Angels of Peace
Line Of Duty’s Vicky McClure leads the cast in a new drama telling how two women became catalysts for the IRA ceasefire
Twenty-five years ago, young Tim Parry set off for the shops to buy a pair of football shorts in his home town of Warrington – and never came back. The 12-yearold was fatally injured by one of two IRA bombs placed in litter bins in the town centre. Also killed was three-year-old Johnathan Ball, shopping with his babysitter for a card for Mother’s Day, which fell the next day.
The shockwaves from those explosions on March 20, 1993, have reverberated ever since. Now a new BBC production, in association with RTÉ, tells the heartrending story of the tragedy – and how, through the work of outraged parents on both sides of the Irish Sea, the two boys did not die in vain.
Johnathan died at the scene, and when Tim’s life support was turned off five days later he became the 136th child to die as a result of The Troubles. Hearing about the incident, Dubliner Susan McHugh, a mother of two, decided something had to be done about the violence.
‘She wanted to show the IRA enough was enough by organising a peace rally, little realising what the public reaction would be,’ says Vicky McClure, the Line Of Duty star who plays Susan. ‘More than 20,000 people attended the event in Dublin.’
Susan’s peace rally was just the start. As the film shows, Tim Parry’s parents, Colin and Wendy, also began campaigning, setting up a foundation for peace, which to this day supports victims of terrorism and educates children about the dangers of extremism. The one-off drama, Mother’s
Day, is far from an easy watch. We see the Parrys being told the unimaginably bad news by the surgeon caring for their son. Later, we see Susan McHugh receiving threatening phone calls from people demanding she bring an end to her campaign.
But Daniel Mays, who plays Colin Parry, hopes the drama will be a fitting tribute to the work of Susan McHugh and the Parrys. ‘We want to remind people something positive came out of something terrible,’ he says. Since filming ended, Daniel has met the Parrys at their Peace Centre. He’d been forbidden to do so before by director Fergus O’Brien, who says: ‘I thought it would be an overwhelming responsibility for the actors to meet the people before they played them and maybe feel they had to impersonate them.’
But Susan McHugh, her husband Arthur and the Parrys were consulted by the production team and were shown the film after completion. Wendy Parry was concerned at how cold and emotionally detached her character seems. ‘Her husband told her that was how she had to be, in order to keep it together for their other two children,’ says the writer Nick Leather. Although Wendy wanted to grieve privately, she agreed to go on the Late Late Show where she and Colin spoke movingly about their tremendous loss.
While their pain can never fully go away, the deaths marked a sea-change in attitudes towards the violence. On August 31, 1994, the IRA announced a ceasefire after 25 years of conflict. It came into effect the next day – on what would have been Tim Parry’s 14th birthday. Mother’s Day, RTÉ One, tonight, 9.30pm/BBC2, Monday, 9pm.