The day before Halloween, 1993. It was a Saturday and I’d spent the evening trick or treating with my best friend around her neighbourhood. We’d rushed to the house that was famous for its toffee apples, secured two, and then filled our bags going door-to-door at our leisure.
We were back home, sitting on the sofa with her mother and sister by the time the news broke. There had been a shooting at a pub in Greysteel, just outside Derry. 8 people were killed. 19 more injured. The gunmen wore balaclavas and one shouted “trick or treat” before opening fire.
This is the first ‘big event’ of the Troubles I have very clear memory of. As we peered out the living room window, the people in costume passing by seemed suddenly suspect. I remember the energy more than anything else. It was fevered.
Greysteel was intended as retaliation for the Shankill bomb a week earlier, which killed 8 and injured 57. All in all, 27 people were killed in October 1993, the month after the Derry gaelic football team won the All Ireland Championship. It was the worst month in terms of casualties for 17 years.
For the next short while there was constant talk of the shooting. The gunmen were arrested a few days later. The adults were talking about it in my grandfather’s house one day after school. “Animals!” said one.
My 9-year-old brain tried to imagine why someone would do something like that. How someone could do something like that. It was too big for me to grasp. But in the moment I stepped out the front door to go home, a split-second ice-cold thought came over me. “It’s no big deal, really. Who cares? If I walked on the garden now I’d probably crush a bunch of insects. What’s the difference really?”
No sooner had my foot hit the ground than it was gone again. I had thrown the thought from my body with a shiver. “That must be how they think,” I told myself.
I grew up in a world where there was so much I didn’t understand. When I look back now at my early interests in archaeology and geology, and then later psychology and storytelling, I can see it was all about trying to make sense of the world around me. The physical world and the inner world of human beings.
So much of my work now is about empathy and finding shared stories. I have no doubt that work is in some way a response to growing up in the midst of bombings, shootings, and retaliatory killing in a profoundly divided place.
The seeds of our life’s work are planted by the culture we grow up in. You may not understand what that means for you yet, but know that it’s true regardless.
