Sometime on the evening of Saturday, November 7th 1987, the IRA left a 40pound fertiliser bomb in the St Michael's Reading Rooms, a dilapidated building near the war memorial in Enniskillen. The bomb exploded the following morning, Remembrance Sunday, Armistice Day, a little before 11 o'clock, as crowds were gathering under the walls of the Reading Rooms for the annual ceremony of remembrance. Eleven died, crushed by the falling masonry, dozens were horribly injured, and one man, Ronnie Hill, remains in a coma to this day as a result of his injuries.
Ten years on, Denzil McDaniel (editor then and now of Fermanagh's local newspaper, the Impartial Reporter), has written a book that puts victims, their relatives and the survivors under the microscopic. It is a heart-breaking work, unlike so many other books on our Northern troubles. However, those with sturdy Republican views be warned: all the victims here are Irish Protestants. On the other hand, those fearing a ghoulish read be assured: there is nothing sensationalist here. The book is a model of journalistic decorum - and I know what a feat that is, having myself written book (The Glass Curtain) that touched on the same subject.
Why is this book so moving? Well, first, there's the story. People put on Sunday suits, went to a religious ceremony and were slaughtered. The next morning, Gordon Wilson, an Enniskillen businessman, whose daughter, Marie, had died of injuries sustained in the blast, gave an extraordinary interview to the BBC. He described Marie's last conscious minutes as she spoke to him from under the rubble, and when he was asked about those who had planted the bomb, he announced that he would pray for them. He did not say he forgave them, although it is widely believed that he did, and that inaccuracy is corrected here.
After the funerals, Loyalist retaliation was expected. It didn't happen. Gordon Wilson's broadcast had something to do with this, but so too had the dignity and self-restraint of both the victims' families, and the wider Protestant population of Fermanagh, who felt themselves, rightly, to have been directly attacked by the bombing. The creation of this climate in which vengeance was unthinkable was not the doing of Gordon Wilson alone, as is sometimes popularly believed; many had a hand in it, as McDaniel shows.
The absence of a Loyalist response was, in its turn, followed by something even more remarkable: a collective sense in Enniskillen that out of trauma something good might come, while, further afield, there was a belief that because this bombing, even by the squalid standards of Northern Ireland, was about as bad as things could go, from now on things could only get better. Suddenly there was talk that Northern Ireland might, at last, have turned the corner. There was a good deal of wishful thinking involved, of course, especially on the part of the media; desperate to have our disgusting saga of political violence wrapped up with a happy ending, they talked up the "spirit of Enniskillen".
And they were wrong. Although some good things came from the bombing - the Enniskillen Integrated Primary school, for example, and the reconciliation group Enniskillen Together - it did not mark the end of violence. And now, ten years later, cracks have begun to appear in that forgiving face that Fermanagh showed the world just after the bombing. Gordon Wilson's actions are not universally endorsed (although I would be a supporter) and there has been a gradually emerging sense, from the relatives of other victims, that his generosity after the bombing made it impossible for them to express less charitable opinions and, worse, placed them under an obligation to be as magnanimous as he was. This is a disquieting but important part of the story, and Denzil McDaniel does not shy away from it. He shows himself equally prepared to grasp nettles in his account of the complex history of the erection of a permanent memorial to the victims, another point of local friction.
This is an important book because of its power to move, and because of what it records; but it is also important (and timely) because of the criticism of contemporary journalism following the death of Princess Diana. Journalists are, with some justification, loathed in these islands and regarded variously as corrupt, venal and crass. This book is none of the above; more importantly, it is an example of what journalists can achieve when they act ethically. McDaniel is tactful; he allows people to tell their own stories in their own words and in their own time; he is detailed; and he restricts himself to hard, factual information, some of which (in relation to the mechanics of the bombing itself) is new. There aren't many modern journalists, except perhaps John Pilger, doing work of this kind. For a real comparison we would have to look to the past - to William Howard Russell's reports from the Crimea, or to Albert Camus' exemplary descriptions of Berber poverty, published in the 1930s.
The book is untainted by the opinionated bombast or comment that characterises a good deal of modern journalism. If McDaniel has opinions he keeps them to himself, and restricts himself to telling us what happened, as far as he is able. Of course, cynics might say the only reason the author is so reticent about revealing his own thoughts and conclusions is that he will go on living in Enniskillen after the book is published, and will have to meet the people he has written about. I don't agree; too much care is shown in these pages for us to believe that the reluctance to rush to judgment is simply because McDaniel wants to protect himself. Also, he doesn't avoid some of the pricklier subjects, such as the views of Gordon Wilson's detractors. He could have left this material out, but he didn't. He has a flinty integrity, or, to put it slightly differently, he is a journalist I would happily let into my house because, on the evidence of this book, I know he wouldn't shaft me.
Finally, what of politics? The author is a Protestant. Does this affect, even unconsciously, his position? Does he allow the IRA their say? And Sinn Fein? The answer to the last two questions is yes, although they don't get to speak at quite the same length as their victims. But then, they've already had their say elsewhere, and at length. Nonetheless, the quality of the Republican testimony is riveting. The bombing was a mistake: Gerry Adams admits this. It upset the electoral strategy he and others were trying to sell to the Republican family.
But although the Republicans here choose their words well, and avoid both gloating and triumphalism, something ugly lies beneath the rhetoric. Some of this is painfully familiar, such as the assertion (from an unnamed Republican source) that the British provoked the bombing in the first place by their presence in Ireland, which is the same as saying the IRA weren't really responsible. Then, there's the observation (from another unnamed source) that Bloody Sunday was a far worse atrocity; it was an attack on unarmed civilians whereas Enniskillen was simply a military mistake.
More horrible than the egoism and the self-pity is the chilling indifference of the Republican contributors. Through page after page of this book, the relatives of the victims speak of their trauma; they also show an extraordinary generosity toward their tormentors. However, although both the IRA and Sinn Fein regret the deaths, the people who died and their relatives left behind are fundamentally irrelevant to the greater historical project on which they have embarked: the unification of Ireland by the judicious combination of awful violence and political coercion.
At the moment we have the ceasefire, but that doesn't alter the fact that just as with all the ideologies that have tormented the world during this century, there is a coldness at the heart of Republicanism: in the name of a better future, any means in the present are justified. If you want to know the cost in human terms of that ideological position, read this book.
Carlo Gebler's new novel, How to Murder a Man, will be published next spring