Boys of '69 True North

CROWD CHEERS AND APPLAUDS

Just coming from a little place like Ardoyne

and then you come to something like this that you've never seen before,

well, it's just a dream.

And to actually get an apprenticeship

at a club like Leeds United, it was brilliant.

Miss it.

CAR HORNS

Ardoyne was home and to this day is still home, you know,

I'll still always refer to it as home.

But I feel very comfortable here.

It was an escape from that hostility that

we experienced as kids in Ardoyne.

In a sense, it has contributed a great deal to the way I am today.

Some people may have left Ardoyne and have never looked back,

but, for me, it's still something that is core to who I am.

Holy Cross, Ardoyne,

is a Catholic parish in north Belfast,

which is bordered by Protestant areas.

Both sides of the community here have seen more suffering than most

throughout the Troubles.

'Growing up in that context gave me the drive

'to try and make a difference. That's why I have chosen to work here,

'particularly with young people in the community.'

Whenever people hear about Ardoyne,

they have a very one-dimensional stereotype, you know,

that Ardoyne is a Republican stronghold.

I think there is a deeper and a much richer story

to be told about this community,

and that's reflected very much in the lives of the altar boys

that I grew up with.

These were boys who grew up together to be men who grew apart.

The summer of 1969 changed our lives for ever.

Some chose opposite sides in the conflict.

Some left and never looked back.

Many of them went on to be very successful in their lives.

For the first time in nearly 50 years,

I want to track them down and bring them back together in Ardoyne.

I was aware of the fact that there was a cachet about

being from Ardoyne, it was a place apart.

I wonder... what it would have been like

to grow up in a normal place.

In a sense, I regret that I didn't get that.

When you consider we were all dealing with life and death

on a daily basis...

I mean, that's not the average experience

of an 11 and 12-year-old that's growing up.

Living in Ardoyne during the darkest days of the Troubles,

people began to develop an island's mentality.

There's a sense of

here is something that all of us had in common at one stage,

but from that common experience,

people decided that they would go off in different paths

that's led them into many different areas, throughout the world.

Hello, Gerard?

'Yeah.'

Gerard, it's Brian McKee here from up the Holy Cross...

Hello?

'Brian?'

I tell you what it is, we've talked about a reunion

of some of the fellows who were altar boys during the '60s...

Is there any way that you know

that we might be able to get in touch with him?

Sure.

But you're open to the idea?

You're the next one...

'I suppose my worries is that some people may choose not to take part

'and that may be because of something in their personal story.

'It may be because of something within someone else's story

'who's coming together.'

In the same garden there's so many different flowers.

You know, and that's really what life's like, you know?

We're not all going to be roses.

You might get a few jaggy nettles.

When I was in the church here as an altar boy,

it was all pure innocence.

I still cherish the good memories

and the happy days,

the days of total joy.

My father was a bricklayer

and my mother was just a genius at everything.

They were both active republicans.

People might find this strange

when I say every member of my family had been in a prison.

It was one of the sad facts that you are a product of your environment

and the environment we had here was such that...

..if you didn't swim you'd sink.

I remember being over on the Falls Road.

The RUC had come out

and as they were coming down the street

they were beating their riot shields with their batons,

and the RUC man...

spat at me...

cowering in a doorway.

I was dragged out of the doorway and...

the RUC man started slaughtering me.

The bruises and all the thumps all healed,

but that man and his language...

..left a lasting scar.

I would say that I was involved in the republican struggle

and I'd leave it at that.

PRIEST CHANTS IN LATIN

We all started off from a point of mutual understanding,

which was we were altar boys.

And yet, we all took several different paths.

I remember telling my mother and father

I was contemplating joining the police.

Well, he just said, "Well, it's the lesser of two evils."

He then came out and said then,

"Well, it is better to be buried by the state

"than to be buried by the IRA."

To come from where I am to be a Catholic joining the RUC,

I knew, once in it...

there probably really was no...

turning back.

My life dramatically changed,

where I was a civilian, 18 years of age,

playing a bit of hurling, becoming a sworn officer with powers.

I mean, I just wonder...

..did anybody wonder where I went

or did they know where I went, or... did they care where I went?

How far did he get on in it? What was his rank?

-ALL YELL:

-Prince Charles! Prince Charles!

-GERRY:

-'I am the head of the close protection branch,

'the superintendent responsible for the protection of the Royal Family

'while visiting Northern Ireland.'

..Are these all your neighbours?

I'm the longest-serving Catholic police officer.

Oh, that was an act of treachery.

I'll just let it mellow around in my head for a while.

We're not just products of the past but the past has made us what we are.

As altar boys, we shared the same experiences growing up

and had a common bond.

But the events that were to come would change everything.

These were people who made decisions at a particular point in time

and that's part and parcel of the whole story of Ardoyne.

You know, different paths, different people, different choices.

-There you go.

-SEAN LAUGHS

Well, good, that's a start anyway. Here we go...

-There's...

-CATHAL LAUGHS

..four fish on three hooks, not bad. Whoa!

-Oh, look at that.

-Oh, look. A wrasse.

All I can say is, thanks be to God, they are very stupid fish.

'Life is complicated.

'You know, people report on Belfast,'

they report on Ardoyne and it's all very simple.

You know, bigots and terrorists

and labels all over the place.

It's not like that, it's human beings caught up in situations.

First memories of Ardoyne are strange.

But very aware, of course,

when you looked out the window

on the front of the house, what did you see? The church.

Holy Cross, Ardoyne, that was it.

It kind of then became the dominant symbol in my life.

A lot of my friends would have been altar boys

and Cathal, of course, was an altar boy too,

leading the way, my older brother.

-ALL:

-..In the name of the Father, and of the Son

and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

BELL TOLLS

What I remember about it was the sense of camaraderie, fellowship...

I don't recall ever being even remotely aware of anything improper

in the attitude of priests to me or to anyone else that I knew of.

We used to have unspoken competitions to see who could

ring the bells the loudest.

One judged one's peers

by the ferocity with which you banged the bells.

BELLS TOLL

I might be imagining this, but I think I was good at it!

Cathal was a big messer.

You know, you'd never have thought that he would have achieved so much.

I would say about all the altar boys,

there was no angels among them.

They might have been good altar boys,

but I don't think they were... they were angels.

It was like a boys' club.

Although we were in the monastery, we never talked about religion.

You know, we talked about football.

As I was growing up, then we talked about girls.

I do remember Sean at one stage had a little gang, as it were.

You had to have a password to get in...

And I could never keep remembering it,

-so I didn't last very long.

-HE GIGGLES

We were all brought down one Sunday

and shown this room which got called Australia

cos it was underground...

Uh, but there it was - a table tennis table!

Who'd seen such a thing?!

And it was for the altar boys.

He always fancied himself as a bit of a table tennis player, so it'll be

interesting to see just how much, how far he went along that career path.

ALTAR BOYS SING HYMN

One of the great perks of the altar boys was that,

when you were on an early Mass in the morning,

Brother Paschal made a large jug of lovely coffee.

And obviously, he put the sugar into it and he put the milk...

But even now, when I talk, I can actually taste the coffee...

It was just amazing, I've never tasted coffee like it since.

I think joining the altar was...

It was a good thing cos when you were there, you know, there was

somebody to talk to, to have a bit of craic with and stuff like that.

The altar boys were a very close-knit set of friends

and that's probably the strength of being an altar boy,

was that you were part of something

that was much bigger than yourself.

It was an important role that you were playing...

And these other people were your partners.

RECORD PLAYER CLICKS

MUSIC: We Shall Overcome by Joan Baez

Little did we realise that that wonderful innocence of childhood

was about to be taken away from us.

Here we have the altar list for 17 August 1969,

which was the weekend when, I suppose,

mayhem broke out on the streets of Ardoyne.

GUNFIRE

Stay inside, OK, son?

Sectarian rioting marked the beginning of a decades-long conflict

that shaped the rest of our lives.

# We shall overcome... #

It was a strange feeling when you were growing up

watching the whole thing unfold in front of you.

Part of it, you were scared, but also the excitement of it.

10 years of age, it's almost as if, you know,

Indiana Jones had come to Ardoyne.

# Oh, deep... #

And it seemed to us that there was a riot outside the house for...

..two or three years, nonstop.

We closed the shutters in case the windows were broken

and those shutters were never opened again,

there was no daylight in that room ever again.

Fear, absolute fear.

I was terrified.

You could see through the skylight in my bedroom,

the flames were leaping high and houses were being burnt, and...

..I was just...terrified.

Shaking in the bed, just wanting this to be over.

LOUD EXPLOSION

# We shall overcome

# Some day

# Oh, deep in my heart

# I do believe

# That we shall...

# ..Overcome some day. #

It made me think that...

the revolution was coming and, you know, prepare for the revolution.

Cos the situation wasn't in my control

or really in any young person's control.

Fellas of the same age as me ended up behind bars.

Sometimes for doing nothing,

and sometimes for doing perfectly awful things.

Um... It could have been me.

I did join the local branch of the Fein.

I think the local priest had seen me,

so I was confronted by my father.

And I left.

So, my career as a freedom fighter was very, very short.

You can't ignore it when it's coming into your own home,

when it's YOUR family.

I was interned on two occasions.

It was another level of education for me,

where I got a degree out of Long Kesh...

The university of freedom.

"We're right, they're wrong." I could never see it in those terms.

It was never that clear.

Cos, I mean, the IRA, what they were up to, I couldn't relate to.

I couldn't relate to it.

Innocent people were being killed.

I suppose I began to take refuge in the church.

In the madness, that was a safe place.

CHILDREN SING

Maybe in and around that time the whole vocation thing was at work.

I had to escape.

Yeah.

I was ordained in 1984 and then the next day, my first Mass in Ardoyne.

Very emotional time.

Are we altar boys or priests now, you know?

Yeah, I was going to go to Rome, live in Rome for three years,

I mean, that was just...

It doesn't get any better.

My daddy said, "A poor man from Belfast, look at me, look at us,

"and here we are, we've just had Mass with the Pope!"

Absolutely...beside themselves.

There's always a sense with people, you know,

that Ardoyne kind of punched above its weight.

You know, that despite everything that went on there, you know,

the Ardoyne people still managed to rise above it.

All I can say with any certainty is that

I was fortunate to meet certain people at certain times.

I didn't get arrested, I didn't get shot, I wasn't blown up.

I got a good education.

I was in the right place at the right time

when the job of director general of RTE became advertised.

For whatever reason, I was given the job

and I stayed in it for seven years.

This friend of mine rang me up after

apparently my picture was on the front of the Irish News,

and he said that it was the first time somebody from Ardoyne

was on the front of the Irish News

who wasn't the accused or the deceased.

So, that-that's kind of playing into the stereotype of hard men

and all that from Ardoyne.

We were in difficult times, it was difficult circumstances,

but we were trying...

And we got a home fit for heroes.

When Sinn Fein put itself into election gear,

everybody started to sit back and notice.

I'm proud enough to say that I was elected in that first wave

of fresh new faces going into Belfast City Council.

I think it's...

A lot of people have recognised that Sinn Fein are appealing

across the nationalist divide.

'Part of my daily work was heading up the North American desk

'in Sinn Fein.

'I had the pleasure of accompanying Gerry Adams

'after the '94 ceasefire had been called,'

and for whatever small part I played in it, I feel immensely proud.

You know, unlike many of them, Gerard made the decision to stay in Ardoyne.

A lot of people decided to get out quick

and other people decided to get out, to go for a better lifestyle.

'How are you?'

Sean, how are you doing?

This has taken about six weeks to track you down.

'Oh, right.'

The last time I saw you, is way back in the early '70s

and you were this athletic-looking young man with black, combed hair

with Brylcreem, with a suit and a shirt and a tie on,

which is quite unusual in Ardoyne!

I was playing football, sort of, every spare minute you've got.

I was always determined that one way or another

I was going to get a living out of it.

Look at that. Ain't that brilliant? Eh?

It's big, isn't it? Your grampa used to play football here.

That's where we used to come out

cos that was the changing rooms over there.

And then we used to come out onto the football pitch to play.

-But why?

-Why? Because that's how... Gramp-gramp...

Gramp-gramp got paid to play football.

And it were really good.

Just to play with so many great players, just, you'd come off and

I was on a high for, like, two or three days afterwards, it's just...

It's just brilliant.

Everybody took a certain pride

in that it was one of our boys, you know.

Wee lad from Ardoyne,

going over to play for one of the biggest teams in the world.

I know you can head the ball. Watch, head the ball.

-Are you heading the ball?

-SEAN LAUGHS

You silly devil!

Head the ba-a-a-all!

'I think family's everything, isn't it, you know?'

-Are you having a beef burger?

-OLLIE:

-Yeah!

Good lord, Ollie.

'I came in June and my father died in the November.

'He never saw me playing. I think it really...toughens you up.'

There's not much worse going to happen in your life.

He's still there, he's still part of you and it's...

It doesn't go away.

Sorry.

A boy will always want to, in some way, identify with his father

and yet, will always fight with his father. It's what we do.

What I had in common with Daddy was religion.

I wanted to please him.

Why did you leave the priesthood? In my case, it was because

I had to grow up. It wasn't the right choice.

Saying Mass for the last time, I'd arrived at peace about this.

And I just... He couldn't believe it. He just couldn't believe it.

And he didn't really cope too well, at all, with it.

The night that he died,

we got into the emergency room. I approached him, right up,

into his ear.

And I told him, "I'm here. Dad. I'm going to give you absolution",

which, of course, is the role of a priest.

My brother said to me, "He opened his eyes, you know,

"when you spoke to him."

HE SNIFFLES AND SOBS

The relationship had been fractured over the whole priesthood thing.

Somehow, then, the priesthood thing, kind of, mended it, at the end.

Hello, would that be Brendan?

'Yes, it is, yes. How are you?'

Brendan, it's Brian here. How are you doing?

-Great to hear you.

-'I'm doing good.'

I think he's one of the guys who, when he left, he didn't come back

and seems to be someone who's very much at the top of the tree

in his own profession.

Brendan trained as both a dentist and a doctor in Belfast,

before emigrating to America.

'I am an assistant clinical professor.

'My main interest is in trauma. People that have been in

'car accidents or the victims of trauma to the face,

'I would be involved in their reconstruction.'

-Lower right.

-I can do a triage for you.

-OK.

Tell me about the patient.

He's...healthy, for the most part, except for psychiatric medications.

Part of my job' demands that I do have to have a resilience.

'Those early days in Ardoyne were very formative in developing that.'

-How old is he?

-46.

-Wow.

-Yeah, so, actually...

'In Belfast, I saw some horrendous things.

'I remember being in the Royal Victoria one night

'when a police officer came in.

'A mortar bomb had exploded over his head'

and I remember lifting the tea towel and there was chunks of his brain

sticking to the tea towel, you know?

So, you don't forget that.

-There you go.

-Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

All right. Good job.

It's going to be a celebration of all the altar boys.

How do you feel about going back to Belfast

and then meeting the altar boys?

It's going to be excellent, because I haven't seen any of these people

that I served Mass with, in...

..40 years, you know?

It is going to be great. I'm looking forward to it,

because we've all gone in very, very different directions.

They'll not recognise themselves.

'It'll be interesting to meet these guys and to see, is there something

'that we identify as a shared trait. Are we all thick bastards

'or is there something far more meaningful behind it all?'

'I haven't been in the Ardoyne since I joined the police.

'I have no idea how I will feel.'

'I hope he can sleep easy with himself

'and it doesn't come back and cause him any sleepless nights.

'I fear it might.'

'I'll try not to judge him too harshly.'

-Are they still the same bells?

-They are, yes.

-Can I?

RINGING

You was never ever any good at ringing the bells!

-How are you?

-Great.

-You haven't changed a bit.

-Oh!

How are you all? You're all looking well.

I have this memory of you playing football up in the playing fields.

I'm glad somebody's got a memory because I can't remember yesterday!

How are you?

You're very welcome.

-You're very welcome.

-Thank you.

-Do you know any of these bandits?

Cal, of course!

LAUGHTER

Gerry, how are you doing?

Gerard, how are you doing?

I've perhaps been your nemesis in times gone by.

-LAUGHTER

-Absolutely.

Well, I'm now chairperson of the PSNI club...

The dirtiest team in the league, the PSNI.

More suspensions than anybody else.

It's the only time you get a chance to kick a peeler!

So, it's of benefit!

What's this assertion that I was late all the time?!

I want to see this.

The nearest one to the church and he's late.

Obviously, my mother used to say that -

"The nearest the church, the further from God."

LAUGHTER

-Your mother was very wise, wasn't she?!

-She was right!

There's a resemblance, you know, when you were a child.

When I walked in there, I says, "I know this person."

Would you have a few hours free

-tomorrow afternoon, do a wee bit of...

-Oh!

-Oh, I couldn't...

-Just have them out. Be easier!

No, you wouldn't want me to do your dentistry.

I had to do surgery because I was a lousy dentist, you see?

LAUGHTER

It is strange that we all started off here as altar boys

and then we've all grown bad. I ended up in the Special Patrol Group

-in Tennant Street.

-Not my favourite people!

No, no, but I always thought of myself as one of the good guys.

'Often, there is a need for reconciliation within communities.

'There needs to be the acknowledgement

'and the acceptance that people did choose different paths.'

Did you not recognise that there was violence coming from the RUC?

I found it so remarkable to hear that there was an altar boy

who'd served at the altar in Ardoyne who had went on to join it.

I'll be the first to hold my hand up and say

the RUC wasn't lily-white, but there were a lot of good

and honourable men and women in the RUC. Maybe I was naive,

but I honestly believed I was doing something good.

If you were inside that police organisation

and you were looking out, some of the things we were doing,

we actually thought, "We're doing it right."

It's amazing there that I am sitting here with you.

To disagree over...

-And to disagree and to be able to walk away without violence...

-Yes.

..but, by God, what a path you have come upon

but what a path I have come upon.

Tonight is a very special night, because we celebrate this Mass

for the reunion of our altar servers and boys. Well, traditionally...

'42 years after joining the police, coming through the most horrendous

'violence in Northern Ireland, I, for one, am just so grateful

'and, actually, thank God that I am alive.'

RINGING

'I think you've just got to,

'as granny says, to thine ownself be true.'

'No matter what you do, you've got to be lucky.

'If you get a little bit of luck, take everything that comes your way

'and enjoy it.'

'Not everything has been perfect, but...it's been true.

'It's been life.'

'There was something that was very good about being in a place

'with such a strong sense of parish and belonging

'and, even after the Troubles broke out, you had this bond with people.

'There is that kind of sense,

'you can't get away from where you come from.

'It's always going to be part and parcel of who you are.'

'I'm from Ardoyne.'

'That's all right.

'That means something.'

They know how to look after themselves in Ardoyne!

CHOIR SINGS