DEAR MR BLAIR...
Dear Tony Blair,
I don't usually make a habit of writing to Prime Ministers. But this week in the aftermath of the Omagh atrocity you felt need to put pen to paper yourself. In an article in the morning papers you attempted to tell us how YOU were feeling.
I just thought it might be useful for a change to let you know how WE are feeling.
In your article you say: "I think, as any parent would, of my own sons or daughter. I know I should go mad with grief should it happen to them."
This comment, as I'm sure it was intended, strikes a very real chord will all those of us who are ourselves, parents of children in Northern Ireland.
For we belong to the generation which grew up with the Troubles. There is a line in the Eric Bogle song No Man's Land, said to be among your favourites which refers to... "a whole generation that was butchered and damned."
And sometimes Mr Blair, that is exactly how it seems.
Our own lives have been marked, in many cases, scarred by violence. We do not want the same for our children. We do not want them to be damned forever to lives of fear.
And, oh God, Mr Blair, we do not want them to be butchered.
And I cannot help but wonder if you can even begin to imagine the extent of the sorrow, the hurt and the sense of hopelessness we feel at the end of this black and terrible week.
I heard Mo Mowlam on the radio the other day talking about how people here are determined."
But I live here Mr Blair, and I see no signs of this, "determination." All I see and feel around me is complete and abject despair.
On Wednesday I attended one of the funerals near Omagh. And as I drove along wee country roads I passed car upon car of black-tied mourners travelling to this funeral or that one. There were people walking. Great waves of people walking. At times it seemed as if every man and woman and child in the country was on foot following behind the coffins of their neighbours and friends.
On television that night we watched through our tears reports from 16 funerals. Tragedy upon tragedy. The father and son buried together. The teenagers. The three little boys buried side by side.
You thought it couldn't get worse and then the screen was filled with the heartstopping sight of that young father tenderly carrying his little daughter under his arm as if she were wrapped in a blanket not borne in a tiny white coffin.
I do not think Mr Blair, you can understand the depth of the raw, real hurt that every one of us has felt this week. You cannot imagine how many tears we have shed between us or the sense of hopelessness that now hangs over our entire land.
I do not think you can know or understand these things, Mr Blair, because you haven't been here. True, you paid a visit to the injured in a Belfast hospital.
But you should have been in Omagh.
If this atrocity had been carried out in any other part of the United Kingdom - in any other part of the United Kingdom where people can vote for the Labour party that is - you WOULD have been there.
Instead, having assured us that what you saw in that hospital would live with you for the rest of your life, you went away again.
Back to your holiday in France.
Before you left you penned your article in which you insisted: "We must and will take whatever sensible security measures we can to crush the rump of dissidents."
Why weren't these "sensible security measures" taken years ago? Months ago? When the Agreement was signed and it was apparent that such a threat existed? After Moira? After Banbridge?
You mention too, as if it is some crumb of comfort how this "small group of dissidents do not represent anyone, anywhere."
Whether or not they enjoy widespread support is hardly the point, Mr Blair. The point is that they have killed people. And we all know and fear that they could kill again.
The motivation of madmen isn't going to go away you know. And neither, horrifyingly, is their access to stores of arms and explosives.
You were keen to make the point in your article that the materials used for the bomb didn't come from PIRA dumps.
But what about the next time?
Have you even considered there could still be a next time?
For we have, Mr Blair. It is the dark fear that haunts the mind of every parent here. The fear that there will be a next time, and that next time it will be our child, maimed, mutilated, murdered.
Those of us who have no insight whatsoever into the thinking of paramilitaries and precious little into the strategy of their elected representatives can only place our trust in you.
Maybe it is naive to expect that the weapons of war could and should be placed beyond the reach of murderers.
But decommissioning is not about claiming victory or scoring points. It is about trying to keep our children safe.
And our children AREN'T safe, Mr Blair.
We know that and, tragically, they know it too.
This week we haven't been able to shield them from the savagery depicted in news reports and on television screens.
We haven't been able to hide our tears from them, or our fears from them.
In this one terrible summer, three little brothers have been burned to death in their beds, 28 good, decent people slaughtered in Omagh and God knows how many more maimed for life.
Or those who died in Omagh, fifteen were under the age of 21.
In part of the land whose government you lead, Mr Blair, children aren't even safe on a quiet country street or in their beds at night. And worse still, they know it.
As a mother of two sons there are many images which have torn at my heart this week. There were the words of Donna Marie Barker whose 12-year-old son James was just a little younger than my own oldest boy.
She would have had the same hopes and dreams for him as I have for Jamie. Not dreams of great, glittering success but just the hope that he will lead a happy, fulfilled life.
But James is buried now in a little cemetery in Co Donegal in the land where his parents brought him to be safe. And all their dreams and hopes are buried with him.
And alongside that beautiful little boy lies Oran Doherty. Oran is the same age as my youngest son. A typical football-mad eight-year-old.
And believe me, Mr Blair, I cried long and hard for little Oran and his parents as I watched that big Celtic player in a last touching tribute shoulder the child's coffin to his grave, stooping awkwardly, not because it was too big for him to carry. But because it was too little.
I am haunted, too, by the faces of all the children I saw at the funerals.
You would have wept if you'd seen them. Young boys ana girls in sporting strips and school uniforms, shivering in the wind as they formed guards of honour for the coffins or their peers.
Surely to God, Mr Blair, you have more to offer the children of Northern Ireland than this misery, this savagery, this relentless line of coffins?
You talk in your article about the adult instinct to protect the young. As parents, it is an instinct we all share.
But the cruel truth is that in Northern Ireland we cannot keep our children safe.
So what hope can we have of a future, Mr Blair?
And what hope can they have either?
Signed:
Lindy McDowell
I don't usually make a habit of writing to Prime Ministers. But this week in the aftermath of the Omagh atrocity you felt need to put pen to paper yourself. In an article in the morning papers you attempted to tell us how YOU were feeling.
I just thought it might be useful for a change to let you know how WE are feeling.
In your article you say: "I think, as any parent would, of my own sons or daughter. I know I should go mad with grief should it happen to them."
This comment, as I'm sure it was intended, strikes a very real chord will all those of us who are ourselves, parents of children in Northern Ireland.
For we belong to the generation which grew up with the Troubles. There is a line in the Eric Bogle song No Man's Land, said to be among your favourites which refers to... "a whole generation that was butchered and damned."
And sometimes Mr Blair, that is exactly how it seems.
Our own lives have been marked, in many cases, scarred by violence. We do not want the same for our children. We do not want them to be damned forever to lives of fear.
And, oh God, Mr Blair, we do not want them to be butchered.
And I cannot help but wonder if you can even begin to imagine the extent of the sorrow, the hurt and the sense of hopelessness we feel at the end of this black and terrible week.
I heard Mo Mowlam on the radio the other day talking about how people here are determined."
But I live here Mr Blair, and I see no signs of this, "determination." All I see and feel around me is complete and abject despair.
On Wednesday I attended one of the funerals near Omagh. And as I drove along wee country roads I passed car upon car of black-tied mourners travelling to this funeral or that one. There were people walking. Great waves of people walking. At times it seemed as if every man and woman and child in the country was on foot following behind the coffins of their neighbours and friends.
On television that night we watched through our tears reports from 16 funerals. Tragedy upon tragedy. The father and son buried together. The teenagers. The three little boys buried side by side.
You thought it couldn't get worse and then the screen was filled with the heartstopping sight of that young father tenderly carrying his little daughter under his arm as if she were wrapped in a blanket not borne in a tiny white coffin.
I do not think Mr Blair, you can understand the depth of the raw, real hurt that every one of us has felt this week. You cannot imagine how many tears we have shed between us or the sense of hopelessness that now hangs over our entire land.
I do not think you can know or understand these things, Mr Blair, because you haven't been here. True, you paid a visit to the injured in a Belfast hospital.
But you should have been in Omagh.
If this atrocity had been carried out in any other part of the United Kingdom - in any other part of the United Kingdom where people can vote for the Labour party that is - you WOULD have been there.
Instead, having assured us that what you saw in that hospital would live with you for the rest of your life, you went away again.
Back to your holiday in France.
Before you left you penned your article in which you insisted: "We must and will take whatever sensible security measures we can to crush the rump of dissidents."
Why weren't these "sensible security measures" taken years ago? Months ago? When the Agreement was signed and it was apparent that such a threat existed? After Moira? After Banbridge?
You mention too, as if it is some crumb of comfort how this "small group of dissidents do not represent anyone, anywhere."
Whether or not they enjoy widespread support is hardly the point, Mr Blair. The point is that they have killed people. And we all know and fear that they could kill again.
The motivation of madmen isn't going to go away you know. And neither, horrifyingly, is their access to stores of arms and explosives.
You were keen to make the point in your article that the materials used for the bomb didn't come from PIRA dumps.
But what about the next time?
Have you even considered there could still be a next time?
For we have, Mr Blair. It is the dark fear that haunts the mind of every parent here. The fear that there will be a next time, and that next time it will be our child, maimed, mutilated, murdered.
Those of us who have no insight whatsoever into the thinking of paramilitaries and precious little into the strategy of their elected representatives can only place our trust in you.
Maybe it is naive to expect that the weapons of war could and should be placed beyond the reach of murderers.
But decommissioning is not about claiming victory or scoring points. It is about trying to keep our children safe.
And our children AREN'T safe, Mr Blair.
We know that and, tragically, they know it too.
This week we haven't been able to shield them from the savagery depicted in news reports and on television screens.
We haven't been able to hide our tears from them, or our fears from them.
In this one terrible summer, three little brothers have been burned to death in their beds, 28 good, decent people slaughtered in Omagh and God knows how many more maimed for life.
Or those who died in Omagh, fifteen were under the age of 21.
In part of the land whose government you lead, Mr Blair, children aren't even safe on a quiet country street or in their beds at night. And worse still, they know it.
As a mother of two sons there are many images which have torn at my heart this week. There were the words of Donna Marie Barker whose 12-year-old son James was just a little younger than my own oldest boy.
She would have had the same hopes and dreams for him as I have for Jamie. Not dreams of great, glittering success but just the hope that he will lead a happy, fulfilled life.
But James is buried now in a little cemetery in Co Donegal in the land where his parents brought him to be safe. And all their dreams and hopes are buried with him.
And alongside that beautiful little boy lies Oran Doherty. Oran is the same age as my youngest son. A typical football-mad eight-year-old.
And believe me, Mr Blair, I cried long and hard for little Oran and his parents as I watched that big Celtic player in a last touching tribute shoulder the child's coffin to his grave, stooping awkwardly, not because it was too big for him to carry. But because it was too little.
I am haunted, too, by the faces of all the children I saw at the funerals.
You would have wept if you'd seen them. Young boys ana girls in sporting strips and school uniforms, shivering in the wind as they formed guards of honour for the coffins or their peers.
Surely to God, Mr Blair, you have more to offer the children of Northern Ireland than this misery, this savagery, this relentless line of coffins?
You talk in your article about the adult instinct to protect the young. As parents, it is an instinct we all share.
But the cruel truth is that in Northern Ireland we cannot keep our children safe.
So what hope can we have of a future, Mr Blair?
And what hope can they have either?
Signed:
Lindy McDowell
Further Information
Publisher: BELFAST TELEGRAPH
Ref: BT/0194
Published Date: 22-Aug-98
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