THE TROUBLES:A painstaking account, remembering the dead in the words of their loved ones, writes Ciaran Carson.
I'M TRYING to remember August 14th, 1969, the night that Patrick Rooney, aged nine, was shot dead when the RUC fired a Browning machine gun from their Shorland armoured car into Divis flats.
I was there, aged 20, caught up for whatever reason in the riot. My memory of that night is like a dimly lit, flickering newsreel with a bad soundtrack: people screaming, shouting, the air thick with stones, and the armoured cars - "pigs" as they were known - advancing implacably up Divis Street, their gun turrets revolving, vacillating, firing.
Quite probably, I would have heard the shots that killed Patrick Rooney, ignorant of their lethal impact until the next day, when the news broke. Is my memory based on an actual newsreel? Was there a TV report on the event? Was a camera crew there to record it? Memory is fickle and fictive.
Trying to get some accurate bearings on what happened, I turn to the internet, and find myself diverted by something I didn't know until now, that the Shorland takes its name from its manufacturer, Short Brothers and Harland, formed in 1936 when Shorts merged with Harland & Wolff, the builders of the Titanic.
Recently I was invited by the artist Rita Duffy to visit the derelict drawing office of Harland & Wolff.
At the heart of the building are two fantastic vaulted halls, their stucco crumbling, their cornices overgrown with weeds, the windows and skylights broken and grimy, but still admitting a beautiful, clear light. Here teams of draughtsmen would have laid out the plans for the Titanic.
Then I am shown the office of William Pirrie, chairman of Harland & Wolff in the great White Star Line days. The fireplace has been ripped out, and the floor is littered with ancient pay slips and correspondence. There are shelves stacked with dusty blueprints and typewritten specifications for ships built in the 1950s and 1960s.
Rita pulls out a sliding panel from Pirrie's desk and shows me a piece of graffiti on the underside, written in a careful apprentice's copperplate: Robert Abernethy aged 15, born 13th June 1875, 13th July 1890.
The rooms are full of ghosts and memories. In their magnificent dereliction, they would make a great exhibition space, and so they shall: under the aegis of the Royal Ulster Academy, Rita will turn the drawing office into a gallery for the academy's annual show in September.
Earlier that day I got to see the architect's model of the plans for the Titanic Quarter, laid out on a table some 15ft long, representing a futuristic Alphaville city, with tower blocks, promenades, retail outlets, marinas. I wonder how much of this is fantasy, but there is no doubt that Belfast is regenerating itself in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. As I drive home I glimpse, over the rooftops of the old city, the huge glass dome of the Victoria Centre, Belfast's new retail cathedral: a glass dome that would have been unthinkable in the bad old bombing days of the 1970s.
And so another memory swims up out of the murk. It is July 21st, 1972 - a date I gleaned from the internet - and I am lying taking the sun in the garden of my home in Andersonstown. It is a beautiful summer's day. I am thinking of nothing much, just staring up at the unmitigated blue of the sky, feeling at peace. Suddenly I hear the slow unfolding thud of an explosion. I don't pay too much attention to it. It is not in itself an unusual occurrence.
Half an hour later there is another explosion, and then, a few minutes later, another and another and another. I stand up and gaze towards the city centre some three miles away. Dotted here and there on the flawless blue are clouds of smoke and debris.
The day became known as Bloody Friday, when the IRA detonated 22 bombs that killed nine and seriously injured more than 100 people. Heavily edited as the TV coverage of the aftermath must have been, it was still difficult to watch as body parts were shovelled up by the emergency services and placed in plastic bags. One witness spoke of seeing a head stuck to a wall.
Reading Susan McKay's painstaking account of those bereaved in the Troubles is an equally uncomfortable experience. Her journalism has always been brave, unflinching, intelligent and meticulously researched.
She has always taken time to talk to people, to confront them where necessary, and her wish for this book is that "the dead should not be forgotten and that they should be remembered, above all, in the words of those who loved them".
Usually, I read a book of this length in one or two sittings, but on this occasion I found myself having to close it every 20 pages or so as the catalogue of horror unfolded, some of it remembered by me, much of it forgotten. Even when presented with the stark details of a killing or multiple killings that must have affected me deeply at the time, I cannot remember the incident. I have forgotten the names of these dead. Human kind cannot bear too much reality. We forget because we need to forget, and perhaps any kind of peace must necessarily include a degree of collective amnesia. Even those who speak eloquently here of their dead loved ones will not remember all the dead.
Nevertheless, Bear in Mind These Dead is a necessary book, coming as it does amid the ongoing controversy of the Victims' Commission, whose members might find some guiding light therein.
One of the difficulties of all reconciliation processes is to find a way to honourably commemorate all the victims of a conflict, with all the attendant arguments as to whose version of the truth is the right one.
Perhaps an artist could be commissioned to build a true peace wall, inscribed with the names of all those who died or were lost in the Troubles; and one could do worse than to locate it in the Titanic Quarter.
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Susan McKay will take part in a debate panel with Carlo Gébler, Patrick Maguire and Catherine McCartney on the topic Laying the Troubles to Rest on Sunday, June 15th at 3.30pm in the Peacock Theatre, Dublin as part of the Dublin Writers Festival, www.dublinwritersfestival.com
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Ciaran Carson's latest poetry collection, For All We Know, was recently published by Gallery Books
Bear in Mind These Dead By Susan McKay Faber & Faber, 412pp. £14.99