James was one of five Kennedy brothers. They loved their football. They used to say in Hamilton Street, in south Belfast that the Kennedys were their own five-a-side team. On February 5th, 1992 James was in Seán Graham’s bookmakers on the Ormeau Road, when two men entered the shop. When they stopped spraying bullets, James lay dead, one of five people killed. He was 15-years-old.
His broken-hearted mother Kathleen stopped eating and refused to leave the house. She gave up loving life and died two years later. It was James's dad Jack, who said one of the most memorable lines in Joe Duffy and Freya McClements's book Children of The Troubles, words that are inscribed on the memorial stone erected on the 20th anniversary of the atrocity.
Players and concussion have come to exist uncomfortably side by side
“The bullets that killed James didn’t just travel in distance, they travelled in time,” he said. “Some of those bullets never stop travelling.”
This week the emergence of a massive body of over 70 rugby players set to launch a legal battle over health problems they have suffered as a result of head injuries shone new light on an issue that has been in full view for some time. Almost like the slow burn of violence for all of those 30 years in the North, players and concussion have come to exist uncomfortably side by side.
But sometimes it takes a jolt to refix attitudes and reset reasonable anxiety levels. As part of the litigation England hooker Steve Thompson did just that by not remembering a Rugby World Cup in which he played and won. That grotesque absurdity was the jolt. But concussion is not about memory loss.
Next month, on January 29th, it is the 10th anniversary of the death of Benjamin Robinson. Benjamin was 14-years-old and did not recover from the head injuries he sustained playing a Saturday morning rugby match for his school Dalriada. The official cause of death was Second Impact Syndrome, the first recorded in Britain or Ireland.
One winter evening last year I spent time talking to Benjamin’s mother Karen. We sat together in the front room of her house in Carrickfergus, much of it in semi-darkness as the afternoon light faded.
Enthralled by her courage and frozen to the chair, an overwhelming sense of privilege took over as she spoke intimately about the intensity of her love for her son
I asked one question and she spoke for five hours beginning at teatime with Benjamin on the Friday night before the match and finishing on January 31st, when brainstem death was confirmed for a second time at 4.14pm.
As she told the story I recall sitting with my legs stretched out on the part of the floor where Benjamin’s coffin rested overnight before burial. That night in 2011, his mother slept on the couch beside him for the last time.
Enthralled by her courage and frozen to the chair, an overwhelming sense of privilege took over as she spoke intimately about the intensity of her love for her son and the endless, bewildering grief.
As she told the story I recall crying twice, which Karen could not see because of the darkness. The first time was when knowing something terrible was happening, she described her terrified run onto the pitch where Benjamin lay motionless screaming ‘get up wee son’.
The second was in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital, when she heard a loud wailing sound in the ante-room before realising it was her, having collapsed onto the hospital floor when a doctor told her that her son would not survive.
Karen then spoke about her confusion over the coroner’s findings of September 2013, which in part, describes incidents during the match. After the first heavy tackle the coach came on to the pitch to check Benjamin’s “level of consciousness” adding “Benjamin passed these tests and was keen to play on”.
Karen asked rhetorically how her son could have made anyone aware he was fatally injured apart from falling down
Four minutes later he was involved in another heavy tackle, which “resulted in him lying motionless on the ground”. Again Benjamin was checked, with the report adding “again Benjamin passed these tests and was impatient to get back to play”.
It continued to say “during the rest of the match he continued to play enthusiastically and displayed no immediately obvious physical signs that anything was amiss. However he told some of his team-mates he could not remember the score”.
With a few minutes of play remaining, Benjamin spoke to his mother, who was watching from the sideline. He said he “did not feel right”.
In the summing up the coroner notes: “I am satisfied from the evidence that he had sustained a concussion as a result of one of the heavy tackles in the first four minutes of the second half. Unfortunately, however, neither the team coach nor the referee were made aware of Benjamin’s neurological complaints, and he continued to play.”
Karen asked rhetorically how her son could have made anyone aware he was fatally injured apart from falling down.
This month and next she will count the days, as she does every year, to the day her son died, which she believes is the day of the match and not two days later on the 31st, when doctors officially confirmed brainstem death. It is an annual, traumatic vigil over which she has no control. Her grief, she said, comes in great waves and increasing intensity as the match day approaches.
Karen understands exactly what it was James Kennedy’s father, Jack, was talking about. The impact that killed Benjamin didn’t just travel in distance, it travelled in time. Some of that impact never stops travelling.
