Week 3 Summary

I'm going to sum up week three. By this time we're all pretty exhausted and learned out. The most poignant moment of this week was meeting Lawrence McKeowm and Alan McBride. Lawrence was a hunger striker in the H-Blocks. He was a Nationalist and was imprisoned for political reasons. He talked to us about the hunger strikes and the things that ones body goes through from fasting for 45 days. He said the most memorable thing was the sense of smell. They'd wax the floors and everyone else would be fine, but the hunger strikers would be absolutely sick from the smell of the wax.

Alan is a Protestant that grew up in Belfast. He and his wife and daughter lived there. One day he took his wife to work at her fathers shop up on Shankill Road. She did that once a month to help out. He dropped her off and then went for a bike ride with his daughter, who was about 4 at the time. When he got back his friends came by to tell him that there had been an attack on Shankill Road. It was the IRA bomb of October 1993. It was a bombing that went awry. The IRA Volunteers were supposed to give the people in the shop an 11 second warning so they could gain some space, but instead the bomb went off killing 11, including Alan's wife.

It was an unbelievable thing to have these two men in the same room together. Both men affected strongly by the Troubles, on either sides, and wanting us to know about their beliefs. Lawrence works now to tell people about political imprisonment and to help their understanding. Alan has started WAVE, a group that goes into the areas and works with survivors.

There was a very large discussion of victim's rights going on within Parliament while we were there. And it's to be understood that the definition of victim is still being decided. To the Protestants who want to continue to be a part of Britain the Sinn Fein and the IRA are forever linked and they are intrinsically evil and a terrorist organization. They don't believe that any IRA man who died or the hunger strikers were victims of this political war. If you ask a Nationalist, the Unionists and government who have oppressed them and prevented Ireland from being united, they are the victims and the people who have died keeping the North a part of the UK are the terrorists. This makes it almost impossible for the Parliament in Stormont to decide on what defines a victim, let alone what victims deserve as compensation. Whose to say what lives were more important than others? Worth more? How would you feel if someone told you your loved on, who was taken from you in a bomb, was only worth x number of dollars (or in this case pounds)? It's a hot topic, and in my opinion, not one that will be resolved soon.