Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine
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 leader of the Ulster Clubs movement, but that was me. My son Andrew and Colin were very close. During that week Colin had come up with two fish tanks and all the equipment, said he’d be up next week to bring the fish. Andrew and Colin were both into tropical fish. Andrew took it quite badly at the time. The visual impact was that he lost all interest in tropical fish, and didn’t set up the tank. He was spending more and more time in the house, you know, we thought it was him just growing up, his adolescence. I was getting heavily involved in the loyalist movement in my politics, and there were threats to my life, but I was trying to keep that away from him.’
One day Park received a message from his son’s school. ‘We went up to the school, and the teacher said, “Are you aware that Andrew is taking on your security?” He was getting up at seven o’clock in the morning, looking underneath the car, and on the nights I wasn’t in he was sitting at the window waiting for me to come back. Mary was working as a nurse in Musgrave Park Hospital, and Andrew said to her, “Would you not give up that job, Mum? Because if anything happened to Daddy I wouldn’t know what to do.” I mean that came as a big, big blow to me because I thought I was keeping that side of my life away from the family.’
Years later, in 1996, when a bomb in Canary Wharf in London broke the IRA ceasefire, Andrew reacted badly: ‘I was going up the stairs, and Andrew was coming down when we heard the news. Andrew would have been 20, a big, strapping lad, six foot one, and he wrapped his arms around me and started crying, and he said, “No, it’s not starting again, Daddy, is it?” and I had to assure him that everything was all right. That’s the scars that people don’t see. At that time I was doing peace work, and it was risky, and if my own community was to find out who I was talking to, it would have been pretty bad. It started to edge out that I was doing these sorts of things, and we had a family conference and Andrew turned around and said, “Dad, how can you talk to these bastards? They blew you up, they killed your mates!” And that came as a shock to me because here was me, I was moving from one end of the sphere to the other, and trying to look at dialogue and mediation, and here was my son stuck with my pain, my anger. For our children, they’ve seen the aftermath of it, and we need to keep a cycle going where their children don’t see physical force or violence.’
When I asked Park how his experiences have affected his loyalism, he told me, ‘I’m still a loyalist, but now we can look at how we can achieve our aspirations in a different way. We don’t need to kill and maim and blow each other up for it. There’s a lot of scars out there, I mean I’m still living with the scars, I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I get into depressions, I shut myself away for days at end, but at the end of the day it’s people like me and other people who do this work, it’s the only way forward. If I relate it to how I felt in 1972, it was important for me to come over and fight the war for my culture, and I think it’s also incumbent on me to fight for peace.’
I asked him whether genuine politics has come to Northern Ireland. ‘We need to move into normal politics,’ he replied. ‘We’re only starting – we’re learners at the political game. We’ve got to learn what democracy is. We need to get involved in civic responsibility. I think working-class Prods have been disenfranchised from civic society. My party, the Progressive Unionist Party, is a