The North's new commissioner for victims Bertha McDougall, whose appointment is being challenged, tells Susan McKay she knows how difficult it is for some people to relate to someone like her
'I always use the analogy of the starving child," says Bertha McDougall, the North's new interim commissioner for victims and survivors, about the task facing her. "In a civilised society, we will feed the child and care for it and nurture it. That is my job. I have to address the needs of the starving child."
Her sense of urgency and recognition of extreme need will startle those who grumble, when they hear talk of victims' groups, that people should just get on with life and leave the Troubles behind them. However, it is an analogy which is unlikely to appeal to some of the 50 or so groups whose needs and demands McDougall has to assess in her one-year term.
Many of the victims and survivors of the Troubles are angry, articulate and politically sharp campaigners. Far from being helpless and dependent, they have been fighting indifferent authorities for years, and regard themselves as hungry, above all, for justice. McDougall, a pleasant and softly spoken 59-year-old whose husband was murdered by the INLA, took up her post in December and has spent the first weeks meeting people.
"I've had a very good reception, a typical Northern Irish reception, very courteous and very welcoming from everyone," she says. "They acknowledge that they know I have felt the pain. They have known great pain and I can empathise with that."
It is 25 years this month since McDougall's husband, Lindsay, was murdered and her eyes still redden and fill with tears when she speaks about him.
"It was 1981. My husband was a civil servant and a police reservist. He was shot in the back of the head while on a foot patrol. He was operated on and kept on life support, but after six days he was taken off it. It was a time of great personal tragedy. Our boys were 12, 16 and 17, so our family values and beliefs were embedded by that stage. I raised our sons as my husband would have wanted. I took a decision that hatred wouldn't come into our family. Hatred eats away at people and it would have destroyed us. I remember Lindsay saying to me once, 'remember that there are circumstances that you can't change, but they can change you'. My faith was there for me. That was my support and my strength. Love and care were all around me," she says.
As a member of Strandtown Baptist Church in East Belfast, she enjoys singing.
"I used to be in choirs. I like a blend of music - John Rutter as well as more relaxed, casual music." When her youngest child was eight, she went to Stranmillis College to train as a primary-school teacher. She taught for 15 years, and did a degree at Queen's at night. She went on to co-ordinate the Education for Mutual Understanding (EMU) programme which promotes cross-community activities in schools.
"It was very rewarding work and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was about changing a mindset. The conflict went on for a long time. Trust was lost. It will take a very long time to recover it."
She is a member of the Families of the Forgotten, a group of RUC widows which campaigned for pension rights. Her appointment to the victims post was highly controversial, and both the SDLP and Sinn Féin protested to the British secretary of state, Peter Hain.
The job was not advertised, while the only political party consulted was the DUP, which has championed McDougall and has claimed objections to her appointment are based on "hatred". Earlier this week, the day before McDougall embarked on her first round of interviews with the press, it was announced that Brenda Downes is applying for a High Court judicial review of the appointment, claiming that it was illegal and contrary to the Belfast Agreement's equality requirements. Downes's husband, Sean, was killed by a plastic bullet fired by the RUC in 1984.
McDougall has decided that this precludes her talking about anything to do with her appointment, though she insists that she is "independent of government and politics". She is extremely cautious and reads prepared answers to many anticipated questions. Her only statement to date on a controversial issue has been to say, after the "On the Runs" legislation was dropped, that it was a "sensitive" issue for victims.
"You don't want people to take perceived offence," she says. "What I will say is that I need to say nothing which wouldn't reflect the views of victims and survivors." She says she will challenge politicians who "don't respect victims' issues" and has told victims that her door is open to all of them. This includes people who were involved in the IRA. The DUP insists such people have no right to be called victims, and some unionist victims' groups speak about "innocent" victims.
McDougall has already met groups representing victims of state violence, ignored in former victims commissioner Sir Kenneth Bloomfield's earlier report on victims. "I have found that I can respect how difficult it is for some people to relate to someone like me," she says. She adds that victims have every right to be political.
She acknowledges the impatience some feel towards victims' groups. "People ask me, 'What do they want?'" she says. "They want all sorts of different things. They want acknowledgement of their pain and suffering. They want the truth. They want justice. They want practical help. There are a lot of individuals, too, who aren't in groups. More than 3,000 people were killed and 40,000 injured. Then there are people who witnessed things. People are traumatised by things they remember from when they were children. They have talked to me about terror, and how abnormal it all was."
She has a year in which to review services and funding currently available, and to make recommendations to the Secretary of State on the setting up of a forum for victims and survivors.
"Nothing is ruled in or ruled out," she says. Groups have conflicting views on, for example, the prospect of a truth and reconciliation process. "I've told groups I can make no promises and I won't please all the people all the time."