. And as a boy growing up in the early '60s, it was easy to navigate my way through this community. And by that, what I mean is, born into a Protestant Unionist Loyalist family my mother taught me religiously to be a respectful child, to attend Sunday school, to attend church, to attend all those things that more or less young people at the time took part in
What she inducted me into was a way of life that was about respect, and that was about understanding of others. And I say that because the community I lived in at the time was a mixed community. And in Northern Ireland terms, mixed is usually denoted as Catholic Nationalist Republican, as it’s now known as, and Protestant Unionist Loyalist And in those days, there was quite a lot of work, which was why people moved towards this community
That changed significantly in 1969, because my previous comment of being able to navigate this community easily that became harder because at the time with the outbreak of conflict in 1969, it wasn’t safe if you were in a minority in some of these communities. In actual fact, families were moving to communities where they felt safer because they were in the majority. And in some instances, people were forcibly removed from their communities. And with the development of the area that I lived in, this resulted in the displacement of people from this part of North Belfast. So, Protestants by and large moved outside of the inner-city suburb to the outskirts of North Belfast.
I moved in the early '70s to one of these communities, which was at the time, the second biggest housing project in Western Europe, to an area called Rathcoole.
And at this period of 1972, bear in mind that with the rise in the extremism within the conflict - by that, what I mean is in 1969, less than 30 people had died; but by 1972 almost 500 people were killed in a single year. So, at this time, young men - like the young men you’re hearing on this course, albeit from a different generation - were faced with a number of choices that in some cases, may have been enforced on people, but by and large a lot of young men from both communities made the decision, rightly or wrongly, for some of them for personal or public reasons to become active within the conflict, and I was one of those young men. As a boy at 15, I engaged in the armed conflict from a Loyalist perspective and was active for the next two years until my subsequent incarceration in Long Kesh.
You may be forgiven for questioning me for my reasons for making the choices that I made, but at the time, particularly within Loyalist communities, there was a perception from within the community that these were communities under siege, and young men felt that the conventional response to the armed activity from what at the time was considered indiscriminate Republicanism, was that the only option was to fight fire with fireI was a young boy at the time who had this perception, so my choice I believed at that the time was limited. I wasn’t articulate enough, or au fait enough with the political situation to see beyond the immediacy of the situation I felt that young Loyalists were in, so I took the course, as did hundreds of others, and joined paramilitaries. But of course, as I’ve said, that led to my incarceration in Long Kesh prison camp.