Considering Grace. Gladys Ganiel
had died. He went to his church. ‘Some people were waiting for the service to begin, believe it or not. I said: “There will be no service this morning.”’ He visited the hospital, had lunch, and went to the house of a couple whose baby was to have been baptised that morning. ‘I went to their home and actually did the baptism, believe it or not.’
There was an evening service scheduled in David’s church. ‘We allowed the media into the church and they filmed the service. There is footage of me standing in the pulpit announcing the names of the dead and injured and breaking down in tears and trying to gather myself to continue to read out this list of names.’
Then there were the funerals. David was assisted by the Moderator and by previous ministers of the congregation. ‘You were working on adrenaline that week. I believe God gave me grace and strength. Anger within me surfaced later. Just on one or two occasions, in the normal course of events, I found myself angry. When I stopped and asked where it was coming from, I realised that it was from that incident.’
After the last funeral, David heard that another member of his congregation, Ronnie Hill, had lapsed into a coma. Ronnie was Enniskillen high school’s head teacher and had been at the cenotaph with his Sunday School class. David visited his clerk of session.
I said to him, ‘John, I honestly fear I am about to go over the edge. If a phone call comes through that Ronnie has died, I don’t think I can cope with it.’ So, John read a psalm and we both knelt down to pray and that’s when the healing took place. He prayed, very, very calmly. But when I started to pray, I cried in a way I never cried in my life, before or since. There was just this absolutely enormous reservoir of pain and sorrow that built up during the course of the week.
Ronnie entered a vegetative state. David visited Ronnie and his wife Noreen twice a week, every week, till the family left the area in 1991. Ronnie never regained consciousness, dying in 2000.
‘I was in over my head.’
Russell Birney, the son of a grocer in Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh, felt called to minister around the border. In 1973, he submitted his name for the vacancy in Downshire Road, Newry. He was called, and shortly after added the convenorship of the rural congregations of Newtownhamilton and Creggan to his charge. ‘Newry was afflicted with bombings and killings of neighbours of mine. Creggan is about a mile from Crossmaglen, which was the cockpit of the rural campaign of the IRA. It was one incident after the other. I had to travel up from Newry along roads, day and night, that were potentially booby trapped for the army.’ A rota of men was organised to guard his church in Newry, day and night, ‘because there were incidents of churches being attacked and people being attacked coming out of churches’.
On 1 September 1975, Russell got a call ‘about an incident in Tullyvallen’. The IRA had opened fire in an Orange Hall. Four men were killed instantly, and a fifth died later of his wounds. Eighty-year-old John Johnston, a member of Russell’s Creggan congregation, was among the dead.
That night, Russell visited the families.
I wasn’t trained pastorally for an incident like this. When I came down from Tullyvallen that night, having visited those homes – I hadn’t seen any bodies, I was just with the relatives – I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. I saw the children of some of the deceased and seriously injured. I called in hospital and I had seen some of them being treated. It was hard at that time. It was an aspect of ministry that I wasn’t prepared for. I was in over my head, so I had to adapt.
Five months later, two of the guns used in Tullyvallen were turned on the ten Protestant workmen murdered in the Kingsmills massacre, just a few miles away. None of Russell’s congregants were killed in Kingsmills, but he took part in the funerals and provided pastoral support in the community.
Russell also needed support, which he found in other local ministers and his congregations. ‘They were very dark days and they demanded a lot of time. My congregation was very good in allowing me to give that time, because they were sympathetic in every sense to it.’
‘I had to keep it all together for their sake.’
One minister served in both rural and urban areas. He had members murdered or forced out of their homes in every location. He recalled the names and manner of death of many people. ‘The Troubles disappointed me. I felt so sorry that so many lives were lost. Meaningless, meaningless. You are sitting beside a widow who has just been told that her husband has been shot dead or blown to pieces – it’s not easy.’ Like other ministers, he had not been trained for this aspect of his job. ‘You deal with it differently in each home. Sometimes you don’t say anything. There is nothing to say. What can you say? Except that you are deeply sorry. You sit with them, and weep with them.’ He said he ‘prayed constantly’, and leaned on his wife for support.
When you got a phone call, you didn’t know what you were going to see. That can be quite shattering. So, you prayed that God would give you the strength to cope with this situation. You go to the house. However much you are breaking up inside you have to be in control for their sake. Because they’re going to say, ‘What are we going to do now?’ Even the very practical things of arranging a funeral, the very practical things like there’s no wage going to come in at the end of the week. I had to be able to keep it all together for their sake.
‘You never hear our stories.’
William Bingham grew up near the border in Markethill, Co. Armagh. One day a bomb in the town centre damaged his home. A few years later, the IRA left a bomb outside his family’s house when they couldn’t get close enough to detonate it at the police station. William was at school. It destroyed the house, injuring his grandmother, though not seriously.
We lived through many shootings in our town. I’d have known many people who were killed. The Kingsmills massacre was just six miles down the road. We had a shooting at the Tullyvallen Orange Hall where many Protestants were killed. We were at all those funerals. At my grandmother’s funeral, while we were carrying her remains out of the church, the police came to tell us that a bomb had been planted underneath somebody’s car who was a mourner. The whole graveyard had to be evacuated. We did not feel like we were being singled out, but certainly we felt a close affinity with people who were suffering in the Troubles.
From age eight, William felt called to be a minister. After ordination, he received his first call to the congregations of Pomeroy and Sandholes in East Tyrone, another Troubles hot spot. ‘I talked it over with my wife, and she was from a similar background to myself. Both of us felt that if God was calling us there, we had nothing to fear.’ In his first year, three people in his congregations were murdered and the area endured a series of bomb and mortar attacks.
When a member of his congregation was murdered, William was the first person the police contacted. They wanted him to visit the family first to break the news. William would pray with his wife and then make his way to the home of the bereaved family. ‘There is no easy way to break the news that your husband has been blown up, or that your son has been killed or kidnapped.’ From that point on, he was at the family’s disposal. ‘You read and pray with them, and you spend night and day with them. You try not to leave the house at all – 24/7.’ William helped plan the funeral, and then conducted it. If the family wanted him to send out a political message at a funeral, he obliged. ‘I would have been saying what I thought of the IRA. I would have been saying what I thought of government if they were trying to appease the IRA.’
For William, his pastoral duty of comforting the family included this political element. ‘The families were so thankful. There was this real desire to have a voice, to be heard. They would say: you always hear the other side, but you never hear our stories.’
‘I was left there very much on my own.’
Roy Neill was minister of First Castlederg, Co. Tyrone, for four decades; and of Killeter, Co. Tyrone, for two decades. A native of Co. Leitrim in the Republic, he felt at home among the farmers on the other side of the border. He had been in Castlederg for fifteen years before the first member of his congregation was murdered, in 1972. There would be eight more. ‘Then there were many more murders of other people who weren’t members of my church at all. I think