"My mother blamed herself till the day she died."

Last week, a Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's report on the bombings in Claudy of 1972 accused the Catholic Church and British Government of protecting Fr James Chesney, a local priest suspected of involvement in the massacre. I met some victims of the car bombing for the Irish Independent's Review last Saturday, including Mark Eakin (above) whose 8-year-old sister Kathryn died beside him.


The month of July 1972 had been an idyllic one for Mark Eakin and his sister Kathryn. They had whiled away the hot summer days at the family caravan in Castlerock, a seaside resort on the Derry coastline. On Sunday, July 30, their mother Merle told the children that it was time they headed home to the inland village of Claudy, where the Eakins ran a shop.

The family arrived back in Claudy early the following morning, July 31. At 10.15am, the first of three car bombs detonated on the main street of the village. Kathryn, aged eight, was killed instantly while cleaning the front window of the family shop.

"My mother blamed herself till the day she died for taking us out of Castlerock that day," says Mark Eakin, who was 12 at the time of the bombings. "She could never put it to bed."

This week, Mark joined other survivors and relatives of Claudy bombing victims to hear the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman's findings. After the report was made public, it was alleged that the British Government, the RUC and the Catholic Church had colluded to protect Derry priest Fr James Chesney, who was suspected to be part of an IRA gang that planted the bombs.

The revelation has not brought peace to those for whom the Claudy atrocity is still an open wound.

Going to this week's meeting was "like going to a funeral", says survivor Mary Hamilton.

Now a UUP councillor for Foyle, Mary was seriously injured when one of the bombs exploded outside the hotel she owned with her husband Ernest in Claudy. She was 31 at the time. "I was so sad on Wednesday because I knew I would be re-living that day," she says. "I felt so bad I dressed in black."

Her memories of that terrible morning are still vivid. When the first bomb went off, she and a neighbour who had just come into the hotel rushed on to the street. "I saw a lady lying without arms and legs, on fire -- she'd been covered with petrol from one of the cars. Another lady, Mrs McLaughlin, who owned the cafe, she was lying with blood pouring out of her head and her daughter saying to me, 'Mary, Mary, help my mother'. Unfortunately, I couldn't help her."

Mary and the other shocked villagers were ushered away from the bomb site -- not realising they were walking straight into the path of the second and third bombs.

"We met the boy of the Temples [William] down the street, it was his first day at work, and he had hurt his hand in the first bomb. A few moments afterwards, he was blown to bits," she says.

"My legs were injured. I still have metal in one leg, it's too deep-seated really, and I suffer every day with it. But I'm here. Saying that, there shouldn't have been bombs. The sights I saw that day, they are sights that never leave you. A good friend of ours, David Miller, was just blown to bits literally beside me."

The second and third bombs had detonated almost simultaneously, one outside the post office and the other outside Mary's hotel, the Beaufort.

"We were given no warning. They had forgotten that two weeks beforehand, they'd blown up the telephone exchange and no one could get through."

For Mark Eakin, too, the smallest details of that day are etched deeply. He was just three yards from Kathryn when the first bomb went off. While she died from a fragment of shrapnel that pierced her brain, he escaped with some minor cuts.

"I had actually just walked past Kathryn," he recalls. "We were messing about, you know, brother and sister sort of stuff. She nearly had the window cleaned and there was a bottle of Windolene sitting on the window ledge beside her. So I lifted it up and skimmed a bit off the top and scooted it along the window.

"I remember she was standing at the top of a set of steps and she was roaring and shouting at me and then the explosion just went off."

The psychological fallout of the bombings remained long after the shattered buildings were patched back together. Mary Hamilton found that for a long time afterwards she would cover her ears with her hands when she walked past a parked car, always afraid that it would blow up.

Mark and Kathryn Eakin's parents, Merle and Billy, both passed away in the last two years, within six months of each other.

"They were never the same again. They never had the same love of life. They had their good days and their bad days, but there were more bad days than good."

On a purely economic level, businesses and homes had been devastated by the three car bombs. Custom was slow to return to the village and both the Beaufort Hotel and Eakin's shop suffered. The Eakins eventually had to sell up. Their structurally frail building was pulled down and new apartments and a few small business units stand in its place.

The compensation packages offered by the British government/Northern Ireland Office at the time were not of much help. "It was a struggle to arrange that compensation," says Mark Eakin. "My father wouldn't settle, he argued, argued, argued with them. But the bank rates were going up, interest rates were sky high, and the whole thing just crippled him and he just had to take it."

The people of Claudy were left to support each other. Five Catholics and four Protestants died in the bombings and the mixed community tried to scramble back to some sense of normality.

"We were very good friends," says Mary Hamilton. "Quite a lot of us had to live in caravans afterwards and if you had a stool you didn't need, you'd give it to whoever did. Claudy is a small community and we all worked together. I felt for the Catholic people of Claudy after the report."

Mary intends writing to British Prime Minister David Cameron to appeal for further investigations into the bombings but she isn't hopeful.

"They said after the Saville Report [into the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry] that there were not going to be any more big investigations. But I think that the government and the church and the hierarchy of the police have to tell us everything they know."

Mark reiterates that all he is asking is that one person will stand up and be counted. "Those responsible are going to be heading towards their 70s, what's the point in putting that man in jail? He's going to be in his own jail soon enough. They have a chance now to make their peace with God at least."

Peace is something that still eludes him in the house at Castlerock his parents moved to after selling up in Claudy. He is reminded of the bone-shattering impact of the bombs by pottery saved from the rubble by his mum, now super-glued back together.

In the past few years, Mark sought the counselling that he didn't receive as a young boy. He has two daughters now, Rebecca and Samantha Kathryn, his eldest. He feels the counselling has brought him closer to them. "I would find it very hard to say to someone that 'I love you'," he says, "I always put a bit of distance."

"That apparently is due to a lack of getting proper counselling at the time of the bombing because I lost so much that I cared about."

The girls are 13 and 11, somewhere around the age Mark was when his family was ripped apart. "My oldest girl is named after Kathryn and she's constantly asking what happened. 'But why Daddy, why did they kill Kathryn?'" He has no answers for her.
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/my-mother-blamed-herself-for-my-sisters-murder-till-the-day-she-died-2315146.html

Silly Ideas Amnesty Day

We all make mistakes but some of us are better at admitting them than others. Certain politicians, for instance, are quite incapable of holding up their hands in public. What goes for the most macho of men, goes doubly so for those in public life. Never show weakness. Never say you’re sorry. Never say: I was wrong.
This might explain why the ridiculous 30kph speed limit along the north and south quays of the city remains in place nearly nine months after it was introduced to a chorus of disapproval. Twelve-pound babies have been easier to deliver than this ill-conceived legislation.

The AA pointed out that it would create dangerous bottlenecks but the brass necks wouldn’t have it. There would be no U-turn because to make one would be to admit that the whole idea was a half-hearted and badly-thought out stab at making Dublin’s roads safer. Delineating the cycle lanes more clearly along the quays would have been a better start.

Only now is a proposed amendment to the limit being formulated. Dublin city councillors will decide in the autumn on whether to raise the limit outside the stretch between Capel Street and O’Connell Bridge. We wait with bated breath (as we sit in stalled traffic).

Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Look at the e-voting machines fiasco. If someone had laughed hard enough at Noel Dempsey when he started promoting them as the future in 2002, he might have stopped flouncing about like some class of Buck Rogers of the ballot box. If someone had told Martin Cullen to cop himself on when he expanded on Dempsey’s minor brainwave, we might not have spent over €50m on them.

Instead – because no-one was man or woman enough to say that this was a ninny-headed idea and that they should be sold off immediately – we are only now looking at offloading them. It has just emerged that the Government might, maybe, perhaps, tentatively have found a buyer for the wretched machines.

You wouldn’t wait eight years to return a too-small pair of shoes to the shop. Why spend €183,000 a year on storing these machines rather than admitting they were completely the wrong fit?

If our bull-headed leaders won’t admit their mistakes, maybe we need to give them a get-out clause. I hereby propose a Silly Ideas Amnesty. For one day only, let all parties, in and out of power, all local authorities and lobbying groups, take the opportunity to retract all the most ridiculous proposals and legislation they’ve made in, say, the past ten years.

The rest of us will agree to turn a blind eye, and never mention the dumb ideas again. I figure there are many proposals made in the heat of a Dail debate or on the promise of a vote or two that could be made to sleep with the fishies and the country would be better for it.

Perhaps Clare County Council could rethink the outrageous new charges that will likely scare motoring tourists from visiting the Cliffs of Moher. Would Energy Minister Eamon Ryan gladly retract his public service obligation levy (ie, jacking up electricity prices for householders) if only we couldn’t witness his embarrassment at being seen to do so?

Maybe the person who thought letting TDs continue to charge for some unvouched expenses might like to think again. Perhaps Mary Harney could go back and knock together the correct heads in the HSE – the ones in the boardrooms, rather than on the frontline – if we’d only look out the window a bit and whistle Dixie.

At the end of Silly Ideas Amnesty Day, we could recreate that special effect in Men in Black. The one where Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones wipe the memories of the humans who see aliens in their midst. We would be none the wiser – but wouldn’t such ignorance be bliss?

The Terrific Travels of Charlie and George

Charlie Bird and George Lee have been having it tough these past few months - by their own account anyhow. Listening to them whine about life outside Montrose is dispiriting to this journalist who remembers being in awe of them at the ESB Media Awards a decade ago. I was nominated for a colour writing award (and seated at a table with a medical monthly and a agricultural pamphlet, I had a fair idea I shouldn't worry too much about having to make a speech, sit back and enjoy the free dinner). George and Charlie, though, were the real deal and were honoured for their investigative journalism in breaking the NIB tax evasion scandal. Charlie's speech went something along the lines of "We were warned off this story but we are not anybody's typewriters..."
Oh Charlie, what has it come to?

My op-ed in the midweek Herald went a little something like this...

The crèche in RTE is apparently a very fine facility. No doubt it will shortly be taking delivery of a batch of the hotly-tipped children’s bestseller, The Terrific Travels of Charlie and George.

Through the medium of nursery rhyme, this listen-and-learn tome will prepare the offspring of RTE staffers for life within the Montrose family.
“This little boy went to Washington; this boy went to the polls; both little boys went ‘Wah! Wah! Wah!’ – all the way home to D4.”
Don’t bother trying to pre-order Charlie and George at your local bookshop: it has a very limited run and the small print is illegible to anyone outside Donnybrook.

Here’s how the world works for the rest of us: we jack in our jobs to go adventuring, we get a P45. When George Lee decided to run for the Dail so he’d have something to tell the grandkids, he got a guarantee that a job would be still there for him in RTE twelve months later. When Charlie Bird harrumphed that he’d had enough of Washington, he was told to come home early out of the cold.

Why wouldn’t you want to return to an employer like that? The very notion that Lee and Bird are some sort of maverick risk-takers is laughable. RTE all but sewed their mittens onto a piece of string and threaded it through the armholes of their duffle coats before sending them out to play.

They didn’t have to be called in for their dinner. Homesick Charlie has returned over two years early from a four-year post. George spent nine months on the job for Fine Gael. That’s just long enough for him to have kittens over not being treated in the manner to which he had been accustomed.

There is a case to be made for sympathising with Curious George. He looked beyond his role as economics editor at the State broadcaster and thought he could see a different future. (Albeit with RTE standing nervously on the shore, ready to chuck a lifebuoy at him if the waters got choppy).

He couldn’t hack a single winter of discontent. I don’t know if he was being intentionally hilarious when he complained to Pat Kenny on Frontline that he was frustrated that most TDs were “institutionalised” by the comforts and cosiness of life in the Dail. It certainly gave me a laugh. Is there not plenty of opportunity to become institutionalised by the fine renumeration, facilities and jobs-for-life at RTE? I’d be only delighted to be incarcerated in that golden a cage.

There’s no suggestion of a timeout in the sin bin. Lee has been touted for the seat in Washington newly vacated by Bird. In any case, he’ll return to his full salary of around e150,000 which should keep him warm until he gets out of the decontamination zone.

Bird has already laid out his own welcome mat in the documentary about his ill-fated year in the US. “I’ll be back in Dublin, I’ll be walking around and I’ll go back to doing the job I was doing before I left,” he said. Brave little soldier.

Why wouldn’t they expect to be allowed to come home to Mammy Montrose with the minimal of consequences? RTE looks after family, see. That devotion to family saw Charlie Bird miss out on the major US story of last year: the sudden death of Michael Jackson. He was in Dublin at the time, all over the rather more important job of toasting George Lee as he went off to dip his toe into politics.

It still seems scarcely believable that Charlie Bird admitted in public that he couldn’t cope with the Washington job. I don’t need to tell a man who – along with Lee – broke the tax evasion scandal at NIB in the late ’90s that journalism is all about making contacts.

So why did he admit that he essentially felt past the point of being able to do that? More to the point, why did RTE think showcasing his inadequacies in a TV two-parter was a good idea?

A much sterner mother would have said to them both, ‘Climb that tree if you want but if you fall and break both your legs, don’t come running to me.”

The prodigal sons may not know when exactly they are coming back to RTE, or to exactly what role. But no doubt they are looking forward to regaling their wide-eyed colleagues with tales of how awful it is in the world outside Montrose over cups of subsidised tea.