Been there, done that, handed in the t-shirt as evidence (Terrorism)

Member Name: Noggsy

Product:	Terrorism
Date:	22/04/01 (225 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Don't ask stupid questions

Disadvantages: See opinion

As the title suggests, I've experienced terrorism first-hand, so I reckon that gives me a reason to write an opinion on this topic.

However, I'm not sure whether or not it will be a useful opinion, because I don't know what useful entails. Best place to buy weapons? Which terrorist groups to avoid? Still, I'll give it a go and if you have any comments, I'll be most glad to hear them (good or bad).

A week after I started going out with my first serious girlfriend was a very special Saturday, for a couple of reasons. It was the day before Mother’s day and my Mum had been particularly good to me recently, by hosting a German exchange student. So I was looking forward to buying her a nice present to say Thankyou. It was to be the second date with said new girlfriend (let’s call her Helen, as that was her name) and we were going to meet outside McDonalds and then go on to an audition for a drama course we were both desperate to get onto that summer. The date was 20th March, 1993.

About 10 of my friends from school, who all had German exchange students staying with them, met in Warrington that morning, to do some shopping. The students had only been here about 3 days and some of them were a bit nervous, because the week before the IRA had left a bomb under some gas tanks in town, which, had it exploded, would have wiped out the housing estate opposite. Fortunately, the police found the device before it could detonate properly, so disaster was avoided. One of the German families refused to allow their daughter to attend the exchange because of this bomb, which we all thought was ridiculous. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place and we had a good laugh about that one. I bet you can guess what happened next…

We were on the second floor of an indie music store, just off the main shopping street in town, when we heard a loud noise. Everyone froze for a second, until I said, “just a car
backfiring”. Someone else said, “too loud for that Noggsy” and suddenly, everyone charged downstairs. I’ve never seen anything like it before (as with so much that day); no-one suggested it, everyone just came to the same conclusion at the same time. I stumbled at the bottom of the steps and cut my knee, but carried on running towards where we thought the noise had come from. With 20/20 hindsight (always perfect), this wasn’t the most sensible thing to do. We ran onto Bridge Street and it looked like a bomb had hit it. Paper was flying everywhere, people were screaming, bleeding and crying and one woman, sat on the corner, had her head in hands and just looked stunned.

I started to go over to her and see if she was ok, when something happened which I will never forget; the second of the day’s bombs went off. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life, more like a feeling in my chest than sound. The concussion knocked me of my feet and then that curious fight or flight adrenaline rush took me over completely. I, and about 200 hundred others, ran a hundred yards in about 5 seconds. I wish that someone had been timing us; it would have been world records all round.

Picture 200 people running like crazy, and my English friends trying to keep the Germans together, with people calling out to avoid the bins (it was later found that both bombs had been planted in bins). Utter, terrifying chaos. We ran to the other side of town where hundreds of people had gathered and got in line to use the phone. Of course, everyone in town was trying to do the same thiing , so it took us about an hour to get through and then about another hour for someone to fight the traffic and pick us up.

TIP: Should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, don’t allow the Germans to start taking photographs, as it will cause a near riot. Actually, they were taking pictures of British emergency vehicles, which they h
ad never seen before, but it was singularly lacking in Teutonic tact and not at all appreciated.

Speaking of emergency vehicles; all three of the services arrived in minutes and I have never seen bravery like it before, or since. No-one knew whether there were any other devices, but they went straight onto the street, cordoned it off and started dealing with the casualties (2 children dead, 56 people injured) at great personal risk. I salute them.

While we were waiting to be picked up, I went looking for my sister and my girlfriend, both of whom were supposed to be in town that day. Fortunately (I later found out), neither of them was, but I did find a couple of girls from my year at school wandering about disconsolately, so I collected them and took them back to my friends. I did the audition and got on the course and we all went ice-skating that evening (in case you were interested).

It took two weeks before I could go into town again, but I wanted to, to see all the flowers and memorials. A friend of mine and I took the day off school and spent about two hours reading cards and crying. This was harrowing, but it helped to see that people from Northern Ireland were as angry as we were about what had happened. Messages abounded, imploring us not to associate ordinary people in Ulster with the animals that did this. Then we went to hand in the clothes we were wearing that day to the police, in case there was any forensic evidence on them. When taking our statements, the police were again superb. Very supportive and compassionate and I have had the utmost respect for them since then.

TIP: Don’t allow your child to inflate a crisp packet and then explode it on a street which has been bombed recently. It will get you or your child beaten up.

Later, our school had an exchange program with students in Enniskillen and this feeling of compassion had turned somewhat to anger with us. I don’t really understand why and
perhaps it was confined to the students who came across, but they seemed to think that we considered all people in Ulster to be terrorists, or at least sympathetic to them. I think there were some inflammatory letters written to the local paper by people from Warrington, saying something about withdrawing completely from Northern Ireland and letting them sort themselves out. I certainly remember anti-Irish sentiment in the town (not much, but it was there). This shows the danger of giving-forth about something you don’t fully understand. It’s fairly easy to get locked into a cycle of recriminations, where neither side has enough respect for the other to properly listen. All that that leads to though, is escalation, simply so people feel they have been heard.


So Noggsy, why’re you telling us this story?

Well, it’s cathartic; I’ve never written it down before. Also, it might give me (and maybe you) an insight into how I feel about terrorism. You see, I don’t really have a fully-formed opinion about this topic. It’s difficult to see all sides of the story.

If you had asked me that day, or the day about a week later when Tim Parry (who went to my school) died, I’d have invited you to line everyone in the IRA up and I would happily gun every one of the bastards down. I hated them; all my friends did. But then later on, when the town settled down, Warrington began a dialogue with people in Northern Ireland and the issues stopped being so clear-cut for me.

Colin Parry (Tim’s Dad) was instrumental in a lot of what happened over the next few years with regards to the bomb. He never got bitter (in public at least) and he always spoke of communicating with the terrorists. I found myself asking, in the face of his and his wife Wendy's strength, what right did I have to be so angry? Colin worked tirelessly to bring about talks, even travelling to NI to try and meet the terrorist
s themselves. If you want to know more about what happened from the Parry’s point of view, I highly recommend the book they wrote, entitled “Tim: An Ordinary Boy".

I took part in a radio debate with Colin and a Unionist MP (a mate of that lunatic, Paisley) about a year after the bomb, and it was striking that the MP was full of indignity on Colin’s behalf. He was trying to use what happened as propaganda, but Colin was having none of it. He stayed calm and eloquent and said that he wasn’t angry with the IRA, as long as this spelled an end to the violence. It didn’t of course, but it certainly lost them a huge amount of support in Ireland and America and opened the way for peace talks.

The actions of some of the Unionists and their resistance to the 'Peace Process' seems incredibly dangerous to me. They stir up already volatile emotions and make it hard for anyone to remain calm. It seems to me sometimes, that some people actually don't want peace in Ireland (and I don't just mean terrorists like the Real IRA) and actively work against this goal with inflammatory rhetoric. To me, that is almost as dangerous as the bombs, because it closes off avenues to policians and makes everyone involved more frustrated.

So do I still feel angry? I don’t know. The IRA planted bombs in front of McDonalds - a place where kids always met - on the Saturday before Mother’s day. They planted a bomb, calculated to drive people down the street towards the second bomb, which was timed to go off about a minute later, and thus hurt more people. So they were trying to kill children. Not a military target, not an industrial target, KIDS. There’s no justification for that whatsoever. But if I get murderously angry and take revenge, then they get murderously angry and take revenge and so it goes on.

The British have got a lot to answer for in Ireland, but that is in the past. The trouble is,
societies have got long memories and it’s unfortunate, but true, that Irish terrorism (what some people call freedom-fighting) has worked throughout this century to force the British to withdraw from Ireland.

Terrorism works by making it unpopular or uneconomical to continue to do whatever it is that the targets are doing. The unfortunate side-effect of this technique, is that innocent people get injured or killed. This often results (as in Warrington) with the terrorists actually losing support, rather than gaining it. Public opinion, is vital to the IRA (and other such groups) and an unforseen side-effect of killing children, is that they have now lost a huge amount of public support, from people who refuse to accept that children are valid targets in this 'war'.

As I have already said, the only thing that can stop the cycle of violence, is people sitting down and talking to each other. No matter how frustrating the Stormont talks are, I believe that they are the only way to stop this sort of thing from happening again. I don't see it as being soft on terrorists, I see it as grown-up, and fair-play to Gerry Adams et al for sitting down at the table and reversing their previous stance. The language of hatred only ever incites more hatred, and that's something both sides can do without.

If there were an easy answer, better brains than mine would surely have found it by now.

I’ll drop it if they will.

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