Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1972. ‘I wanted to come over and fight the war. If I had any skills, I wanted to bring them over to Northern Ireland. There was no use me sitting in a pub in Glasgow, talking about it.’ What does he mean by ‘fight the war’? ‘I believed that the British army, for various reasons, wasn’t defending Protestant people, either by government restraints or in personal restraints. Some of the squaddies were, in my eyes, republican sympathizers. That challenged me very much, so I came over.’ He tells me that he did not join a paramilitary organization. Given that he had spoken of the need to ‘fight the war’, I asked him why not, and he told me, ‘You’re trying to make a distinction between being a member and not being a member. There’s maybe no distinction. I maybe have given tacit support – and maybe more than tacit support – without being a member. So don’t assume because I wasn’t a member that I wasn’t doing things.’

      Park calls himself a loyalist. I asked him what this means. ‘A loyalist is somebody who wants to maintain the union with Britain and will go to lengths to maintain that union.’ What lengths? ‘Defending the community. Because we felt under daily threat.’ Park describes his politics as left-of-centre, and in recent years he has been an influential member of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), which once represented the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force but has proved forward-thinking in its policies. The PUP has strongly supported the peace process and attempted to forge links between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Its ideal is an inclusive socialist United Kingdom. I asked Park whether there was a contradiction between his loyalism – which would seem to have conservative overtones – and socialism. ‘Most of the victims and perpetrators of this dirty war came from the working classes. Not too many middle-class people got their hands dirty. I’m not part of any Protestant ascendancy! As a working-class Prod, where’s my ascendancy? I don’t own a big house! And my daughter can’t be Queen of England because she’s a Presbyterian! I’m a dissenter! I started off in a worse place than the Roman Catholics did – at least they had a title! Presbyterianism is the core in Northern Ireland.’

      In January 1976 Park was badly injured in an explosion in the Klondyke Bar in Belfast. He tells the story: ‘People came from the IRA to bomb a pub in Sandy Row. The Klondyke was next to the bridge, and it was an opportunity for them because there were no visible guards, and they placed the bomb inside the door. I was standing just the other side of the door with my two mates when the bomb went off. I remember a flash; there was one of these gas fires in the pub and I had a vague thought something had happened with the fire. Up until a few years ago, I had a picture in my head of flying through the air – but I spoke to an ambulance driver who said, “Andy, it didn’t happen that way. We dug you out. The roof caved in and the bar came on top of you.” I’ve never read about the bomb, and I never saw a picture of it until recently.’

      Park was in the Royal Victoria Hospital for almost a year. He lost part of his thighs and one hip, and had steel callipers on both legs for eight years. The initial medical view was that one leg would have to be amputated, but the leg was saved. Park was bedridden for three months. ‘When I started putting my legs over the bed, just to sit – the blood rushing down was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.’ He remembers incidents from his time in hospital. ‘Just after the bomb, there was a guy next to me who was dying, and his sister was a nun. They were sitting there going through the rosary beads, and oh! Can you understand the anger, resentment, hatred I had for all things Roman Catholic? I couldn’t distinguish between Roman Catholicism and the IRA. They were all the same. It was so hard. And then I remember the two night nurses. One night a bomb went off right outside the hospital and one of the nurses sat with me the whole night, did not move from my bed, comforted me, talked to me. I was… Jesus…I was almost hanging from the ceiling. I later learnt that it was an IRA bomb and the bomber had blown himself up. I’m sorry to say, when I found that out it gave me a sense of satisfaction.’

      Park’s wife Mary would come to visit him twice a day in hospital, even while she was pregnant with their son. ‘I’d give her a tongue-lashing if she was late. She brought me pieces of chicken and steak, and I wasn’t grateful at all. The nurses would give me a bottle of Guinness to build me up, and my wife used to bring me a half-bottle of whisky or vodka, so I was drinking when I was still in hospital on medication. The only reason I wasn’t falling about drunk because I was already lying down.’

      Two of Park’s friends died as a result of the explosion. One, John Smiley, was killed at the time; the other, Jackie Bullock, lost both of his legs, and drank himself to death over the next two years. Once he was out of hospital, Park began drinking several bottles of vodka a day. He describes his state of mind: ‘Turmoil, hatred, anger. I hated them all. Hated them with a vengeance. I lay in bed at night, planning how I was going to get my revenge. I went through scenario after scenario, finding out where they lived, how I was going to visit them. Revenge, total revenge. And I became an alcoholic. It killed the pain. And the uselessness. I felt useless. Worthless. Even when I started on the road to physical recovery, I wasn’t achieving what I set out to do, and it was hard for the wife and the family. I’ll be straight with you – if the roles were reversed, I don’t think I’d have been around to take the abuse. I wasn’t physical, but I was sarcastic, cutting to the bone with a remark. I wasn’t grateful at all to be alive. When I stopped drinking in 1984, I was six and a half stone.’

      He explains how he managed to stop drinking: ‘One time I was in hospital for about ten days, I’d burnt the gullet of my stomach lining with alcohol. The doctor was absolutely brilliant. She turned around to me and she said, “Andy, would you like to see someone who deals with alcohol-related illnesses?” She didn’t say to me I was drinking too much, didn’t say I was an alcoholic, and the upshot of that was I went into a mental home in Down-patrick, and I was there for nearly four months drying out and detoxing and things like that. And through that I joined Alcoholics Anonymous. It told me to get a sponsor, somebody you can identify and talk with, and the strange thing was that my first and only sponsor in AA was a Roman Catholic, a high member in the Gaelic Athletic Association – and I was sharing secrets with him that I hadn’t shared with any person in my life. That was changing for me, and I became a twelve-step carer, I did prison visits, and I was also very heavy into politics.’

      Park might have been sorting out his own chaos, but Northern Ireland remained a chaotic place to live. ‘Everything became normal. That’s the crazy thing. You’d just think, there’s a bomb over there, I’ll cut down this way instead. Near the end of the Troubles my little sister came over to visit me from Scotland, and she brought a friend. One day there was a soldier lying in my garden, and I brought them home, and we had to step over the soldier to open the front door. The wee friend started getting in hysterics, saying, “There’s a man lying in your garden with a gun!” I goes, “Aye, it’s a soldier. It’s all right.’ It wasn’t until later on that I saw that this wasn’t normal. We never ventured outside of our own immediate areas. That wee geographical circle became your world. You wouldn’t go into town after five o’clock, and there were no buses on. Being aware of where you could go, and where you couldn’t go, became a natural instinct. You didn’t even think about it. It’s why I say that everybody in Northern Ireland has been a victim of this war.’

      When Park travelled across to Scotland, he took his Belfast habits with him. ‘I went out shopping in Glasgow, and when I came back to the car, I was down on my hands and knees checking underneath the car. Mum said, “What are you doing?” so I pretended I’d seen a flat tyre. Once when I went to get a drink with my dad, a car backfired, and I assumed the position down on my right knee. My dad didn’t say anything.’

      Park became the chairman of the Ulster Clubs movement. The movement was intended to unite loyalist groups against government moves to increase links between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and to provide an association for loyalists unwilling to join a paramilitary group. In September 1988 the movement’s treasurer, Colin Abernethy, a close friend of Park, was shot dead by the IRA on a commuter train. ‘Colin was travelling to his work, and as the train drew in at Lambeg station, two guys dressed as postmen got up and shot him in the head. The statement came out that they’d killed the СКАЧАТЬ