Episode 1 From Our Ireland Correspondent

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

The Royal Ulster Constabulary are hunting the IRA killers...

Mrs Thatcher has called the men who run the army...

The bomb was one of the biggest in the city for years...

Politicians from all parties have condemned...

The Guildford Four...

NEWS STORIES PLAY ALL AT ONCE

..our correspondent Denis Murray.

..is from our Ireland correspondent, Denis Murray.

When I became the BBC's Ireland Correspondent,

I didn't realise quite how much of my life would be spent talking to the camera like this.

I'm Denis Murray, and for 20 years I had the privilege

of reporting my own place to the rest of the UK and the world.

I'd grown up with the history and the complexities,

and I'd reported within Northern Ireland.

My job now was to explain it without over-simplifying

and in a way that would get the attention of people elsewhere.

Northern Ireland was dominated by the bomb and the bullet.

Nothing seemed to have changed across two decades.

So naturally the coverage was dominated by violence.

As a result, the reporting of the Troubles had become almost formulaic.

Another shooting, another bombing.

It would have been easy to fill in the location, the time and whether there were any dead.

In fact, there were so many attacks,

it's hardly surprising a lot of the reports looked and sounded the same.

It got to the point where your life wasn't your own.

What you did was dictated completely by the news agenda.

SIREN WAILS

This is the edit suite in which I spent a large part of my working life.

And I suppose you were semi-aware at the time that you were reporting history.

These programmes are in no sense intended to be

any kind of formal history of the Troubles and the peace process.

What I'm trying to do is show you what it was like

to be a close-up eyewitness to those events.

Because I suppose what we reported and how we reported it, more importantly,

became part of it all.

Reports are coming in of a bomb in Northern Ireland.

First reports indicate that five soldiers have been killed and up to 11 people injured.

The three people who died were driving north after their holiday.

It is believed the bomb was in a derelict house beside the main Dublin to Belfast road.

The news tonight is dominated by the murder of eight young soldiers,

their bus blown up by the IRA.

I'd been a journalist more than ten years,

but nothing - nothing - had prepared me for this horror.

It wasn't just the nature of the events,

it was the sheer scale of what was happening.

It was relentless, non-stop, daily.

One night, not long into the job,

I was with a group of other journalists

when everyone's bleepers began to go off at once.

None of us knew what had happened, but clearly it was serious.

At that stage, my reaction was, find out what had happened and get there.

As the years went on, I dreaded the phone ringing,

because as often as not it was something on this scale.

When I arrived, the night and the surroundings,

like the situation, were dark.

The bright lights on top of the camera,

used so we could actually film, felt like an intrusion.

The gaping hole in the side of the road,

the wrecked bus blown some distance away,

and, as so often, that eerie quiet despite the presence of so many soldiers and police.

While the rest of the country slept, the sense of so many lives shattered,

not just the dead but their families as well, was palpable.

Early this morning, the IRA blew up a bus carrying soldiers

back from leave to their barracks at Omagh in County Tyrone.

Our first report is from our Ireland correspondent, Denis Murray.

The soldiers' bus was only nine miles from its destination in Omagh

when the IRA bomb, planted at the side of the road

only a short time earlier, exploded,

ripping through the near side of the vehicle.

The road where the attack took place is isolated,

but local people flocked to help.

I went down to the bus, and there was bodies on one side of the road,

a body round this lamp post here, and bodies all over the place.

And we started then to get into the bus and drag bodies out.

It was terrible. It was... It just... I can't explain it.

It was something I have never seen before and never want to see again.

I was the first journalist that local man had spoken to,

and because of what had happened and because of what he'd seen,

he was bitterly angry.

He wasn't really angry with me but quite often,

people got rid of their feelings on the first reporter they saw.

He agreed to an interview and as soon as the camera was switched on,

the anger disappeared and suddenly, he was just an upset human being.

But I couldn't allow myself to stay involved in that tragedy.

I had to throw some sort of mental switch

and become the dispassionate reporter again.

By 1988, most people in Britain were sick and tired of the Troubles.

To most people in England, Scotland and Wales they were just a background noise,

but they were the very people to whom I'd be telling the story.

Because British soldiers were killed, there might be more interest than usual.

That sounds shocking, but it's true.

It's all so only human.

How many of us remember just how many people have been killed by car bombs in Baghdad?

People in Northern Ireland thought everybody was fascinated by the Troubles

but they weren't - they just wished the whole thing would go away.

Inevitably, there were calls for internment.

A key part of my role was this - I couldn't just report on events,

I had to be the BBC's commentator as well.

On air, I said internment wasn't going to happen

because it had proved such a disaster before.

But the Government had to be seen to be doing something.

'The Six O'Clock News from the BBC.

'Good evening. The headlines at six o'clock -

'The government has banned Irish terrorists and their close supporters

'from being heard on British television and radio.'

'Sinn Fein held a news conference in West Belfast today to give its view.

'This morning, we were able to broadcast the comments of Gerry Adams. Tonight, we cannot.'

I hated the restrictions.

They got massively in the way of being able to tell the whole truth.

Even so, you got the impression that Sinn Fein

weren't as angry as they might have been.

After all, it was another injustice to complain about.

EXPLOSION

'1988 has seen the most ferocious IRA campaign in years,

'marked by a return of attacks on the city centre.'

Sinn Fein was starting a long march of its own.

The party's leadership was beginning to develop an endgame.

How do you end the Troubles?

After decades of violence, they were nowhere closer to a united Ireland.

'For the first time, Gerry Adams was challenged by John Hume,

'in explicitly nationalist and republican terms,

'to defend the IRA's campaign.'

Over the next nine months, the two men and delegations from their parties

had a series of secret meetings, at which they exchanged in writing

their own arguments and answers to the others.

'The talks ended in August, without agreement.'

John Hume's talks with Sinn Fein marked a shift in the landscape.

It was a sign that republicans in particular

were looking for something different, not just the gun.

Gerry Adams had said publicly that he was looking to create

a non-armed political movement to work for self-determination.

That meant Sinn Fein wanted a seat at the talks table,

without frightening Unionists and without going too far for its own faithful.

If there were signs of change on the wind in Northern Ireland,

British opinion received a severe shock to the system.

I've gone to prison for 15 years, for something I didn't do.

For something I didn't know anything about.

The release of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six showed

that the British establishment had arguably indulged in sharp practice.

These people simply weren't guilty of what they'd been convicted.

'Paul Hill walked with his family into the arms of supporters,

'a free man for the first time in 15 years.

'The agony of so many years in jail for a crime he didn't commit,

'swept away in the jubilation of the moment.'

Many British people had to face the possibility that some

within their own establishment had connived to perpetrate injustice.

And the IRA helped no-one by remaining stone silent

about who actually was guilty.

Some of the prisoners' families told me that

whenever there had been a possibility of release,

the IRA made a point of carrying out an atrocity to prevent it.

The republican movement loves a martyr, even when it's not one of its own.

There were a lot more unpalatable possibilities out there which would

not only have to be faced, but which were arriving at great speed.

'Nelson Mandela's specially chartered jet

'landed at Dublin Airport at lunchtime.

'He called for the British Government and the IRA to sit down together for talks,

'even though he acknowledged the IRA represented only a minority.'

The issue is that differences have arisen.

As a result of these differences many people have died,

have lost their lives.

What is the sense of continuing with that mutual slaughter?

'Although Downing Street sources are playing down Mr Mandela's remarks,

'Mrs Thatcher will leave him in no doubt -

'the Government doesn't negotiate with terrorists.'

'Peter Brooke, the Northern Ireland Secretary,

'isn't commenting on Mr Mandela's remarks.

'In an article in tonight's London Evening Standard, though,

'he says dialogue is the only way forward, but stresses it would be

'a tragedy if the Armalite should have primacy over the ballot box.'

Given the times, you can just imagine the reaction to that,

especially in Britain.

It was, "Not on the agenda, Mr Mandela, no can do, Mr Mandela,

"and frankly, not much of your business either, Mr Mandela."

But part of the backwash to that was that my ITV colleague and I

attracted a fair degree of criticism

for trapping the man into saying something controversial.

It was absolutely not true.

He was asked two perfectly reasonable questions, to which

he gave very firm answers, and clearly believed what he was saying.

It didn't happen because he said it, but goodness me,

what he had to say became one of the absolute cornerstones

of what the process turned into.

Ireland, inward looking though it might be, couldn't remain untouched

by world events, and not just South Africa but the Middle East, too.

The release of Irish hostage, Brian Keenan,

had no direct relation to politics here, but it was something

from elsewhere, of liberation, of change, brought directly home.

'The homecoming at Dublin airport was emotional, but triumphant.

'A few minutes later,

'he spoke of his feelings for the hostages still in captivity.'

I feel torn between a rock and a hard place.

I'm overwhelmed.

Most of my job was, necessarily, reporting Northern Ireland,

but the Republic was hugely important, too.

After all, I was Ireland correspondent.

The Republic was changing fast,

much faster than people in Britain or the North thought.

Mary Robinson swept to one of the least likely political victories ever,

and became Ireland's first woman president.

She went on to transform the nature of the office.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

'This evening, the announcement of the result

'set the seal on a truly extraordinary victory.'

CHEERING

'But her victory speech was very confident,

'saluting the voters she feels closest to.'

The women of Ireland - Mna na hEireann -

who instead of rocking the cradle rocked the system.

CHEERING

Of course, all the journalists groaned and said, "That's cheesy."

I rather arrogantly stood out in front of them and said,

"Ha-ha, but you'll all use it." And of course, we did.

I remember thinking the instant she'd said it, "What a moment,"

and talk about change time.

I was a student here in the early '70s, but now

I was forcefully struck by just how much more confident the place was,

and being Irish had become downright fashionable.

But while the makings of change and what would become a peace process

were evident all round, the core problem remained.

One of the steps to change that

came from Secretary of State Peter Brooke.

He declared Britain had no selfish, economic or strategic interest

in Northern Ireland.

That was significant for the simple reason

that someone had actually said it out loud.

Publicly, the unionists hated the speech,

but the smart ones knew a new game was beginning.

Back up north, though, my phone only rang with bad news.

'Six people died in an IRA bomb attack on this army checkpoint

'on the outskirts of Londonderry.

'Five of them were soldiers,

'the other victim was Patsy Gillespie,

'a civilian chef at an army base in the city.

'He was forced at gunpoint to drive the bomb into the checkpoint.

'The IRA used him as a human bomb because to the terrorists,

'he was a collaborator.'

Patsy Gillespie was just one man who drove to his own death

to protect his wife and children.

It seemed it couldn't get much worse than this.

'Another 300 troops are being sent to Northern Ireland tomorrow,

'to help cope with the worsening violence...

'There were two sectarian attacks on Catholic men today,

'apparently in retaliation for last night's IRA shootings.

'This is just what churchmen and politicians feared,

'retaliation for retaliation, and what's really worrying the police

'is that there may be a lot more to come.

'The bomb exploded in a recreation area and bar,

'in a basement of the military wing of the hospital,

and both the dead and most of the injured are soldiers or their families.'

'The IRA say they weren't targeting anything specific with their £1,000 van bomb -

'the biggest of five attempts to bomb the centre of Belfast in the past month.'

A new political game might have started,

but the old game still had to burn itself out.

On the rural roads and along the hedgerows,

people took their lives in their hands, simply by doing a day's work.

The IRA murdered eight Protestant builders here,

for the crime of working on an army base.

'The workmen died when a 600-pound bomb exploded

'close to their van, as they were driving home.

'The security forces cordoned off the area for a two-mile radius

'for several hours after the attack. The blast was heard 12 miles away.

'The device was detonated either by a radio signal or a command wire,

'which means the terrorists waited and watched for their victims.'

'This is a carnage scene. It is evil, it is wanton,

'and there are insufficient words to describe one's condemnation of it.'

And it was here at Teebane that we used an image which has haunted me,

which communicated the human aspect of yet another incident.

That flask had been part of someone's lunch just a few hours earlier.

As I read the names, it struck me that

so many people are not remembered like this.

Their only memorial is a headstone.

So many of the deaths in the Northern Ireland Troubles were lonely ones.

It was the multiple murders that got the big headlines.

That's exactly why the paramilitaries carried them out.

'The latest victims of Belfast's increasingly reckless gunmen

'were in a bookmaker's shop on one of the city's main roads.

'About 20 customers were inside at the time, just after 2:00pm -

'the crowd, in for the start of the afternoon's racing.

'Two gunman walked in, one with a handgun, one with a rifle,

'and they opened fire, indiscriminately.

'Five people died, another ten were injured in a hail of gunfire.'

This was a purely sectarian attack, carried out by loyalist gunmen

whose sole intention was to kill Catholics, any Catholics.

'It's another benchmark in Belfast's escalating violence.'

I grew up on the Ormeau Road,

and I'll never forget how silent the road was that day.

It was as silent as I've ever heard anything and one woman began to cry.

She got louder and louder and louder,

and eventually friends walked her way,

and not one of the photographers or the cameramen

took a photograph or recorded any sound.

This was an awful time.

No-one knew if stepping outside their front door would get them killed.

As soon as one paramilitary group did something, another one reacted.

Not long after this, a colleague and I went to see UDA leaders on the Shankill Road.

They were ordinary working-class Belfast man,

just the same as the men the UFF had murdered in the bookies.

I put it to them that they were driving Catholics into the arms of the IRA,

and the reply was, "As long as the IRA continued its genocide, loyalists would strike back."

It was a case of, "We can kill as many of yours as you can kill of ours,"

a cycle that had to be broken.

The politics couldn't be forgotten.

It was only from that direction that an end to this misery would come.

And steps were being taken in that direction.

One of them was the Ulster Unionists going to Dublin

for talks with the Irish government. That had never been done before.

There was a new imperative for dialogue.

I'm quite often asked, "What was the turning point?"

The truth is, there really wasn't one.

The process, even at its lowest level,

was the right people in the right place at the right time.

If I had to point to one, it would be the IRA bombing in Warrington,

in which two young children were killed.

Why? Because of the impact on opinion in the republic.

While most Irish people have relatives in America,

everyone has relatives in England. It was a human response.

In my view, no other IRA action brought this reaction

from the great mass of Irish people.

The IRA had a rule not to carry out operations south of the border,

because it would damage their image. Warrington did just that.

For two days, the people of Dublin have been putting their signatures

to books of condolence to express their sympathies in seven separate books.

Many simply wrote the word "Sorry" beside their signatures.

Many others said,

"Not in our name".

Of course, Republicans took a depressingly cynical

and selfish view of this.

One senior Republican told me that round the world,

the IRA had gone from being seen as freedom fighters

to being seen as baby killers.

Get back!

The Shankill Road bombing was a terrible thing

and the night it happened there was a news programme on BBC Two

at about half-past seven.

And the IRA had said it didn't mean to kill

all those people in the fish shop.

It was trying to kill the leadership

of the loyalist UDA paramilitary group.

The presenter asked me, what did I make of that?

And I had to say, "I realise this is not going to be

"a popular opinion tonight, but I believe them."

I was terribly nervous afterwards that I'd gone too far

but that was the kind of decision you had to take in those days.

If you were going to tell the truth about something,

you had to reflect the unpalatable.

SHE WEEPS

I hate them.

What they've done.

They've destroyed my child's life.

I've no love for them.

I know people say you should forgive and forget,

I can't.

I can't. Not what they've done.

They destroyed people's lives yesterday.

It was needless.

The youngest victim was Leanne Murray, who was a teenager.

And the next day everyone wanted, for the coverage, an interview with her mother

which the family were saying she wouldn't do.

So I went up to her house, we were allowed in and we did the interview

and Mrs Murray sat there weeping throughout,

talking about what a lovely wee girl she was and how she'd left

the rest of the family to go to the fish shop to get her Saturday treat.

And I remember sitting there thinking,

this is a fantastic interview, this is just a wonderful interview.

And the other part of my head, if you like, the human part, was going,

what on earth am I doing in this woman's living room?

And all I could say to her at the end was, "Mrs Murray,

"I'm so sorry this has happened to you, genuinely.

"And all I can say to you is this interview is going to have

"a tremendous impact when it goes round the world",

which it did. But at the same time, when we left the house,

my hands were shaking and the cameraman just put his head

on the steering wheel in the crew car and we had to sit there

for about five minutes while we got our breath back.

Just driving around like this, I don't think about it all the time

and I don't obsess about it, but if I go for a drive like this,

then I remember, oh, yeah, there was somebody shot dead there,

there was an explosion over there.

The Troubles went on for so long, they affected so many people

and they were so diverse across the city,

in some places, you could say every kerbstone has a story to tell.

One of the things that's really struck me

is how many people still want to come up and tell you their story

about who they knew who was killed,

about how they might have been there themselves,

but for happenstance, they were somewhere else.

And they still want that story to be told.

And I think that's very important. If there's one important thing

the media did in all those years and still can do,

is just let people tell their stories, have their say.

At the time though, not all those stories could be told.

There were just too many stories to tell and they kept coming,

day after day after day.

I felt it was very important to keep communicating

that human side of the violence,

but at the same time, I had to keep an eye on

what was happening with the politics because things were happening.

The mourners at those funerals in the aftermath of the Shankill bomb

didn't know, probably didn't care that day,

what was happening politically out of sight.

Gerry Adams carried the coffin of Thomas Begley -

the IRA man killed by his own bomb on the Shankill Road.

He had to, politically.

Many of the bereaved said that if their relatives' death

meant no-one else would die, they could take some comfort

and maybe they did.

Because perhaps for the first time, politicians found

the murders a reason to keep trying, not a reason to stop.

If the implication from the honourable gentleman's remarks

are that we should sit down and talk with Mr Adams

and the Provisional IRA,

I can only say to the honourable gentleman,

that would turn my stomach over

and that of most people in this house and we will not do it.

That language seemed unequivocal.

Now a lot of us thought some sort of contacts might be going on

and they were.

But it was a secret which was blown by the Observer newspaper.

The denials had been so emphatic that the discovery was a shock.

Many journalists felt they'd been lied to.

The night before the Observer published,

I got a call from a trusted government source.

He gave me all the details

and I was able to break the story on the late Saturday news.

I doubt the government would ever have revealed the contacts otherwise.

Now here's an object lesson.

Journalists are really good at remembering the things they got right,

and really bad at remembering the things they got wrong.

I said on the late news that night that I thought it was very difficult for Sir Patrick Mayhew

to survive this one, because it looked as though the government had been caught out

doing something it said it wasn't doing.

But of course he came here on the Monday to make a statement

to MPs and was hailed all round

for taking a bold and courageous step.

A lot of the decisions, talks and agreements carried out

during the peace process, were and remain secret.

The unthinkable could be done in private

as long as it led to results in public.

I'd been to Downing Street many times

but what happened next sticks in my memory.

It's not much remembered now, but to me,

the Downing Street Declaration was crucial.

The Taoiseach and I have now agreed

on a joint declaration on Northern Ireland.

It is a declaration for democracy and dialogue

and it is based on consent.

It makes no compromise on strongly held principles.

But it does embody our common view

that there is an opportunity to end violence for good

in Northern Ireland.

This is a historic opportunity for peace.

We hope that everybody will grasp it,

So that we can all make a new beginning.

This came against a background of the final years of apartheid

and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So there was a temptation to see what was happening here

as something going at the same pace and something on the same scale.

So I had to take a fairly cold view of it, which was,

Albert Reynolds had described it as a historic opportunity

and I said it will only prove to be a historic occasion

if it pulls off what it's intended to do

which was to secure an IRA ceasefire,

then a loyalist paramilitary ceasefire, which would in turn lead

to all-party talks and then you'd have all-round agreement

which I said at the time would be a very impressive

series of tricks to pull off.

A door to a solution which had seemed irredeemably locked

and bolted had just opened.

At this point, I'd been Ireland correspondent for five years

and I now had a changing story to tell.

It was something that would change all our lives.

The primacy of the gun was becoming the primacy of politics.

But none of us - politicians, press, public -

knew how much longer it was going to take.

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