Understanding other people’s experience, seeing things from their unique perspective and hearing their story is a hugely important aspect of being a human being. And one we’re not terribly good at in Northern Ireland, it’s fair to say.
Obviously as a former reporter, I’d say this. I told many people’s stories over a 25-year career in journalism. I’ve sat with people I wholeheartedly disagreed with, people’s whose views and actions I despised, and I put their perspective out there on the pages of newspapers or on television.
But I figured that was what the point of storytelling. Giving people all sides of a story, letting them form their own opinions.
Because if we only hear what our own opinion is, what we want to hear, what we agree with, what we can relate to, how can we grow? How can we connect? How can we empathise? How can we heal? How can we understand another person’s actions if we don’t know the pain from which those actions were born? And if we don’t hear and understand the pain of others, we will continue to inflict pain.
If we do none of this we will stand still in the belief that some people act from a place of hatred alone – that there is no other driver for their actions - and that is a simple and shallow understanding. If we refuse to listen to another’s standpoint we stand still in the belief that the people we are hurting are not human beings and deserving of our compassion or empathy, then we will continue to hurt them, because they mean nothing to us.
When I went into reporting I interviewed members of the security forces, former army officers, loyalist paramilitaries, folks who – as a Catholic from Derry, whose father grew up in the Bogside and was one of the leading lights in the Civil Rights Movement – I wouldn’t ordinarily have got in front of. I sat in the living rooms of widows of police officers, listened to their pain, knowing it was no different to the pain of a widow who lost her husband to a loyalist paramilitary that I spoke to the day before, or that of the widow who lost her husband to the British Army.
I spoke with mothers who lost children to our Troubles – from every side of the divide - all of them broken by the weight of such a monumental loss. Their pain was always the same.
The reason our peace is so precarious, and we are still wedded to paramilitarism and our messed up society some 26 years after the conflict ended, is because we processed nothing of our past
But this is Northern Ireland and there are those who would have us imagine that it is wrong to amplify our stories. That their side is the only one that matters, the only one that was just, the only one worth remembering. Or that the past needs to be left where it is, that the future is more important.
I started watching Say Nothing – the Disney+ series revolving around the IRA during the 70s, 80s and 90s – at the weekend. It makes for very grim watching. It’s a terrible, dark story of an awful, brutal, messy, heartbreaking, raw and gut-wrenching time that some of us still can’t forget.
Some of the families of those whose lives the stories revolve around are unhappy with the show and there are those who say that the portrayal of the Price sisters and Gerry Adams – who has long denied any involvement in the IRA - is too favourable.
But the bringing to life of stories from our past is important, shining lights on the players who shaped this place will aid understanding of why we are where we are today. It is a fictional representation from the mind of a creator but the events within it – most notably the cruel and callous abduction and murder of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville – are important stories to tell. Because there are so many who would like us to forget, to rewrite the past.
Read more: Horrendous, cruel, hurtful: Say Nothing portrayal of Jean McConville not ‘entertainment’ says son
Her story is important, as are the stories of those who were driven to murder on both sides of the conflict, and the stories of those who worked for peace.
All have to be heard, absorbed, understood, learned from, if we are to move on and not hand the hatred and division of our past to future generations. The reason our peace is so precarious, and we are still wedded to paramilitarism and our messed up society some 26 years after the conflict ended, is because we processed nothing of our past. We just sped ahead to the promised bright future without dealing with the problems that blighted us. Those are shaky foundations on which to build peace.
As hard as they are to hear, the voices of our past have to haunt us. If we can’t hear them, we can’t exorcise them and we will never be at peace.
