IAN MILNE: ‘I MET BILLY WRIGHT AND ‘SPIKE’ MURRAY IN A BID TO FORGE PEACE’
Co Armagh man Ian Milne was in the RUC, a prison officer and an undertaker. But perhaps his greatest achievement has been building relationships with terrorists
TO those whose loved ones’ funerals he carries out, undertaker Ian Milne is a compassionate, kind and thoughtful friend. But that same personality enabled the Co Armagh businessman, who had relatives murdered by the IRA, to form a series of extraordinary and meaningful friendships with terrorists of all hues as he acted as a mediator during the Drumcree crisis.
They included senior republican Sean ‘Spike’ Murray, whom he comforted when his father died and who sat with him when his mother was dying.
Milne (59) also reveals details of a memorable encounter with the late LVF leader Billy Wright, in a flat bedecked in religious art.
His astonishing interventions, which brought death threats from loyalists and republicans, are told in a fascinating biography penned by journalist Ivan Little. “Judge the person once you know them,” he tells me is the lesson that he learnt during years of secret negotiations.
Yet as well as his associations with public figures, Milne’s own personal story is equally dramatic — and harrowing. Before he became an undertaker, he served in the RUC and then the Prison Service. The collapse of property investments left him suicidal. Courageously, he also reveals he was sexually abused as a boy — and how finally reporting it to the police when he was 48 brought closure.
But first to this affable countryman’s remarkable efforts to find a solution to the Drumcree dispute which ran from 19952000 and each July saw thousands of Orangemen and supporters descend on Portadown after their parade was blocked from passing along the Garvaghy Road by its Catholic residents.
The stand-off claimed lives and violent scenes were beamed around the world. It was a time when Milne met some “very nasty people and very unusual people on both sides”. He also made “very unlikely friendships”.
Milne, who then was in the Orange Order but isn’t now, got involved on the spur of the moment. “Someone said on the radio that 25% of the gross domestic product of Northern Ireland was within five miles of Portadown, which was catastrophic for our country. Something had to be done.”
He contacted Chris Gibson, chairman of the Confederation of British Industry, and met him and Sir George Quigley, chairman of the Ulster Bank. “I felt an amazing synergy between us. It went on from there.”
When Catholic taxi driver Michael Mcgoldrick was murdered by the UVF in Lurgan in July, 1996, as a “birthday present” for their commander Billy Wright, a desperate Milne went to talk to Wright.
“Billy Wright was a bad man, let’s get that on the record first of all,” says Milne. “You cannot kill people for political ends though he saw himself as defending the unionist tradition.
“I went to see Wright in a flat in Corcrain in Portadown. His people had built an inlay in a wall nearby, which represented the Cave of Abdullam, an old testament analogy to the thinking of loyalist killers indicating a link between religion and revolution. The flat was warm, old-fashioned and had pictures of Protestant martyrs on the walls.
“I talked to Wright about the situation. He spoke about how Protestant people couldn’t cope with a new environment and about his views on alcohol where he said for some people one drink was too many and 1,000 drinks weren’t enough. But he refused to talk about the murder of Michael Mcgoldrick.”
Milne abhorred the violence — police suspected Wright of involvement in dozens of murders — but contacted the terror leader several times to try to avert looming crises. In one instance, Wright helped a Catholic family. “Their home was coming under attack from loyalists and Billy came with me to speak to the family who were shocked to see him walking through their front door. I reassured them Billy was only there to hear about their plight. When he’d finished listening, he said such attacks would never happen again and 23 years later they never have.”
Milne, who doesn’t believe PUP leader Billy Hutchinson’s claims that Wright was a State agent, told how Wright intervened after a loyalist bar in Co Tyrone was wrecked by drinkers at a nearby republican bar.
“It was a small rural bar that held about 12 people. A man with a disabled daughter went to it each Saturday night, his one outing a week. Word got to Billy Wright about what had happened.
“He called into the republican bar and ordered a Diet Coke. People fled to the toilets to hide and the barman offered him the drink on the house but Wright said he was there to buy it. Then he said he wasn’t there for a row but he wanted the other wee bar fixed up.
“The next week two vans arrived, the optics were replaced, a new bar counter installed, new glass put in the windows and £400 left to buy everyone a drink.”
Even more striking are the contacts Milne formed on the republican side, most notably with ‘Spike’ Murray, whom he first met after being invited to tell senior republicans how Protestants in Portadown were feeling.
That night he’d told them “if we’d been living in my democracy they’d have been on the end of a rope for complicity to murder, but it wasn’t my democracy so we’d have to learn how to get on with one another”.
Milne says: “Spike Murray is to me in some ways an enigma” before revealing how they supported each other through the death of a parent.
After a republican friend told him Murray’s father was dying, Milne drove to Belfast and persuaded a local to take him to Murray’s mother’s house.
“This wee woman was sitting on the settee. There was no-one else there. She says ‘are you the wee loyalist man from Portadown?’ I said ‘I wouldn’t describe myself as a loyalist, probably more as a unionist’, and sat down. She told me how she was a Protestant born on the Shankill Road and had married Spike’s father who was a dyed-in-the-wool republican. I said ‘your husband’s not too well’ and she said ‘no, and I’m not able to go to the hospital’. Half an hour later the door opened and Spike came in and told me his daddy passed away. I said ‘I’ve been keeping this wee woman company’.”
Four years later Milne was at the bedside of his dying mother. “One night the nurse said ‘there’s a man here’. Rev William Mccrea arrived in, sang mum’s favourite hymn, said a prayer and left.
“The next night the nurse said ‘there’s three men here and one wants to come in’. I said let him in and in came Spike. I said ‘what are you doing here?’ I was worried about his safety in Portadown. He said ‘Lest you forget, when my father died you were there for me’. He stayed a couple of hours, talked and made tea. He said ‘I’m thinking of you’. And I said to him ‘This is the way it should be’.”
Milne became friends with Breandan Mac Cionnaith, the Garvaghy Road residents’ spokesperson. “He’s just another human being. The Orange Order inflated his ego and turned him into this bogeyman but he was just an ordinary working class guy like me,” he says.
“They didn’t want to talk to him because he had terrorist convictions but some Orangemen had terrorist convictions too.”
Milne, who grew up in Knocknamuckley, a townland outside Portadown, believes his non-sectarian upbringing left him wellplaced to talk to all sides. His father’s family had fled sectarian violence in Cork, but enjoyed good relations with Catholic neighbours in Co Armagh, one of whom would drive them to the Twelfth.
Milne remains convinced a solution could have been found early in the Drumcree dispute if people had sat down together. “[Portadown Orange leader] Harold Gracey was the nicest, kindest, most decent man. If I could have got him and Breandan into one room they’d have seen each other wasn’t too bad. Both of them were given life sentences by opposing sides for crimes they didn’t commit.”
Milne himself was serving his own life sentence of sorts after a terrifying sexual assault when he was 11. A man known to the fami
ly invited him to his home where he performed a sex act on him. When he told his mother, she refused to believe him, which damaged their relationship.
“The assault wrecked my life,” says Milne, who only reported it to the police after a dying former RUC colleague urged him to do so.
“Doing that gave me back the power. I went from feeling unable to sit an O-level to doing a Master’s in mediation at Queen’s.”
He’s enjoyed a varied career. After school and just under five feet seven inches tall, he was only eligible to join the RUC Reserve. Despite the Troubles, Milne loved the job. But when he won a farming prize that sent him to Norway for three months, the RUC terminated his contract. Later, he joined the Prison Service briefly.
After marrying Valerie, the couple ran Chequers restaurant in Cookstown. Then, in 1985, a friend who was a funeral director asked Milne to help remove an elderly lady’s body from her home. Milne went along reluctantly but was mesmerised by her family’s gratitude and had found his vocation. In 2000 he launched his own funeral business in Portadown and now has branches in Lurgan and Banbridge too. Sons, Stuart (31) and Andrew (25) work in the firm while daughter Rebecca (30) has presented him with his first grandchild.
In 2010, he ran into financial difficulties with property deals and still resents how his bank handled the situation. At rock bottom, he cancelled an appointment with his doctor and made meticulous plans to take his own life. “Fortunately when I rang to cancel, the GP was walking past, asked the receptionist who was on the line, then took the phone and told me to open the front door and sit on the settee. He was at my home in minutes, sat down and said he’d be there with me for as long it takes.”
Milne says i t ’s important people can see beyond what might seem a “narrowing of options”. Breaking that destructive thought pattern — and medication — “got my fighting spirit back”.
The phone rings and Milne must get back to work. Ironically, when he was 14 an incident occurred that seems a portent for much of his life’s occupations and preoccupations. A bomb exploded at Ballygargan Orange Hall, close to his home, killing a soldier who’d been searching it after a female caller falsely told the Confidential telephone loyalists were storing arms there.
Later, when Milne and his father visited the wrecked hall, the teenager found tiny pieces of human remains. His father suggested they bury them and the pair recited the Lord’s Prayer as they did so. “We were just doing the best we could do in the circumstances,” adds Milne.