Brenda Downes, who won a recent court case against Peter Hain, tells Susan McKayshe'll never get over the killing of her husband
Brenda Downes says she was "totally shocked" when she heard Mr Justice Girvan read his judgment in the North's High Court earlier this month. Listening to the judge's scathing criticisms of Peter Hain, she realised she had won her case against the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland over his appointment of Bertha McDougall as victims' commissioner.
"I couldn't believe it," she says. "I had no faith whatsoever in the judicial system."
Downes sought a judicial review of the appointment of McDougall, the widow of an RUC man murdered by the INLA, on the grounds that this was a political appointment and McDougall could not command cross-community support because of views she had expressed about victims. McDougall has indicated that she would find it difficult to regard those convicted of terrorism in the same category as the broad range of victims. McDougall's integrity is not in question.
This week it was announced that the British attorney general Lord Goldsmith is to carry out an investigation into whether Hain or his senior officials deliberately misled the Belfast High Court in relation to the victims' commissioner. Lord Goldsmith agreed to the inquiry after Mr Justice Girvan sent him 67 questions about how Mr Hain and senior civil servants dealt with the appointment.
However, Hain insisted yesterday that he would not apologise for trying to advance the victims issue by appointing McDougall as an interim commissioner.
Downes's husband, John, was 22 when he was shot dead by an RUC reserve policeman who fired a plastic bullet at his chest at close range during a rally in 1984 to mark the anniversary of the introduction of internment. The controversial bullets are meant to be fired below the waist and from a distance of at least 30m.
"It was a beautiful day and we brought our 18-month-old daughter Claire along with us," says Downes. "The road was black with Peelers [ police] and there was an eerie atmosphere. There was a bit of a scuffle at the start and I heard Gerry Adams telling the crowd that this was to be a peaceful rally. Where we were standing, you couldn't hear very well, with the helicopters overhead and all, so I said to John to move up to the front. That was the last time I saw him alive."
Speaking about these memories brings fresh tears. She's 43 now. She was a month short of her 21st birthday then. "Soon after that, the RUC just went berserk. I know now it was after Martin Galvin appeared on the platform. They were firing plastics [ plastic bullets] all round them. It wasn't a riot - it was a police riot." Galvin, then director of Noraid, the US group which provided funds for Sinn Féin, had been banned from entering the North. In the mayhem which followed, he got away.
"I knew I had to get away because I had Claire in her pram, but I was demented about John. I wanted to go back and look for him but a wee woman trailed me into her house along with a lot of other people and said I had to stay with my child. Later on I went up home to our flat. Then a woman came and said I'd better go to the hospital."
The Royal Victoria was full of people who'd been injured in the riot. Downes was brought to meet a doctor who told her that her husband was dead. "I went into complete denial. I refused to identify his body. Then I was forced to take a lot of tablets and I don't remember a lot about the next few days."
A couple of weeks later, she saw the TV footage which had already been shown around the world. People are crouched on the ground. John Downes is seen with a narrow stick in his hand running towards RUC men in riot gear. One of them shoots him. He falls.
"John wouldn't have stood by while people were being terrorised. He was a very genuine and generous man. He was a bricklayer by trade and he was always doing work for people for nothing, even though we had nothing ourselves. He wasn't in the IRA or Sinn Féin, though he was very politically minded. After he died, they tried to demonise him. He was called a former political prisoner and a rioter. He was in the Fianna - the junior IRA when he was 16. That's what the youth in this part of Belfast did in those days. He got a suspended sentence."
BISHOP (LATER CARDINAL) Cahal Daly was among those who criticised the police for their actions during the rally and said "even moderate and peace- loving people" shared his indignation.
Downes couldn't cope with the loss of the man she'd been with since she was 14. "It was a living hell then for a very long time. I still haven't got over it. I relive it all the time. Every time I'd see someone in a maroon jacket, I'd think, 'there's him, now'. I didn't know how people dealt with death. I was too young. I stopped making dinners. I got heavily into drink. Tablets all day, drink at night. I had to knock that on the head because of Claire, but it was really, really hard. Life was hateful. I resented every minute without John."
A policeman was charged with the murder. "They had to be seen to do something because people were up in arms about it." In 1986, Downes returned from a summer holiday to learn that he had been tried and acquitted. (He stayed in the police.)
"They said it was self-defence. His life was in danger. From a stick? With them in riot gear with batons and guns and plastic bullets?" She was incensed. "I felt completely powerless. I had waited all that time. I wanted to look into the eyes of the person who did it. I wanted to see him and him to see me."
Shortly before her father-in-law died last year, he told her he'd been turned away from Crumlin Road Courthouse by the police when he tried to attend the trial.
"I tried to appeal but it was turned down. My solicitor was Pat Finucane. He never got to finish the case because he got murdered too." [ The UDA, acting in collusion with the security forces, shot Finucane in 1989.]
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST plastic bullets was set up after John's death. "That was the only thing that kept me half sensible. I met people like Emma Groves, who lost both her eyes; Jim McCabe, whose wife Nora was killed; and Archie Livingstone who lost his daughter, Julie. I realised I wasn't the only one who'd suffered."
She says she has never met anyone who could come remotely close to replacing her lost husband. "I don't think I ever will."
Her daughter has gone to university in Scotland now. "I don't think she'll ever come back here. I tried to leave myself. I went to Australia but then my father got cancer so I came home. You can't run away anyway. Your baggage travels with you. I detest Christmas - Claire and I usually go somewhere together. Even being on holiday is hard - all I see is families, and especially fathers with children. John worshipped Claire."
She became a human rights activist. She joined the Irish-Palestinian support campaign, and visited Palestine. "It was like here but far, far worse. I found it very traumatic." She is in campaign groups against racism, and to make the streets safer from car crime (formerly known as joyriding) and sexual violence. She was part of a delegation which brought medical supplies to Cuba. She did voluntary work at the Falls Women's Centre, and she provides respite care for troubled teenagers through Barnardos.
She joined Relatives for Justice when it was set up about a decade ago. Many of those involved were also bereaved by the security forces, and the group supported her attempt to get a judicial review of the appointment of McDougall.
"When it came on the news that she had been appointed, I was gobsmacked. The Good Friday Agreement was supposed to give us equality."
The case was rejected at a lower court and Downes had to reapply for legal aid to appeal. Mr Justice Girvan found the appointment was improper; that the Secretary of State had abused his powers and breached the Belfast Agreement; that he was politically motivated - having consulted just one party, the DUP, before appointing McDougall; that he had failed to seek evidence as to whether she could command cross-community support; and that there had been an attempt to mislead the courts. The North's top civil servant, Nigel Hamilton, and the permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Jonathan Phillips, were also severely criticised.
Downes welcomed the judgment. "It was justice. It was justice for all the people whose loved ones were killed by the state and the killers got away with it. But I came back here to my house and I said to myself, 'How do you feel?' I felt empty. I didn't feel victorious. The pain is still there. But all I can say is, at the end of the day, they'll remember John Downes. For as long as I'm alive, they'll not forget him."