Considering Grace. Gladys Ganiel
nominally associated with his congregation.
I said, ‘Certainly, I’ll do the funeral gladly, but not if there is paramilitary presence.’ A half hour later there was another call to say that I had not been invited to take the service, and on no account was I to take the service. So, another clergyman with known political associations came and took the service. There were about fifteen buses parked at the roadside which had transported paramilitaries from Belfast and elsewhere. During the funeral it was said from the pulpit that it was a disgrace that the man’s own minister refused to take the service. After that I got very unhappy phone calls, threatening phone calls.
While Barry’s wife Sandra remembered the tensions in the town, she also remembered those who quietly built relationships with each other. Women started prayer groups. One evening, a Catholic woman walked into a meeting. There was an Orangeman present, who regarded her suspiciously. Barry recalled,
By the time the Catholic woman had finished praying, the Orangeman had no doubt whatsoever that she was a Christian. You couldn’t have prayed the prayer she did if you hadn’t been. It was quite the transformation to see his face when he saw she came into enemy territory and prayed as she did. It did him a world of good!
‘There were often gun battles on the road, riots outside the church.’
Husband and wife Patton and Marlene Taylor both served as Presbyterian ministers during the Troubles. In 1985, Marlene was the first mother ordained in PCI. Patton, from Scotland, had been ministering since 1977 in Duncairn Presbyterian in North Belfast. The local Protestant population had largely fled. The church looked directly over the republican New Lodge area. There was an army barracks across the street. Most members of the congregation commuted from the suburbs. The manse was adjacent to the church and Patton and Marlene lived there with their five children. Patton said,
I consciously chose to go there because it was a Presbyterian church in the middle of what was now a republican area. There were all kinds of issues around that but I went – perhaps with a certain naiveté but also with some conviction. I felt that a church in that situation ought to have some witness in the immediate local community.
Duncairn Presbyterian worked with the nearby Antrim Road Baptist Church to set up summer schemes for children and teenagers. Many Catholic children attended. These activities grew into the 174 Trust, which employed youth workers and hosted short-term volunteers from Northern Ireland and around the world. Tony Macauley’s memoir, Little House on the Peace Line, tells the story of that ministry from a youth worker’s perspective.14 Patton said, ‘There were often gun battles on the road, riots outside the church, petrol bombs flying. We had a period where the congregation had a contract with a local glazier to come in Mondays and fix the windows that had been broken in the manse that week.’
Marlene ministered in Cooke Centenary Presbyterian on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast. ‘For me, that was a release to get out of the manse and to go to a community that was more mixed.’ There were still Troubles-related deaths in the area. The local clergy fellowship took it in turns to visit the bereaved, going together in Catholic–Protestant pairs. Marlene said, ‘We felt it was important to keep a visible presence on the road for a kind of stability. We wouldn’t meet behind closed doors. We would meet in a café, or a community centre, and be seen walking down the road and being together.’ Marlene journeyed back and forth across the city through army checkpoints. ‘It was particularly difficult to get back into the manse again in the evenings to feed my baby. I had to literally go and face the army to negotiate to get in. If they didn’t let me in, I would get in by some way. That was how strong the feeling was that I had to get back in to feed that child.’
The Duncairn ministers and youth workers met every morning to pray. The Taylors hosted evening prayers in their home for their family and the volunteers who lived with them. People in their congregations offered varying degrees of support. Marlene said, ‘I think if we hadn’t had that group of committed people in the church whom we could have contacted day or night, we wouldn’t have made it. We didn’t feel supported by the Presbyterian Church as such. No one centrally contacted us during tense periods, and that was hard.’
‘The call to ministry was very much about peacemaking.’
Abigail became a minister because she wanted to contribute to peace. ‘For me the call to ministry was very much about peacemaking. If the church wasn’t going to be doing something about that, then who was going to be doing it?’ She grew up in a tense border town where the curtains were drawn in her school’s windows during bomb scares. ‘Like that was going to save us!’ When she was a teen, a Catholic couple she respected was murdered by the notorious Glenanne gang. When she went to church the next Sunday, the murders weren’t mentioned at all. ‘There was no acknowledgement that it happened. No apology, no nothing, which seemed to me just brutal. Plus, we couldn’t go to the chapel for the service because those were the days when Protestants didn’t go to mass. You didn’t step your foot over a chapel door – you’d have been in big trouble.’ Abigail later discovered that members of her congregation were in the Glenanne gang. ‘That was shocking. The fact that the church would condemn [loyalist murderers], yet they were sitting among us, they were part of us.’
Abigail’s first post was in an urban interface area. ‘The Troubles were unavoidable. You would have a baptism and people would turn up at church with their UDA [Ulster Defence Association] or UVF badges on.’ In some ways, the urban interface was more open than her border upbringing. There was already an inter-church clergy group. She received invitations from local Catholic priests to speak in their churches, and to become involved in grassroots peacemaking with paramilitaries.
I’d just arrived from the country, and there was a Catholic priest phoning me. It was scary. Did I consider republicans my enemies? Absolutely. Did I think of those Catholic priests as my enemies? I wouldn’t say that. But I wouldn’t say I was too sure of them either, at that point. But I believed it to be a Gospel call and a Gospel obligation. That’s why I did it.
As a woman, Abigail was perceived as non-threatening. This allowed her to say things and make contacts with people which might not have been possible if she were a man. She remained convinced that Christians in a violent, divided society should be peacemakers. ‘For me, faith is spelt “r-i-s-k”. If I hadn’t been prepared to do those things, and if my congregation hadn’t been prepared to do them with me, I don’t think we would have been faithful people.’
‘I had no fear of the UDA and the UVF.’
Bill Moore grew up on the Shankill Road, the son of a lorry driver and a stitcher. His parents worked hard to send him to the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (Inst). Inst was, he said, a ‘snobby’ school for a lad from the Shankill. In 1981, he accepted the post in Taughmonagh Presbyterian in South Belfast. It was a place most ministers didn’t want to go: a socially disadvantaged estate with a strong UDA and UVF influence. ‘I told them I would stay five years – I was there twenty.’ Bill loved the people and identified with them due to his own background.
Bill methodically built relationships with people in Taughmonagh. ‘I had no fear of the UDA and the UVF on the estate, because I’d visited their parents in hospital and visited them in gaol. I visited their houses, married some of their connections. A generation grew up and had known me.’
These relationships stood Bill in good stead when he felt he should challenge the paramilitaries. In 1991, Catholic taxi driver Harry Conlon was abducted by the UDA and murdered in Taughmonagh.
I put a little cross where he was shot and it disappeared. So, I put a bigger cross in the spot and it disappeared. Then the big cross appeared back and there was written on it: ‘Bill Moore, Rot in Hell. Death to all Taigs.’ A taxi driver in the estate told me it was women who actually done that. I said, ‘It’s good to know that it wasn’t the real hierarchy of the UDA!’
On another occasion, the UDA ‘disciplined’ men on the estate who did not have ‘approved girlfriends’. In other words, they were dating Catholics. Bill’s church committee circulated a flyer that read:
During the week three young men from Taughmonagh have been shot in the leg by Taughmonagh UDA and it is