The following is a piece I wrote, a few years ago, for a book ('Injured On That Day') published by the WAVE Trauma Centre which describes my experience of events in my home on 6th January 1994. Events which changed my life in an instant. Events which put me on a new path and have brought me to where I am today, on the 6th January 2016.
The second piece below is something I wrote, in 2014, on the 20th anniversary of that day, entitled 'Epiphany'.
The web link further on will take you to an audio clip which I made with 'The Theatre of Witness'. This also touches upon my journey through trauma and acceptance. It is called 'Everyone Is My People'.
I dedicate all of these pieces to my family, my friends, and my fiancee Sammie.
'Injured On That Day'
When you hear many of the stories about shootings and
killings in this country, they usually contain the line that the victim was in
the wrong place at the wrong time. On 6th
January 1994 I was in the right place at the right time. I was a 21 year old man in my home in Lenadoon about to sit
down to my dinner.
A rap at the door. My
15 year old sister, Joanne, goes to answer it and is pushed aside by an
intrusion of wooly faces brandishing their hardware. “We are the IRA and we are taking over this
house.” When the IRA come into a house
in Lenadoon you sit down and shut up. So
that’s what my mother Mary Jane, my 18 year old brother Damien, my sister and I
did.
The Crystal Maze was on TV but nobody was watching. Joanne was frightened. The fat, wooly face had his machine gun
pointed at her. She was crying. I asked the black head to stop pointing the
gun in her direction. After giving me a
cold look out of his sweaty mask he pointed the muzzle to the floor.
After a long 20 minutes the front door knocked again. Another of the gunmen came down into the
living room from upstairs. He instructed
me to go to the door, open it and bring whoever it was into the living room
where we were being held. “If you do
anything stupid, I will shoot your family.”
There was no argument. I went out
to the hall and opened the door to my father, Paul. He had a few drinks on him but noticed that
there was something wrong. We walked
into the living room and the door was closed behind him.
I sat down while he stood there in the middle of the
room. “What the fuck is going on here? What
are you all doing in my house? ”. The
little, wiry monkey one pulled out a big black hand cannon and pointed it up to
my da’s forehead. “If you value your
life, you will sit down now.” Joanne was
hysterical now. “Da, just sit down. It’s the Ra.
They’ll be out of here soon.” I said.
He sat down beside Joanne. We
were all a lot more nervous now.
Ten minutes later the door knocked again. “Just bring them in here!” I got up and went out to the door. It was a few of Joanne’s friends. Wee girls.
“Joanne’s already out with her other friends” says I. I was not bringing these wee girls into this situation. I closed the door and went back in. The white eyes in the black heads weren’t too
happy, but unlucky! “You don’t need to
bring those wee girls into this”. I sat
down again.
They all left the room and closed the door behind them. We all looked at each other and just sat
there. The door was kicked open. “Operation’s over,” was the shout. Then a loud crackle of bangs rang out and
they were gone. “Is everybody alright?” asked
my mum.
“I’m not alright” says I, to myself. “I’ve been shot here”. But nobody could hear me. Five bullets had pierced my body. My arm, my femoral artery, my lung, my spleen,
my spine. I was in shutdown and melting
into the sofa. A strong smell of cordite
filled the air. “There’s something wrong
with Paul here”, says Damien. Keep him
awake. Phone an ambulance. Get a
towel. Stop the bleeding. Keep him awake. Slap his face. Stay awake screams Dee. Stay with us.
Where’s that ambulance.
Pandemonium.
I was quite happy and content. An enormous sense of warmth was flowing
through my body. But I was falling away
and I knew it. Damien was pulling me
back out, he had a tight grip on my arm, both in my mind and literally. Stay with us.
I started to come round a bit but I was only running on adrenalin. “I’m ok, I’m here” I thought, but I could not
open my eyes.
The ambulance came and the boys got on with their job. They got me in the back and it was away we
go. “I’m alright, don’t be worrying
yourselves, lads” says I. That must have
been some strong gear they gave me because I was in the clouds. We arrived at the RVH and it was like a movie
scene. The stretcher banging through the
doors, the strip lights above. “Paul,
would you please stop that chanting?” requested one of the doctors. “Ay ya hi ya, ay ya hi ya” was all I could
shout for the previous five minutes. My
inner shaman was keeping me awake. Then
the anaesthesia kicked in and that was that.
I woke up many, many hours later and was told that I was in
intensive care. I had a very long breathing
tube down my throat and could not speak.
I motioned to get a pen and paper and scrawled ‘Don’t worry, be
happy. Jah Lives’. My inner Bob Marley was in control. Back to the morphine.
The week in that bed was a nightmare. The heat was oppressive and the pain was here
to stay, for good. After a few days I
was told by the surgeon that I would never walk again. I was paralysed from the waist down. It was hard to take and it was even harder to
express this on an Alphabet card. That
bloody tube.
The next few months in Musgrave Park Hospital Spinal
Injuries Unit were long but I was able to meet many more people who, in my
eyes, were worse off than me. I still
had my arms and that breathing tube was gone.
A wheelchair couldn’t be that bad.
I still had my family and all of my friends with me.
By the way it wasn’t the IRA after all. Turns out, the UFF did it. Their intended target, a neighbour, didn’t
arrive so ‘any Fenian will do!!’. Who
knows? Who cares?
'Epiphany'
In Western Christianity January 6th is the feast of the
Epiphany. Epiphany in its most basic sense is an experience of sudden and
striking realisation. I view what
happened to me on that day twenty years ago as a sudden and striking
realisation of how my life was going to be.
The beginning of a new chapter.
That was the day that the men with hard steel in their
hearts and cold steel in their hands paid a visit to my home. They had come to attack my neighbours.
Instead, they attacked me. Twenty one,
eldest son, facing the wrong end of a gun.
I was inches away from becoming the first story of the 1994 chapter of
‘Lost Lives’. Bullets riddled me. Blood drained from my body. Organs were
removed. Spinal cords severed.
In spite of all of this violence and trauma inflicted upon
me by the brave defenders of Ulster, I woke up. I survived. I lived. It was a new life though. No longer, was I the same young man; tall and
fit and ready for life. My identity
would change. My ambitions would change.
My physicality and bodily integrity would change. I would feel severe burning
pain from my injuries for the rest of my life. I was now crippled, within and
without. There would be many barriers
put in front of me. This was my epiphany
and I had to deal with it.
I look back on the past twenty years as a time of personal
compromise, pragmatism and struggle. I
had to fight every day to retain my sanity through some tough times. The 1994 ceasefires were perhaps the hardest
time for me. To see people parading
around the streets in celebration really hit me hard. Why could it not have come that little bit
sooner for me? A selfish thought, I know. Many more people were yet to lose
their lives in the years since to this futile violence. It continues to this day. There may always be political and sectarian
violence in this part of the world and it may be impossible to stop.
What I came to realise was that I could do my bit to use my
new identity as a victim/survivor to help others who had been hurt and
were still suffering. I joined victims
and survivors groups. I met people who
had been hurt the same as me. People who
had been paralysed forty years ago, thirty years ago, twenty years ago and ten
years ago. The milestone anniversaries
keep coming and going. As the years go
by the pain has become worse but the determination to bring relief and to
ensure the non-repetition of the Troubles has grown amongst my fellow injured
friends and I.
I pay tribute to my friends within the WAVE Injured Group
for the campaigning they have done in the past few years on some of the issues
that affect people like me. Their
collective strength has given me new determination to carry on with their
Campaign for Recognition. This campaign
has seen the collection of a ten thousand strong petition; the lobbying of our
politicians and an input into how we can ‘deal with our past, present and
future’.
It just so happens that today marks twenty years since I was
shot, but for people like me every day is a reminder of January 6th 1994. That is not to say that I look back on that
day with a morbid fixation. I certainly
do not. I have moved on. I have grown from that traumatic event. I have had inspiration and support from my
own inner self and resilience, from my family, from my friends and from my
community. Others have not had such
support structures. They need more help
to move on and I will now focus my determination for the next twenty years to
help alleviate this suffering in whatever way I can.
I hope that on this day, the feast of the Epiphany, that
many of our self-professing Christian politicians, communities and those
without faith will experience a sudden and striking realisation that there can
be another way. A way of compromise,
pragmatism, utilitarianism, hope, love, mutual understanding and true peace in
this place I call home. Where are the
Wise Men when we need them?
