The following are excerpts from a talk, given by Jo Berry in 2003, called 'Facing the Enemy'
In it she describes her journey to meet the man who killed her father in a bomb attack and how they together formed 'Building Bridges for Peace'I got invited to Ireland so within months I was in Northern Ireland.
In a way very naive of the situation just thinking that I could go there and meet people and hear why my father had been a legitimate target, which he had been.
And I found people there very warm, very willing to hear me, very much wanting to explain to me they weren’t just bad people. And I began to see that there was far more in this.
I ended up corresponding with someone from the INLA who was in Longkesh. And he wrote me long letters about why he’d taken up violence and these letters were so articulate they made me see that someone who had killed, who was in prison, was not necessarily just a bad person.
It was more complex than that.
I met people who had been terrorised by the British army, who in the middle of the night had been taken out into the street, night after night after night. And I began to understand some of the stories of the people who felt a lot of injustice against the English. And that was all part of my learning, of my healing. I met someone very high up in Sin Fein and we had to meet in hiding.
He wasn’t allowed to meet me at that time; it was 1986. And he apologised to me. He said “I’m sorry that your dad was killed” and this is politically what’s been going on and why, and that helped.
But it was his relationship with his son that helped me most. He had a son who was very, very handicapped, and the love that he had for his son meant more to me than the words he was telling me.
I could see that although he was saying that he stood against the violence, he was also someone that had a lot of humanity in him. And I began to see how complex the situation was.
Then I got myself in a rather difficult situation where I felt a lot of fear. And I felt it was time to stop, I was out of my depth, and because of my accent I got myself into a place where people were very worried about me. And also because I hadn’t really dealt
with some of the emotional legacy of the bomb, I just said that’s enough.
And there was a long gap, but during those long years I still felt every time a bomb went off I had this feeling of, you know, why can’t I be involved? Why can’t I do something? What am I doing? And I just cried, and stayed with the feelings.
Until 1999, when Patrick Magee was released, and within 6 weeks of him being released I was in a situation where I re-lived the bomb.
I went through the whole day again as if for the first time, and I know I feel that was a lot of repressed pain that I hadn’t dealt with and the trauma. And after that I realised it’s time.
It’s time for me to actually look at all the feelings I had been denying and I was ready.
My youngest child was 3 and I could now take time away from the family. I went to Finderhall where they had a conference on Forgiveness. And I was very shy in those days, well I still am quite shy, but I was very shy in those days.
And I decided to speak in front of everyone there, and to say that I wanted to meet the guy that killed my father and that I wanted to forgive him and hear his story, and that I felt that if I could meet him it would be easier for me to understand what had happened.
I also talked about how I actually discovered that it was in me, I had the seeds of destruction and that was what I wanted to look at, was how, given the situation, I could also have made the choices he made.
So I shared that with everyone there and it was like the door opened and suddenly I was meeting people, inviting me to go to Northern Ireland. And one man there invited me to a project which was just about to begin in the Republic. And Colin Parry who is here next week, he helped to launch this project.
It was the first time I met victims from England, or any victim, and I knew that through meeting these victims I was going to be able to get the support I needed. This was in January 2000. During those 6 months I had lots of opportunities to share my story in a safe way.
And the power of just being able to share my feelings with people who weren’t going to judge me, weren’t going to say “Haven’t you dealt with this yet”, just to listen, and that listening gave me the space to be able to heal and let go and transform that pain.
And I found through feeling the feelings and transforming them that gave me this incredible energy, passion to want to change, to want to do things. I also saw so much healing happening through people from different sides.
We had victims there from three sides, or from four sides really, from England, from the Republic and from Catholics and Protestants in the North. And we found such a common sharing there, and such a common humanity, and we realised that pain is pain.
Whoever caused the violence doesn’t matter.
There’s a lot of love there and I still go there and we’re now like a big family and it’s wonderful. I also had the experience of meeting some ex Republican prisoners and it was a real lesson on how not to meet ex prisoners.
It was a very new experience for Glencree and with what I know now I would say they broke all the rules of emotional safety and preparation and lots of things I’ve now learnt.
I was thrown in the deep end and there were four men there who were from the IRA and I just decided I wanted to spend all my time with them to meet them as individuals, as human beings.
And I even remember walking up the Wicklow mountains and thinking, if my mother could see me now she would just die of shock, because there was just me and them walking up this mountain, and yet I know I was safe, and they were very open to hearing my story.
But emotionally it took a lot out of me, and I went back home and had a very negative experience of just feeling that I had gone too far and when I went back to Ireland the next week I felt such betrayal, and had such a strong feeling that I had broken all the
laws of what you do and what you don’t do.
And there was part of me saying it was wrong – you’ve betrayed dad’s memory by meeting them – they could have killed him – very, very strong feelings. So I learnt a little bit about dealing with my difficult feelings, it was not a new situation to be dealing
with something very challenging, so I listened to the feelings of betrayal and after hours and hours of crying what came out of this was – Well these people could be my friends.
Why did my father have to die? Why couldn’t we just talk?
You know, there was nothing demonic about them, they were very approachable, and yet some of these were hunger strikers. They were some of the hard-headed IRA, and yet they were just like us.
And it was such a shock that there is no betrayal because we were all connected and I felt connected to them. And that was a very important preparation for me for meeting Patrick, when the feeling of betrayal came back. It was something I was more familiar with.
So during the year this feeling grew and grew and grew. I wanted to meet Patrick. So three times I sent out a message. It’s quite a small world in Northern Ireland and a lot of people I met all said that they knew him and I think a lot of them wanted to be the people to introduce us together.
And each time I sent out – yes I’d like to meet him – I got told “No – he doesn’t want to meet you”. So I thought, well that’s fine, this might never happen.
I really trusted – a lot of this journey has been about trusting, about timing, and just knowing when the time was right, I would meet him. I also had a lot of fear in me and I thought, well, maybe I’m not ready so I waited. During that year I wrote a poem called “Bridges can be Built” and it was written about meeting him, and I shared it at a Peace Conference in the September/October.
And someone came up to me again and said “I know Patrick” and I was used to this at that point and he said “I can make sure that you can meet him”. I said OK and he said “How long do you need preparation?” and I said “Twenty-four hours” and my friend said – no, say three weeks – it’s far too short. But actually when the phone call came it was “I’ll meet you in 24 hours”.
And when the phone call came I was in my home, saying goodbye to my daughter, preparing to go away, to go back to Ireland.
..........
For the next few months we met many times and we actually had weekends together at Glencree and the Wicklow mountains and we talked for hours and hours and hours.
And he told me a lot about what happened to him in prison and stories of his life and I talked a lot about my father and what I’d been through and gradually got to a point where we were supporting each other.
In my life at that time my ex husband was not someone who could support me, and Patrick had very little support in his life, so he would talk to me about the problems of meeting me and I would talk to him. We also had the support of the people who were filming, but
apart from that it was a very, very quiet thing that not many people knew about, and he was very wary of coming out because of his own relationship with Sin Fein as ex prisoners. So we wanted to keep it very, very quiet.
About during May of that year, we were approached by Everyman to do the documentary, and Patrick got permission and I was the one saying – no, no – I was so scared of what would happen if I went public. Scared because of the other victims of Brighton, my family knew nothing about it, my step-mother had been badly injured – I felt that my family’s lives had gone through so much that I just didn’t want to make it worse for them. And I didn’t know how other victims would feel as well.
But there was something stronger in me going – yes, this will help reconciliation, this will help peace, you know, just go ahead and do it, so I decided to go public.
I have to say that I let my family know 4 weeks before the documentary actually went out, because I was that scared to tell them. And they were fantastic when they heard. They were so, so supportive.
My little sister who, well she’s not little any more, but she was when her father was killed, and it was my role to tell her that her father was dead and her mother was injured, and she was the one I was most worried about. But she said to me with such wisdom “This is the healing the family needs, this is the healing the world needs.”
And that was more than I could have hoped for, and I held on to those words at times when I really doubted myself. I have had a lot of self-doubt about this and what I’ve done, and during that year I used to hold on to the belief that something positive would come out of us going public. We could show that we could communicate.
Yes, it was difficult – it is still difficult – but yes, if we can talk and hear each others stories and see each other as human beings then maybe that can help others. It’s been so important for me to see Pat’s humanity and to see him as a real human being rather than this demonised IRA terrorist that was portrayed in the media.
Through seeing his humanity it has also helped me to re-find mine, and I really believe that victims of terrorist violence do lose some of their humanity, and also those that take up violence do, and that part of the journey is re-claiming that. Since the documentary has come out we have done several public sharings together and we will carry on. Sometimes I feel that it almost gets more difficult.
We shared together, around September 11th, a couple of days in London, The Royal Opera House, at an event called Transforming September 11th, and we shared there.
And Patrick said “Some days I’d really rather be in prison than having to deal with the fact that I now have Jo in my life as a friend and I killed her father”. He said “That is so difficult”. He said “Though I can justify the bomb the emotional costs was too big”.
And he said that what he has to face by having me. And he said if he’d met my dad he probably would have liked him. To me that means so much and it also still hurts, you know, that that’s true.
I’m sure if they had met, my dad was very open minded, they could have sat down and talked. For me it’s difficult, because I now say that he is a friend. He was the one who rang up last year on the anniversary to see how I was, and yet, he killed my father. And I live with that contradiction and sometimes it’s very hard, and sometimes I want to close down.
And we’re still working
Anything that I can say I’ve done and that’s that. And forgiveness is a word that I know very little about.
What I feel that I can do is to make a choice, to open my heart enough to hear Pat’s story or anyone else’s stories that have hurt me.
That is my intention each day is about opening my heart.
I don’t actually want to forgive Pat, because I feel that if I’ve forgiven him then I’m not allowed to be angry any more, I’m not allowed to feel my feelings and I want to still feel everything.
And I feel maybe the only person I can forgive is me, because I’m sure, given any situation where I felt my rights were taken away, I was oppressed, you know, I could make decisions to be violent.
My commitment is to not, but I don’t know, if my life had been different – even now I’m still struggling with someone in my life I can feel very angry with. So it’s something that’s an ongoing journey for me.
The need to see Patrick as someone who is a bad person, you know, I still have that in me, but I just feel that if I can take charge of that part of me – the inner terrace I’ve begun to call it now – then I can be more healed and I can open my heart more and that is my main goal now."
