‘I’m sick of meeting politicians and appealing for help’
VICTIMS SPEAK OUT IN PENSIONS ROW
MARGARET Yeaman has never seen the faces of her grandchildren. Her family tell her whose eyes and hair and smiles they have, but it is not the same. Of everything she has suffered since she was blinded in the bomb, this is the worst.
“At least I have the memories of my own children’s faces,” she says. “They’re grown up now, but I see them as they were on March 15, 1982, as I waved them off to school. They were nine, 11, 13 and 15.
“They’ve given me six precious grandchildren, but I feel like such a failure. I can’t do the things that other grannies do. I can’t take them on trips, bake buns with them or buy them clothes. I loved shopping myself, going into town, having a wee look around. All that’s gone.”
Margaret was working in an estate agent’s in Banbridge when a 500lb no-warning IRA car bomb exploded. An 11-yearold schoolboy, Alan Mccrum, was killed in the blast.
“I was standing at the window looking out as the bomb went off,” she says. “My eyesight went there and then. I felt my teeth breaking in my mouth. My hands were badly cut and I needed over 100 stitches in my face.
“I lost my right eye, and my left one is dead. I didn’t want to leave the hospital. I felt while I was there that maybe there was a chance they could fix me. But there was nothing they could do. My retinas were blown off.”
Aged 34, Margaret returned home to a very different existence with her four children.
“They had to grow up fast. It was very challenging,” she says.
“I was taking a lot of tablets. Some days I thought of ending it all, but I kept going for the kids.”
The Victims’ Payment Scheme, which would see those severely injured in the Troubles receive pensions of £2,000 to £10,000, was passed into law at Westminster and had been due to open for applications on May 29.
But a row at Stormont over the definition of a victim has meant that did not happen, and victims have been once again left in limbo.
They will begin legal action against the Executive this week. Margaret is disgusted at Stormont for not delivering the pension. “I’m 75 now. I’m sick of meeting politicians and appealing for help,” she says.
“I’d ask them to wear a blindfold and walk a mile in my shoes. And that wouldn’t even show them how awful it is because they’d know they could take the blindfold off. I’ll never see again.”
Slivers of glass still come to the surface of Margaret’s skin.
“I pick them out,” she says. “I suffer from dizziness. I miss driving, being able to go out on my own. My fingers were too badly mangled for Braille but I listen to talking books. I’d be lost without my Jack Russell Amy. She sits beside me all day.”
A pension would make life more comfortable, Margaret believes.
She adds: “I wouldn’t always have to think about the bills. It would be nice to head off with my husband for a bit of sun. Maybe go to Tenerife, enjoy a wee gin and tonic. I try to keep upbeat, but it’s very hard.”
Philip Gault didn’t want to go shopping with his mother. But Friday, July 21, 1972 was a scorching hot day and all his friends were away to the seaside. There was nobody with whom to kick a ball about in the streets near his north Belfast home so, reluctantly, the nine-year-old headed out with his mum.
He was standing at the ulster Bank on Limestone Road when the fourth of their a’ s Bloody Friday bombs exploded in a car beside him.
Philip was blown 10ft into the air. “I remember the flash and the darkness, then the dust and blood. I screamed as loud as I could,” he says. “My right leg was left hanging by a few sinews. A man wrapped me in his jacket and took me to an Army Jeep. My mum was hysterical. To calm her down, the soldier said it was only a cut.”
The surgeons saved his leg, but there were endless operations for the next seven years.
“They didn’ t want to do them during school term so I spent my summers in the Royal Victoria Hospital,” Philip (below) says.
“I wore calipers for four years. I got called names in school — ‘peg leg’ and ‘hop-along’. You grow a hard exterior, toughen up in a way a child shouldn’t have to.
“It’s particularly challenging in your midteens when girls come into your life. You try to hide your leg and pretend you’re normal. Then, they notice yourleg,and you see them shy away.”
Philip felt he was no longer accepted in his own community: “I was an innocent child injured by the organisation that said it was defending the community I lived in. My very existence was an embarrassment to them.”
He lives with constant pain and wakes up shouting with nightmares — “I don’t know how my wife puts up with me .”
He says a pension would allow him, at 57, to consider retiring from his Civil Service job: “It would be good not to have to leave the house for work on cold, dark mornings when the arthritis has kicked in and I’m feeling lousy. To focus on myself for a bit, to get back some of those lost years.”
Mary Hannon-fletcher was an 18-year-old trainee biomedical scientist on a first date on October 8, 1975 with a boy she had met at a disco the previous week.
They had been to see The Godfather Part II in a Belfast city centre cinemaand were walking home up the Grosvenor Road. “A car slowed down and they started shooting out the window,” she says. “My friend pushed medownonthe ground and lay on topofme.whenthe shooting stopped I tried to get up and realised my legs weren’t working.
“As I lay there a British Army foot patrol passed and one soldier said, ‘Oh great, another Fenian gone’, and walked on.
“My friend suffered superficial wounds but the bullet had hit my spine. They told me in hospital that I’d never walk again.”
No paramilitary organisation claimed responsibility for the attack but the car was found burnt out in a loyalist area.
Mary later spent four months in Stoke Mandeville hospital in England, which specialises in spinal injuries. She says she suffered abuse from some staff and patients. “The Balcombe Street Gang were bombing London and they presumed I must have been in the IRA. I left that hospital a lot better able to fight my battles than when I went in,” she says.
Mary returned to her job, and career success followed. She is now a senior lecturer at Ulster University. “They tell you the pain from your injury will go away. It doesn’t, but you learn to tolerate it,” she says.
“Not all victims have been lucky enough to keep working. Many live on the breadline. It makes me furious that Stormont is ignoring the law of the land by not giving victims a pension. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it would allow people to get the roof fixed or the garden done. It would be a little bit of security as they get old.”
Mark Kelly was a DJ who ran the disco at St Mary’s On The Hill parish youth club in Glengormley. On Saturday, August 28, 1976, he picked up the keys from the bar across the road, and decided to stay for a few pints. A UVF bomb exploded, leaving the 18-year-old with life-changing injuries. “I can’t remember the blast ,” he says.
“Just the place in darkness, and the smell of burning beer. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. I shouted for help, and for my mother.
“A policeman carried me out. I asked if I could use the toilet. I didn’t know I’d lost my legs. I lost my hair, too — the first and only time I was a skinhead.
“My lungs and ear drums were damaged and I had burns all over my back. I was wearing a cross and chain, and the cross melted into my chest. I’ve still got the mark.”
His parents had to move home because the house was on too steep a slope to make it wheelchair-friendly, and Mark needed a downstairs bedroom.
“It was tough in so many ways. There was no Disability Discrimination Act back then,” he says .“ire member the bouncers not letting me into a Roy Orbison concert because they said my wheelchair was a fire hazard. But I was determined that music would remain a big part of my life. I set up the first mobile video disco roadshow in Northern Ireland. I went everywhere from the Europa Hotel to wee country halls. I wasn’t one for sitting at home feeling sorry formyself.”
Mark married in 1981 and had four children, but his marriage broke up: “Trauma from the Troubles takes its toll on relationships. It didn’t help that there was no counselling for victims then,” he adds.
“When people asked how you were, you said ‘grand’, but it felt like you were carrying big bags of coal on your back all the time.”
During the 1998 Good Friday Agreement referendum campaign Mark was worried about “all the negativity” and wrote a song called Stop, in which a young man demands that politicians act constructively.
“I’m glad there was a ‘Yes’ vote, I’m glad Stormont got back up and running this year, but I’m furious at how they’re messing around on the victims’ pension,” he says. “They’ve let us down, they’re traumatising us all over again. It’s actually a bigger disgrace than the incidents which changed our lives.
“Pay people the pension before they’re too old to enjoy it.”
Mark knows the first thing he would do with his :“two years ago I went to Ibiza with a friend. It was my first holiday in years. Imagine me, almost 60, and heading there.
“I did a sub-aqua dive. I fell in love with swimming again. It was heaven, all the fish around me, and rays of sun coming across the water. I’m going back to dive in Ibiza if I get the money.”