In memory of the children stolen by the Troubles

BBC drama a harrowing portrait of an obscenity NEVER AFRAID TO TACKLE THE STORIES THAT MATTER

ALOT of people say to me, why on earth would you want to bring all that back? And I’ve said, we don’t bring it back. It’s with us all the time.’ This was Wendy Parry, who lost her 12-year-old son Tim in the Warrington IRA bombing in March 1993, speaking in advance of the broadcast across Ireland and Britain last weekend of Mother’s Day, a powerful drama about the effects of the atrocity.

The drama focuses on Wendy Parry in Warrington – where no one knows to this day why it was targeted for the double bombing on the eve of Mother’s Day – and Susan McHugh, a young mother from Clontarf in Dublin, who was so outraged by the killing of Tim and threeyear-old Johnathan Ball that she spontaneously organised one of the biggest peace demonstrations ever held in Dublin.

In many ways it was a landmark broadcast, because in truth, it highlighted the work of the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation, started 18 years ago in memory of the two children who were killed. It is now one of the biggest peace and reconciliation centres in the world and is now working with 850 families involved in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing .

The ethos is not one of revenge. The Parrys, at this stage, see no point in hunting down the bombers who killed her son. As Wendy said last week: ‘Myself and Colin wanted to make sure that Tim was not forgotten, we didn’t want him to be like other children in Northern Ireland where basically, they are a number on a list.’

That last comment really echoed with me. At the end of the harrowing 90-minute drama, we were told that ‘157 children aged 16 and under have been killed in the Troubles.’

I know, since I began researching the area, that the figure is, tragically, much greater.

Only last week, I was contacted by two veteran Dublinbased newsmen who recalled the shocking discovery of a dead six-year-old child in Belfast in the late summer of 1971.

Internment without trial had just been introduced, there was serious conflict in Belfast and Derry, including families being burnt out of their homes. Twenty five people were killed in the anarchic week of internment – but is that even the true toll?

While filming a news report for Norwegian TV, the Irish camera crew in Farrington Gardens in the Ardoyne area of Belfast spotted what they thought was a ‘sizzling mannequin’ in a burnt-out home. It was in fact a six-year-old who had been electrocuted. They immediately carried the child for medical help – they were convinced he was dead. I spent last weekend in vain trying to find a reference to this child in the newspapers of the time .

Of course, he is remembered and mourned by his own family, but he is not numbered among the dead of the Troubles.

It gives us a glimpse of the horrific past we endured.

So many children died violently that hardly a day goes by when a family is not marking an anniversary. Twenty three families have just marked an anniversary of the death of their child in the Troubles in the month of August .