Too bad Sean Kelly turned up at "The Future Together" conference in north Belfast last weekend. Too bad the DUP did not. It was still an inspiring event, but one that showed all too clearly how fraught is the project of "creating a language of hope" in a place cut into jagged jigsaw pieces by a peaceline which has, this summer, been built even higher.
The conference was part of the New Lodge festival and the republican organisers had invited their loyalist neighbours to join them at Belfast Castle to celebrate relationships which have been quietly built through years of hard and brave work.
Kelly showed up at the invitation-only gala dinner at the end of the event. Known to Sinn Féin as a "hero of the peace process" and to many others as "the Shankill bomber", he survived the 1993 IRA atrocity.
Nine Shankill people died, along with the other bomber, Thomas Begley. When he was briefly returned to prison last summer, the graffiti in republican walls said "Free Sean Kelly". The graffiti on loyalist walls said "F***k Sean Kelly".
Begley had been reading Martin Dillon's The Shankill Butchers. The mostly Catholic victims of the notorious 1970s loyalist gang came mainly from North and West Belfast.
As it happens, the most interesting speaker at the weekend conference, and the one who most inspired the feeling that the North might be heading for a better political future, was Robert Bates. His grandfather, Robert "Basher" Bates, was one of the Shankill Butchers.
Robert Bates doesn't want to talk about the past. He says the future is what matters. Only 16, he has a passionate commitment to his people and to ending sectarianism and conflict. He said he was a loyalist, meaning "loyal to your community and helping it in its hour of need". It was not "about men in balaclavas running about giving young people drugs and burning cars and causing mayhem".
He said he grew up hating Catholics. "I knew my community had suffered a lot at the hands of republicans. What I didn't see was the bigger picture. My people had caused a lot of suffering too."
He is now chairman of Belfast City Council's youth council and a member of the UK youth parliament. He has become a close friend of a Catholic teenager from Ardoyne. "I never had a chance to meet a person like that before," he said. Young people in the Shankill needed to learn that there was "more to history than burning green, white and gold flags".
Bates said Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley weren't the ones who would make the streets of Belfast safe so that he and his friend could visit each other without fear. "We are."
Bates met Adams during a coffee break. Adams said he had a headache. Bates searched his pockets for a painkiller. Bates said he'd been trying to get the DUP to get the streets of the Shankill cleaned up and when they hadn't, he'd phoned Adams's constituency office on the Falls Road. Next day, the Department of the Environment had sent workers out to do the job.
Adams said more and more people from loyalist areas were seeking his help as their MP. "Will you vote for me next time?" he asked Bates. "No," the young man replied. Both of them laughed.
In fact, Bates regards the late Gerry Fitt of the SDLP as a local political inspiration. Martin Luther King is his hero. He thinks the Progressive Unionist Party has worked hard for peace but says he won't join a party with a paramilitary background. He has no time for the DUP. It was "disgraceful" that the party for which a majority of loyalist people vote refused to take part in dialogue about a shared future. (The UUP, Alliance, PUP, Sinn Féin and SDLP all participated.)
Adams spoke at the conference - about denial. Unionists refused to accept any responsibility for the conflict, he said. In its immediate aftermath Adams said the Shankill bomb was wrong, but republicans insist the IRA intended to kill UDA leaders who, it believed, were meeting upstairs, allowing time for those in the fish shop downstairs to escape.
In a tribute to Begley in the book Ardoyne, the Untold Truth, Kelly says all he and Begley talked about on their way to plant the bomb (in a shop at the busiest time on a Saturday afternoon) was "hope to God we get the right people . . . hope to God there are no innocent lives lost". The bomb went off prematurely - "there was nothing we could have done about it". It is nonsense.
There is no way their plan could have worked. It is denial. A couple of Shankill people walked out when Kelly appeared. Bates felt the organisers should have told people he had been invited, but stayed, and stands by them. "Everyone makes mistakes - but this was a really inclusive conference, the best I've ever been at," he said. "Don't forget there were loyalist 'lifers' there too. We have to move on and focus on the positive."
Sinn Féin's new "outreach to unionism" officer, Martina Anderson, took part in the conference. Rev Brian Kennaway was invited to launch his book on the Orange Order on the Falls Road and did so last Saturday. Gary Mitchell's new play about the UDA has just had its premiere in the West Belfast Festival. Protestants are breaking Paisley's taboo on talking and republicans are applauding their courage.
However, another loyalist at the Future Together conference said: "There is a lot of energy and enthusiasm from republicans, but they've got to stop acting like they are missionaries out to convert us."
It was fortunate Alan McBride was not at the conference, as he might well have been had he not been on holiday. McBride's wife Sharon was killed in the Shankill bomb. He has accepted many invitations to speak to and with republicans and gave this year's Bloody Sunday memorial lecture in Derry. However, he is not ready to face the man who murdered his wife. The war isn't long over. Starting a conversation in a new language is a sensitive business.