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It may not seem much in relation to the severe cases of trauma recounted
in this column over the past several months, but the assault on our home
in August 1986 was an extremely traumatic and the most concerning moment
in my life to that date. It is my defining moment of the Troubles, my
most lingering memory, and I have no doubt that it was inflicted on my
family by members of the Republican Movement.
I had just returned from university in Galway where I had successfully
completed my first two years and was looking forward to my final year
studying commerce. I was working in Altnagelvin hospital as a porter
during the summer. At the end of Rag Week earlier that year I had an
unusual experience, which I felt at the time was an encounter with the
Holy Spirit. I had worked out the names of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley
at 666, and I was sure that I had just made the most dramatic discovery
in the history of mankind.
But other students weren’t seeing it that way, and so I didn’t make as
much of it as perhaps I should have at that time. I have since written
books about the events of that week in 1986, and how they fitted in with
other events yet to come as I strolled through life unaffected by these
gigantic themes.
After that event in my second year at UCG, I became the vice-chairman of
the UCG Political Discussion Society and I invited John Hume to come to
Galway. That’s when I think my troubles started.
Not long, perhaps a few days, after John Hume agreed to come to our
society meeting in November, which he confirmed in August, and after I
had informed a few people, there was an utterly devastating attack on
our home in Pennyburn.
At approximately one o’clock in the morning, two men standing ten yards
away from our door threw large bricks at the windows and doors of the
front of our house. One bedroom window was smashed, the front door was
smashed, and a living-room window was smashed. I was sleeping at the
time in the only bedroom whose window was not smashed. I had been lucky.
If the shards of glass had landed on me, they might have cut into my
face, which was just beneath the window.
I got up immediately. I was furious that the privacy and peace of my
family had been infringed with such brutality and such profound
thuggery. These were the actions of the IRA, and not some young hoodlums
engaged in anti-social activity. The IRA was sending a message to
someone in our home. My father was of course an SDLP councillor at that
time, and still is, and it could have been something that he had said or
done at the council. No-one really knew what it was at that time they
were trying to say, but we all knew that they had been trying to say
something.
To me it was simply a case of dirty-tricks, where the IRA was asserting
its right to intimidate as it pleased members, even elected members, of
its own community in order to assert itself over the entire Nationalist
community. They chose to attack us after one o’clock in the morning – in
the darkness of the night – to make it look like it was just thugs, and
because that was all that it could get away with.
In any case, a picture appeared in the Derry Journal of the living-room
window and a caller, unrelated to my family, rang in to say that the
face of Padre Pio could be seen if you turned the picture upside down. I
checked this and it was true.
The attack may not seem to have been much to outsiders but anyone who
has experienced this sort of thing will readily tell you that there is
for many months the constant fear that it will happen again, the anxiety
that it could be worse next time, possibly involving petrol bombs, or
real bombs, and that there are people out there who seem hell-bent on
destroying the peace of your family.
We were being attacked, so far as the older children in the family were
concerned, because my father was involved in public life – helping his
community - and we were being attacked on the orders of people who may
now be in those same public positions – allegedly helping the community.
That may be said to have been how they conducted their business in those
days.
The meeting with John Hume at UCG went ahead in any case, but I was
stressed still - even when I was as far away as Galway - and I was glad
to get it over. As to whether the attack on our home was intended to put
me off the idea of asking John Hume to come to Galway I would not be
able to say.
I think the combination of my discovery in relation to Gerry Adams and
Ian Paisley, which I had genuinely shocked members of Sinn Fein in
Galway about months previously gave them a motive to stop the meeting
going ahead, and so perhaps that is the final arbiter. Perhaps they
attacked us because they had something to fear.
*John O’Connell is Derry-based author.
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