Episode 3 From Our Ireland Correspondent

Seconds after the explosion,

the horror of an attack on people, on a community,

in all its raw brutality.

INDISTINCT SHOUTING

Behind the shields of the RUC's riot teams

the little girls of Holy Cross Primary go to school.

I nominate Martin McGuinness as Minister for Education.

There it was - the reality of the Good Friday agreement.

Sinn Fein in government.

Let me make it clear. We will not be sitting in that government

with IRA terrorists.

The marching season in Northern Ireland

is now where the old enmities find their expression.

Just after the Good Friday agreement, somebody asked me

what had I learnt from it all,

and what I said was that people can change, when they have to.

And, time and again across 20 years, I reported upon the unthinkable

becoming the possible, and then the probable and finally, actual.

When I became Ireland Correspondent in 1988,

everything I reported on was extraordinary

but it dawned on me that what most people wanted was quite simple,

that was the right to be ordinary.

What I mean is, people just wanted to live normal lives,

not surrounded by a kind of daily war.

It was going to take almost a decade to get there.

But there was a general assumption, outside Northern Ireland,

that normalising would happen very quickly.

So one of my problems

was to keep the non-Northern Ireland audience interested.

Why was it taking so long to get the Good Friday Agreement to work?

For many reasons.

Weapons decommissioning in particular would take years to resolve.

NEWS REPORT: The biggest divisions in this campaign were in Unionism

and with the result so far, the camp against the Good Friday Agreement,

led by Ian Paisley, is ahead on points.

This contest hasn't even reached half-time yet.

Dublin is sick!

Hear, hear!

Mr Tony Blair is sick. His lies has caught up him

and the sickest man of all is David Trimble.

The attempt by the DUP and their allies to wreck the Assembly

has failed, and will continue to fail.

On the way to office, Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble heads for

the first meeting of the new, devolved Northern Ireland assembly.

He's the first local politician as First Minister,

or effectively Prime Minister of Northern Ireland

to hold such an office, since 1974.

We have arrived, and you have been compelled

by the votes of the people, to come here.

Even in opposition, you will be part of the change

which will take place on this island.

The newly-elected assembly met, but without powers.

A sort of halfway house, but very significant all the same.

A beginning.

Politicians who'd never talked directly before, doing just that.

Good afternoon. My name's Denis Murray.

I was the BBC's Ireland correspondent for 20 years.

And I've 35 years in journalism, all told.

I was in an odd position, in a way,

that, as Ireland Correspondent for the BBC,

I was reporting Northern Ireland and Ireland as a whole

to an audience outside of Ireland,

but most of the journalists in Northern Ireland were reporting the country to itself.

Up to the hunger strike,

most of the reporting for London had been done by "firemen" -

people from London sent in for a week or two.

So, eventually, they invented this title of "Ireland Correspondent" -

somebody who would have to live with the consequences of his reporting.

The Omagh bombing was one of the stories we had to cover.

And I'll be straight with you - I found that really trying

because we thought it was all over

and then, suddenly, the worst thing imaginable had happened.

There should've been a carnival here. Instead, there was carnage.

Saturday afternoon shoppers, here because it was safe.

Crowded together, away from a bomb scare.

Instead, the bomb was in their midst.

It killed 14 women and three young girls.

It killed five men and four young boys.

It killed three generations of one family.

A 65-year-old grandmother,

her pregnant 30 year-old daughter, and her 18 month-old daughter.

A litany of the dead, of the slaughtered innocents.

29 people and unborn twins murdered.

And to what end? None.

There was something I found very striking after the bombing,

because no matter who came here, Tony Bair, Bill Clinton,

Mo Mowlam, the Queen, they all did the same thing.

Which was, they stopped and looked around

because they realised for the first time

just how narrow this part of the street is.

And I could see they were all doing the same thing -

visualising what it must have been like when the bomb went off.

# You can have my heart

# But it isn't new

# It's been used and broken

# and only comes in blue... #

As a reporter, one of the most remarkable things

about the aftermath of the bombing

was the genuinely open-hearted welcome from the people of Omagh.

I worried that the media would be seen

as not just intrusive, but invasive.

But there was no hostility, which would've been understandable.

Instead, people stopped you on the street to tell you their story.

Not to have it broadcast or reported.

Just to have somebody, a familiar face from the TV, to listen.

A week after the bombing, there was a memorial service

and one of the prayers at that was,

"We thank those who've told our story to the world."

and I can't tell you how much those words still mean to me.

But the political process had become unstoppable.

No violence was going to prevent the politicians trying to move ahead.

That was not going to be easy.

But one thing they all agreed on was the first order of business

on the first working day of the Assembly at Stormont.

All the members signed the book of condolence for the Omagh bombing.

The rest of the sitting that day struck me as "business as usual".

In a way, its significance was that it was ordinary.

One essential part of the agreement was anything but everyday.

The early release of paramilitary prisoners

was - and remains - the most painful part of the whole process.

Politically, it wasn't controversial.

If the agreement was to work, it had to be done.

The human level was totally different.

Relatives of the dead, in many cases, had to watch killers go free.

Many families were put through the agony of loss all over again.

Just looking at those shelves brings back so much.

They say journalism is the first draft of history.

Well, you're looking at it.

Those are compilation tapes

and that means there's about ten reports on each tape,

so there are thousands of reports up there.

You look at that and you wonder how many people's lives

were recorded up there, how many people's deaths,

how many people's lives were changed forever.

An old country graveyard.

Hardly used now, but a grim discovery.

A new coffin, partly concealed.

The body found here is believed to be that of Eamon Molloy,

who disappeared from his North Belfast home in the mid-1970s.

The Disappeared. 17 people kidnapped and murdered by republicans.

On the one o'clock news at the cemetery

I said that this was typical IRA.

Effectively a token gesture, which was at best grudging

and, apart from the importance to the family,

had no real significance.

I was immediately phoned by a rather hurt Gerry Adams

who said I had under-estimated the significance of this

and that it was a major gesture by the IRA.

I didn't change my opinion

but in later reports, I included his view.

The most public search for remains

took place on this beach in County Louth.

The hunt for Jean McConville, abducted in 1972.

Her remains were eventually found.

The most melancholy sight,

just two undertakers needed to carry her coffin.

Most of the Disappeared were young men.

Some of the mothers put their son's names on family headstones,

just so they'd have a place to grieve.

All the families wanted was a Christian burial

and somewhere to mourn.

While I was Ireland correspondent, there was an assumption

that the peace process was finite, that it would end in something

but in many ways, it's still going on,

because you can't build a new future without unravelling the past

and that still haunts us all.

And I doubt if the full truth of the Troubles will ever be told.

The murders of the Disappeared

were denied by the paramilitaries for decades.

Eventually, the IRA admitted some of them.

So, while they'd answered those questions about the past,

they were still bluntly refusing to provide a resolution

to the issue of the present - getting rid of their guns.

Two years they've had, to demonstrate a commitment

to peace and democracy.

The key question is,

is there any genuine intent, amongst the paramilitaries,

to change, to commit themselves to peace?

With little progress on decommissioning in sight,

implementing the totality of the Good Friday deal was impossible.

The parties simply couldn't move their positions.

So the Governments decided that, once again, help was needed.

Former US senator George Mitchell, who chaired the talks

leading to the Agreement, was called on to return and lead a review.

I believe those difficulties can be overcome.

If I thought otherwise, I would not be here.

The people of Northern Ireland have been clear, consistent

and overwhelming in their desire for peace and political stability.

At this stage, the parties were barely speaking to each other.

George Mitchell managed to break the ice.

The plan had been for the parties to "jump together".

The IRA would start decommissioning

and the Unionists would go into Government with Sinn Fein.

David Trimble persuaded his party to take a risk

and share power with republicans before decommissioning started.

We've done our bit.

And, Mr Adams, it's over to you.

We've jumped. You follow.

Despite all the problems, there was a very strong feeling

outside Northern Ireland that, once the agreement was made, that was it.

Put at its most superficial, that there was some kind of happy ending

in Ulster, that we'd all wished for.

The level of world media attention dropped like a stone

and the hundreds of crews and reporters

who'd been here on Good Friday went away and, by and large, they didn't come back.

The seemingly endless stops and starts of the process

ceased being international news, even though one of the starts

was the working reality of that agreement.

I nominate Martin McGuinness as Minister for Education.

DISGRUNTLED MURMURING

I couldn't help feeling that the Unionist outrage

over the very notion of Martin McGuiness in charge of schools

was the unionists' own fault.

They could have nominated one of their own first.

I affirm the pledge of office...

Even though it was a momentous day, I got a sense of fragility about it.

I can't really explain why. It just didn't feel permanent.

That Executive and Assembly, though, did a tremendous amount

of real, nuts-and-bolts political work.

But you felt it was only one crisis away from collapse.

Throughout this period, the politics went through cycles of deadlock

and then sudden bursts of progress.

We always used to say it was like a blockage in a pipe

suddenly being removed, and the water gushed through.

I've lost count of the number of times

I've stood at places like this

and said the once-unthinkable has just happened

And yet a couple of days later, they were taken for granted.

They'd become part of the fabric very quickly.

And all the parties, all the parties, threw away

what had once been tablets of stone.

ANGRY SHOUTING

But you can't change all of history, all at once.

SHOUTING

Ardoyne, North Belfast, and the Holy Cross Catholic Girls Primary School.

Protestants there felt an oppressed minority.

Their protest was to block the parents and children

going to the school, which was in the Loyalist area.

Holy Cross was expected.

It would have been well flagged up, I suppose.

People knew something was going to happen.

I remember that night, part of my live report

into the late news programme.

I said "if I can just add, having done all the analysis,

and the facts, and so on,

that it was one of the most poisonous, unpleasant events

it had been my misfortune to have to report.

They were apprehensive, but they hoped the worst was over.

Surely, today, the protest would be peaceful.

There seemed fewer Protestant protesters than before.

But, from one Loyalist side-street, the stones began to fly.

Seconds later, the blast bomb was thrown from the Loyalist crowd.

EXPLOSION

-SECOND EXPLOSION

-Oh, Jesus Christ!

People who, anywhere else, would be neighbours not knowing each other,

here, the bile...the, just...

Only word I can think of is poison. Awful.

And also because these children were so small,

and they terrified out of their wits.

I remember one little girl just crying, "I want to go home".

And I think that struck a chord with a lot of people round the world

because that's something all kids say

when they're at their wits' end, and they're miserable.

After you had something like Holy Cross

certain sections of both sides said, "We have to stay the way we were",

for a brief while, because, "Look what them ones did to us."

And both communities were feeling hurt,

and one of the things that dogged all of us for years

was that each community felt itself to be the victim community.

Both sides had wrongs done to them

and what we used to call "whataboutery".

Bad things happened everywhere.

And one of the triumphs of the process was that, by and large,

you don't hear that as much now, as you once did.

People have accepted that bad things happened everywhere

and the real, important thing is that goal over there,

of sorting the whole thing out.

The great obstacle to that was the weapons issue.

At an early stage, I took the view that if the guns weren't being used,

then they were effectively out of commission, anyway.

But I changed my mind.

The principle behind putting the weapons beyond use

completely trumped Sinn Fein's case,

which was "the IRA won't do it, so don't ask".

By the late '90s, Sinn Fein had lost the argument.

The first act of decommissioning was very significant.

And because it was the first, it didn't matter what the quantity was,

as much as the fact that it happened.

One government official said to me at the time

it would've been significant

if it had been a rusty pike from the 1798 Rising.

The process of decommissioning was never revealed to us.

But it was impossible to televise.

It was a concept, and nobody ever saw it.

And we just had to wait and hear from the people that were there,

that it had happened.

Nothing would work without trust. At Stormont, it was yet to build.

This was over a purely political matter in the assembly.

But it showed the parties still weren't used to

being in the one place, together.

We will not allow ourselves to be distracted

by the sort of mob violence that certain parties descend to.

Move it in that direction.

The tensions underlying the "brawl in the hall"

reflected those in the wider society.

ANGRY SHOUTING

The divisions were as wide as ever,

with sectarian murders and an increase in punishment beatings.

The absence of political progress didn't help.

Just as throughout the Troubles,

people coped, and got on with their lives.

While things were becoming more normal,

events that couldn't have been predicted

were threatening the future of the process.

Three Irish republicans were arrested in Colombia.

They were charged and convicted of aiding Marxist guerrillas there.

No-one believed they were eco-tourists.

Then, Stormont-gate.

Sinn Fein's offices at Parliament buildings raided by police.

There were accusations of a spy ring involving Sinn Fein officials.

This is the offices of a political party

which sits in this assembly. This is an assembly building!

All the charges were eventually dropped

but this was the crisis that proved too much.

The assembly collapsed.

The public was simply bewildered.

What on earth was going on?

Unionists were outraged.

They held crisis talks with Tony Blair

but any trust they'd had in Sinn Fein was destroyed.

Sinn Fein went to Downing Street, too.

They saw the raid as a politically-motivated stunt,

aimed purely at damaging them.

In a speech in Belfast, Tony Blair laid it on the line.

The fork in the road has finally come.

Whatever guarantees we need to give

that we will implement the agreement, we will.

Whatever commitment to the end we all want to see,

that of a normalised Northern Ireland, I will make.

But we cannot carry on with the IRA half-in, half-out of this process.

The assembly wouldn't sit again for another five years.

In that political hiatus, Sinn Fein's electoral support went up.

But at least some elements of the IRA believed

they weren't just half-out of the process, and they reverted to type.

An armed gang raided the Northern Bank and got away with £26 million

after terrorising two bank officials' families.

The IRA flatly denied any involvement. Nobody believed them.

What was going on was this immediate post-conflict society

trying to achieve some kind of normalcy.

And those incidents were important for this reason, in my opinion.

It showed the paramilitary grassroots that a ceasefire meant

not stopping some actions, or operations as they called them,

but stopping all of them.

There was a phrase shot through the Troubles as well,

which was, "The dogs in the street "knew how the paramilitaries were operating in their own society."

Journalists knew a lot of that, but thinking you know something

isn't the same as being able to prove it,

so we couldn't report a lot of that stuff.

Now the murder of Robert McCartney changed all that.

Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners...

The rosary, a traditional Catholic ritual for the dead.

This is a Republican community saying to the Republican movement, "It's time to come clean."

Robert McCartney was beaten and knifed to death after a row in a pub.

His family is convinced members of the IRA did it,

and they're now intimidating local people.

It was a bar full of people.

It wasn't one man did it. It was a gang of men.

Why are they not charged?

Simply because people are obviously afraid to come forward.

The McCartney family's campaign for justice showed in sharp relief

how Republicans worked at street level - cover up, lie and intimidate.

The self-image of the IRA as noble freedom fighters was shattered.

Robert McCartney's sisters didn't set out to do it,

but they achieved something nobody else had, no politician, no group.

As never before, Sinn Fein was on the back foot.

In the past, I have defended the right of the IRA to engage in armed struggle.

I did so because there was no alternative for those who would not bend the knee,

or turn a blind eye to oppression,

or for those who wanted a national republic.

Now there is an alternative.

The bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney had a dramatic effect.

They became the catalyst for Gerry Adams' appeal to the IRA to disband, which it did.

That really was seismic.

What's really striking when you come to the Republican plot at Milltown

is how far back the Republican memory goes.

A hundred yards away over there is a memorial from 1798.

But then Gerry Adams made his appeal to the IRA,

which he wouldn't have made if he didn't think the IRA were going to do it.

And the IRA drew a line under their most recent campaign.

So after 30, almost 40 years, that was the end of it all.

Two months later, the IRA completed the decommissioning of its weapons.

Even so, our jobs as journalists didn't get any safer.

As the Protestant Orange Order, their bands and supporters

came past the Catholic Ardoyne area,

they came under attack from golf balls and bottles.

As soon as the first missiles flew, police pushed the Catholics away,

a manoeuvre the locals felt to be out of proportion.

The police pulled a manoeuvre that we hadn't seen before.

Normally they would just sweep past the camera crew, but not this night.

'We got stuck in a place we normally wouldn't have been,

'and the water cannon turned in our direction.

'Whoosh, it was all over you.

'It wasn't so much the force of it, it was the volume of it.

'It was like drowning in the air, I couldn't breathe.'

And the cameraman's nose started to bleed and wouldn't stop.

But he also had a blinding headache within five minutes.

We couldn't drive back from here.

But in another supposedly safe part, other members of the team,

one of them got hit by shrapnel from a blast bomb,

and one of the correspondents got hit in the shin by a brick that had a piece of nail in it.

His whole shin began to swell up.

In all my years of reporting

I don't remember so many people getting hit in one night,

or so many people from the one team getting hit in one night.

Leadership is lonely, defeat worse yet.

David Trimble listens to his DUP opponents' victory speech.

The Ulster Unionist Party, under his leadership,

lost the trust and support of the Unionist electorate.

The political scene had changed. The makers and breakers of a deal were now the DUP and Sinn Fein.

The old political extremes had become the new middle ground.

Throughout this period, the politics stayed deadlocked

and we seemed to spend hours at endless country houses in England

while the two Prime Ministers tried to hot-house the thing.

But I remember vividly, it struck me in September 2005

that Ian Paisley in particular, but the DUP in general,

really wanted to get back into government.

They wanted to share power with Sinn Fein,

and they wanted another election as well before it happened.

I said this to my two closest colleagues.

They said, "That'll never happen,

"that would mean Ian Paisley throwing away 40 years of his career."

And I said, "I bet it does happen." And do you know what? I was right.

The deal was done, and this time it really did feel permanent.

Now the debate would not be under the shadow of the past.

It would be about education, health and the budget. Ordinary politics.

In my 20 years as Ireland correspondent,

I watched Northern Ireland move from the agony of the Troubles,

through the ups and downs of the peace process,

and finally, to this new dispensation.

It was my privilege to be an eyewitness.

And it's few journalists who get to see their story come to a conclusion.

-IAN PAISLEY:

-If you had told me some time ago that I would be standing here to take this office,

I would have been totally unbelieving.

MARTIN MCGUINNESS: 'We know this will not be easy,

'and that the road we are embarking on will have many twists and turns.'

It is, however, a road which we have chosen,

and which is supported by the vast majority of our people.

APPLAUSE

Even now, everyone in Ireland up to a point

is some kind of prisoner of history.

But the greatest achievement has been that those bonds have been broken.

If you look at the political history up to about 1988,

and if you look at it now, it's utterly transformed.

Set that against the previous 700 years of conflict,

and I think that's just truly remarkable.

Denis Murray, BBC News, Belfast.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]