Contents, Part 3:

Rising above the impact of trauma

The Peace People ...

Research, and awkward results

Violence destroys.

A Veteran's Story.

Different generations

Community Welfare ...

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Rising above the impact of trauma

Nick Nugent: But I want to ask a specific question, coming back to the points you've been making about the divided community – and incidentally, Northern Ireland is something that comes into the training I do a lot. I tend to teach journalists who are working in, or with, conflict, or in divided communities, so we feel we have some lessons to draw from the BBC experience, in particular, in Northern Ireland. You've referred to people affected by trauma going in different directions, becoming journalists or joining the paramilitaries, or becoming bigger figures, as a result. Do you have experience of people affected directly by trauma, finding it then easy to come to terms with the other side in a divided community? Does a traumatic experience in any way help people to understand the other position, or is the more usual result that it drives them deeper into their own community or their own ghetto – if it is a ghetto situation?

I ask the question specifically because I've had a recent experience of working with journalists in another very divided community, a very, very long way away in Ambon in Eastern Indonesia , where it's essentially a Muslim/Christian conflict. I've had a bit to do with the journalism in that area over the past four or five years. But I had a group just a couple of months ago who seemed to me to show a remarkable degree of having risen above the community divide by virtue of not only the work they did as journalists. In other words they're following what we regard as the right standards of being journalists first, and only Muslims or Christians second – rising above the conflict.

But I think they've been helped in that by their experience, their own traumatic experience, because in that particular group there wasn't a single individual who hadn't been very affected; lost family members, lost possessions, had become a refugee, etc. And it seemed in a curious sort of way to have helped them rise above – climb out of – their community, and be the stronger for that and thus be better able to carry out their task as a journalist.

So, in telling you that anecdote, I'm asking if you've had any parallel experience from Northern Ireland that could be examples of trauma actually helping to bridge the divide, in a sort of way?

Mario Marro-Perera, NBC: I've got quite a different kind of question and I suppose it's about the reporters' responsibility in what they report. I very strongly believe, like Lord Alderdice said, that good reporting can increase understanding if you get to the sense of the meaning; and it can offer hope as well.

But I just wonder if always reporting bad news actually fuels the fear and fuels the misunderstanding; the parallel being general crime in this country. Many more people are afraid of crime than is actually committed, and part of that is to do with how much crime is reported in the newspapers. So there are two questions in that. First of all about journalistic responsibility – how responsible do you feel for perhaps adding to a situation?

And secondly, the larger question of what makes a story because I have a sense that bad news, bad events have always been a story that needs reporting. But I also feel that this is a wonderful opportunity to start reporting the kind of stories - different stories - that can offer hope.

Mark Brayne: Let's start with this question of resistance in schools, and institutional problems. There's the interesting question whether trauma can have a kind of positive impact, in a sense; and then the reporting of crime and fuelling fear.

Oscar Daly: Well, there are several issues and I'll try and address some of them very quickly. We were talking before this meeting about the reporting of suicide. There's a study from Vienna in the 1980s when a lot of teenage girls were throwing themselves in front of the underground trains, and the media, I'm not sure why, took a decision that they wouldn't report it any more. The suicide rate dropped to zero. So the media can obviously have a major influence on things.

Regarding the issue of denial, I think probably foremost here was the British government's attitude to what was going on. Those committing violence were seen as just a group of criminals. So, it didn't deserve any more merit, any more reporting than that.

The government could have, if they'd wished, commissioned fabulous research on Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is still a fairly cohesive community, and there wouldn't have been so many variables that you could have ignored the impact on research in other parts of the world. That was a huge opportunity lost partly because of the government, and because in the mental health field professors for much of that time, I think, were people who had interests other than trauma. They were interested mainly in brain waves and things like that – epilepsy and head injury, but not interested in the psychological effects of trauma. So I think that's one of the reasons why we didn't have the research.

On the benefits of trauma, there's a famous study done on a group of Harvard graduates who served in the Second World War. Many of them were decorated with Purple Hearts and whatever you get, and most of them except for one out of maybe 30, ended up having fabulous careers, many of them ending up in Who's Who in America. So they grew through trauma. What their individual traumas were I don't know, but at home I'm not sure that that happens with too many people. Most people I see - and certainly I'm seeing a biased sample in the people I see - are clinically unwell. Very few of them can see the point from the other side.

One of things we were talking about is truth and reconciliation, and the issue of forgiveness. The odd person would say, ‘Yes, I can forgive and I feel better for that.' Most people would say, ‘Please don't ask me to forgive. It's far too hard. I can't forgive, and then I feel guilty because I can't forgive, and feel worse.' That's one of the issues we're going to have to address when we talk about truth and reconciliation or whatever.

Mervyn Jess: On the subject of schools and trauma and children, I'll actually pose the question to John, given that he has the political expertise on this one. Did you think that there was some sort of political resistance perhaps at governmental level to getting into this in any great depth because of the possibility that we're going to open up yet another can of worms in Northern Ireland? I pose that question and you can come back on that.

The comment you made about so much else happening is so true about anything that's reported. ‘Why didn't you do this about that, then?' ‘Because so much else was happening.' Effectively, in Northern Ireland, the Troubles blew out of the water the trauma issues, the suicide issues. So the very thing which was probably the root cause of some of that was getting in the way of it being reported on a 25-minute news bulletin of an evening, because you just had to do the big story.

That has changed. It's changing as we speak; hence I'm here, hence we'll be doing stories no doubt– and have done them – about people suffering from trauma. Maybe not at the level that we're talking about now, but we've been to schools to see how the children - for instance, on the school trip that day in Omagh and whatever - how they're getting on. We've been back to the parents to see how they've been faring.

The Omagh bombing in 1998 was, in its own way, a very individual and very peculiar type of incident in Northern Ireland terms. It was, for the families who lived there, their Hiroshima; it took out people from right across the community. It was completely indiscriminate and it was carried out by a paramilitary group that was not part of the peace process. So to an extent that removed that element of ‘Those murdering scumbags killed my kid, or my sister or my father or my mother.'

They were outside of the political arena at that stage and still are and that made it easier for people to get together around the Omagh incident, and you had much more of a cross community support going on there for all those people because there were Catholics and Protestants, there were Irish, British, Spanish.

The Peace People

I'll point to one issue and one movement, which is the one that sprang immediately to mind when you mentioned the coming together of people out of trauma. The only one that really does that for me is the Peace People back in the 70s, when a terrorist getaway car killed three young children. That just galvanised people. The children who were killed were all Catholic. It was West Belfast, but it brought people from right across Northern Ireland; from Catholic, from Protestant, Unionist, Nationalist and it ran to an extent that both the organisers of that, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And coincidentally, since that, apart from Seamus Heaney who's a poet, we've had John Hume and David Trimble receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts, again, to bring about some form of normality.

With the Peace People, things eventually ran into the sand, and the Troubles overtook it. But that was an example of what can happen when people are affected by something that effectively involved the death of the innocents. They weren't combatants, they weren't wearing uniforms, and they weren't paramilitaries. The same with Omagh – again, just people out shopping on a Saturday afternoon, not involved in any way, not wielding any political axe, and they were completely wiped out.

That's where the bridging takes place; when it comes down to one group attacks another community ostensibly, to get at another political group – that's slightly different. That, I feel, is more difficult for people of Northern Ireland to come together on. Even if they feel in their heart of hearts that it was absolutely a terrible thing for the victims and their families, it's not as easy to come out and say it.

John Alderdice: On the issue of denial, there can be a danger of thinking that defence mechanisms are bad things that we need to get rid of. They're things that we need in order to survive. The problem can be that they can be too much or they can be inappropriate. Whenever I'm doing a psychotherapy assessment at the clinic, I don't assume that everybody needs to come into therapy. In fact, there are quite a number of people I see who would be severely damaged if they came into therapy, because they couldn't actually cope with bringing up some of the insoluble problems they have, and what I've got to do is help them to build up their defences and survive. There are other people for whom it has to come out.

And so there is a genuine dilemma for authorities for deciding how far you open things up and how far you don't.

Research, and awkward results

There's also another dilemma that is of another order completely, which is that if you start exploring some of these things, you're going to get, politically, the wrong answer. There's a colleague of Oscar's and mine who used to work in prisons, and started doing some research into people in prisons who abused alcohol and so on. One of the things that became very clear in her research was that there was quite a different profile between the people who were what in Northern Ireland we delightfully call Ordinary Decent Criminals, and those who were coming from paramilitary organisations.

The way they dealt with being inside, the way they related to each other, how they used it and so on and so forth; all quite different. She tried to get it published, and the outcome of it was she no longer continued working there because she was obviously employed in a government job, otherwise she wouldn't be working in prisons. And the message that she was coming across with was quite in conflict with the political requirement to make clear that these were simply criminals - so it couldn't be allowed to be published.

So one of the reasons why you have authorities not accepting that you can go in and do all sorts of things, is because the answers that may come out maybe very unwelcome ones from a political point of view. Because when you're there as a politician, you're not simply trying to find out what the truth is. You're there to promote a particular cause. And as we've seen, even over the last few days, sometimes both the truth and individuals become the casualty of the attempt to promote a particular cause.

So I think when you make the observation that you think there's denial and resistance, you're completely right. Some of the explanations for that are not wholly malign. There are other explanations which are very largely malign, and I think there are others that are part of the warp and woof of life as it is.

Violence destroys

When we come to the question of people rising above it, I think individuals yes, you can point to some individual cases where people do rise above it. Where you're looking at a community as a whole, I don't really have very many examples of it.

I think violence, in the end, destroys things. Occasionally, when you wipe out whatever is, there a garden grows. But most often what happens is a chaotic weed bed grows. And mostly you get polarisation.

At the time of the Peace People, I think it was Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia who was writing a book on violence at the time and said, ‘Lovely to see all of this happening, but I'm sorry to have to say, if these people don't get involved in establishing political structures, it won't work, because my experience in Africa is that no matter how you allow the emotion of a positive kind to be expressed, unless you create institutions of structures that help to channel that, it eventually will blow over and in fact often damage people.'

And indeed the interesting thing was that, effectively, the Peace People blew apart, and Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams don't have every much contact with each other at all now. The violence actually ended up impinging on them.

On the question of journalists and reporting, reporting is not an on-or-off thing. It's not you either do it or you don't. It's how you do it that's critical. I don't subscribe to the view that says, ‘Well, I think this is bad news, so I think we'd better not say too much about it.' I think there are ways that one can do it.

And one of the things that I find worrying and at times frustrating is that so much reporting is about exciting people rather than enabling people to think. I know from talking to journalistic colleagues that that's often a source of frustration for them, because if they come in with a think piece, nobody wants to broadcast it or print it; because that's not what's perceived to be exciting for people in terms of the ratings and the sales of papers. That's not surprising.

It's about helping people to understand in the community at large. All of us like things that excite us, but we actually need to be encouraged to think about things even if it's not the most attractive short-term event. It's back to what you were saying at the start, Mark; the temptation would be to go to Simon and Garfunkel (not that that's not a think-piece, too) rather than come to this. And that's perfectly appropriate that we do. But when there's no think and all excitement, that's just adolescence. What we've got is a hugely adolescent society with people not wanting to take responsibility seriously and get down to thinking about very difficult questions – with the singular exception of the Frontline Club.

Neil Greenberg: Certainly in military populations and in emergency services generally – I am talking in a general sense –mental health problems relating to work, drinking too much alcohol or/and relationship problems, far outweigh the effects of dramatic incidents, because people are naturally quite resilient. And although this is a very important topic, and something I'm interested in, you have to take into context that there are larger things going on, which is why politics and, I think, our energy, goes into that.

The other point I'm interested in, is the ‘Why?' Why do some people go one way and why do others go another? It brings me back to the time when I heard you speaking last time, John, and you were telling a story about a Catholic who wanted to become a mechanic, and had approached a Protestant who said ‘No Way!.' And when he asked why, he said, ‘Because you're a Catholic.' It was like an impossibility, and he couldn't do it. And for that chap, you stated, that was the one event that led him down a certain series of pathways. And I think if you try and search for the reasons why, it's fascinating but there are so many one-off stories in all of our lives that influenced us in great ways, to try and take any one group to find THE answer, I think, will constantly be frustrated.

A Veteran's Story

Ray Hazan: My name is Ray Hazan. I work with St Dunstan's, which is a national charity for blind ex-servicemen and women. I did two tours of duty in Northern Ireland with the army in Ballymurphy in 1970, and then I was blown up by an IRA parcel bomb in Derry in '73. Within six weeks I was at St Dunstan's training centre where I was surrounded by men from the Second World War who'd been blind for 30 years.

In my turn, I've been able to help fellow colleagues who've been blinded in Northern Ireland as well. But I think the most important point there is that joining the special family was, and still is, of course, a great source of inspiration and personal help to me.

The other point is a positive point of journalism. The BBC did a documentary on my rehabilitation – and again it gave me a sense of value in that I was telling people of the hidden consequences as they were then. People were forgetting about what was going on in Ireland in the mid-70s; already they were becoming inured to the violence, but the consequences of that violence were going on. And secondly, and more importantly, it was helping to break down the barriers of handicap; people thought that blindness was an affliction, even then, but it's better now.

Finally, if I could say that I don't feel bitter about what happened. The way I get over problems – and time is a great healer of course – is that it's yesterday; it's happened and it's gone and bitterness is not going to make me see again or improve the situation. So, forget it. And to me, today is more important than yesterday, or even tomorrow. But I still come back and say the major point is having a family or kindred spirit, and that was my counselling and I just wondered if there are these support groups in Northern Ireland today?

Mark Brayne: We're beginning to run out of time, so let's have a series of questions together.

Francesca Cerletti: I work for Peace Direct. I have two questions; the first one is how far do differences in culture impact the way that people deal with trauma? And the second one is: is there a difference between generations in the way they do/have dealt with, trauma in Northern Ireland?

Julia Gregory: I work in Colchester, which is a garrison town in the east of England. It's a regional paper that I work for, and I do a lot of work with the army, that's my main area. I was very interested when you were talking about communities that are affected by trauma where there's a geographical closeness and people aren't isolated. Last year, six Red Caps (British Army investigators) who were based in Colchester were killed in Iraq. I found it very interesting how the different families have coped with their reactions to their grief.

In the case of one whose funeral I attended in Colchester, his widow has literally written to my newspaper asking, ‘Even if you mention my husband's name amongst the six, that distresses me. Please just don't do it. Don't even run his picture.'

Whereas his brother says that every single day of his life now, he is answering phone calls from the media; a Norwegian TV reporter went to the Northeast where he was supposed to cover football, read about his family story in the paper and knocked on the door.

And some of the other families of the Red Caps, I feel, at certain points have been slightly whipped up with their emotions and their feelings by some of the papers, which I don't necessarily feel is healthy.

I was wondering how families are affected who were isolated, even perhaps if they're living in a garrison town like this widow is, where I'm afraid to say that a huge proportion of the population don't care about what happened to their family or to the soldiers in Iraq. We've also got Iraqi doctors who also feel very isolated and I'm wondering how that affects people.

And also, you were talking about perpetrators of violence; I've done a lot of interviews with D-Day veterans, Falkland veterans, Ireland veterans; and certainly the Falkland ones are still serving soldiers and will tell me about killing people. And they will say, ‘You're the first person I've ever spoken to about this,' and tell me about how they cope with that when they're bringing back those memories and talking about them.

Mark Brayne: I'd like to come back to Ray was saying about the value of kindred spirits, the sense of community. Although we're not large in number here today, this dialogue, this discourse this evening is of a kind that's not yet been held very much between journalists, and people who've experienced trauma, and the specialists of trauma. I think that the seeding of these ideas, and this new awareness that will be taken out from this discussion into the conversations all of you have with your colleagues, will gradually make a difference.

So to sum up some of the questions. There's the question of the kindred spirits, the generational differences and how trauma is experienced. And from Julia, what of the people who have committed and done these things, what are their experiences and what support do they need? And the very different experience of some people who want to talk and who want to be talked about and some who absolutely don't. I know there were other questions in there but they were the ones that stay with me.

Oscar Daly: As we said earlier, the majority of people who are involved in trauma cope. They're resilient. And it's important not to over-medicalise things. I think we've under-identified the problem in the past, but it's important not to over-identify the problem either. The first port of call for anyone involved in an incident should be family and friends and colleagues and so on. Only if people aren't coping with that support at a later date, then they need to seek help.

Different generations

The issue of different generations. You could speculate, and certainly there is work done now on inter-generational trauma, with evidence coming out that the children of Holocaust survivors are themselves having difficulty in relationships. Now, how much of that is the direct effect of trauma, or the effects of living with parents who were traumatised, which has in turn influenced the environment they've lived in – is that affecting them rather than a more direct trans-generational effect, I don't know.

I suppose in Northern Ireland, again, you could speculate; there are many people now who are in their twenties, thirties, many of them live in single-parent families – their fathers were injured, killed or imprisoned. I think there were something like 40,000 people imprisoned in Northern Ireland over the years, so in certain areas it would have been more normal to have a single-parent family than two parents. Living in areas of high unemployment, of continual strife – I don't know, but I would guess that some of those people will have greater difficulty in coping than their parents. But again, that's just speculation.

The issues of the different families, again I think, just highlights that for every individual as a person, and in every individual family, people are individual in how they cope or don't. A lot of people do like to see their name, or the name of their loved one, in print because it does in a way legitimise what's happened, and legitimises their grieving, and perhaps even their ‘victimhood'.

The final point about perpetrators; again I suppose it depends on the nature of the trauma and the nature of the conflict. The Vietnam veterans on whom most of the work has been done over the last 30 years - and I don't think it extrapolates well to our kind of conflict –had huge amounts of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder because they weren't welcomed home. They'd lost the war. Society in America turned against them, and I think those are some of the factors in that] they didn't have the support of society. Those factors are why they didn't cope with not only what happened to them but what they did to the indigenous population.

Whereas, somewhere like the Falklands, yes, there were atrocities there carried out by British soldiers, but they won the war and that is hugely different. People who win the war have many fewer psychological problems than those who lost the wars.

Mervyn Jess: On the perpetrators line, again this isn't scientific, it's just anecdotal as I've seen and observed it. I was interviewing reams of D-Day veterans just a month ago. We were doing lots of features. We went over and spent a week there, and did the whole piece from the Northern Ireland perspective, because quite a lot of soldiers from there went out and fought in that campaign, too. And even interviewing the vets now, they still broke up at the point where they had to recall losing comrades, best friends, whatever, and still find it difficult to talk about shooting dead a German soldier at 20 feet, otherwise he was going to shoot him. But they did talk about it.

To get people to talk about what's been happening in Northern Ireland within a year or 10 years or even 20 years of it is a different thing all together. And from a broadcaster's point of view – certainly from the BBC's point of view – we have very strict guidelines about how it is we interview people who have been involved.

For instance, if we wanted to speak to an IRA bomber or gunman or a UDA bomber or gunman about why he did this or that – since his early release from prison – we would have to make contact with the families of his victims. That might mean contacting 60 people, and if any one of those persons were to say, ‘I don't wish to see that person on television being interviewed about the incident that killed my father, brother, sister,' we would have to not do it. That's the bottom line, because of the distress and the trauma you could cause that person. In 50 years time we'll probably be interviewing IRA, UDA, UVF gunmen left, right and centre.

My journalist colleague Peter Taylor did a programme 15, 20 years ago about the Irish civil war, when there were still members of the old IRA alive talking about street fighting outside the Post Office in O'Connell Street in Dublin , and shooting British soldiers there, and British soldiers shooting them. That was absolutely fine, because it was an historical piece; so I think we'll see that in 50 years' time, but I don't think we'll see a lot of it before that time.

On generational trauma, and the question of culture. Yes, those who have suffered in both communities would have support from each of their own communities. I don't see any evidence of anybody cross-supporting each other. For instance, when the prisons were in full swing, you had very, very well run prison welfare organisations which provided aid for the relatives of the prisoners who were in prison, with weekly or daily bus runs to the prison for visiting rights. That was extremely well organised, all community based – and in both communities.

When the guys who come out of prison, or come out today, they then are, to an extent, subsidised by the paramilitary groupings that they would have had an allegiance to. Some of them would have, if they had continued, kept a connection with them; it would be some sort of subsidised system to help them back into the community, the same as they'd helped their family out whenever.

Community Welfare

As regards the cross-community question, no; each to their own, as they say. And it's the same with the security forces. You've heard the example of the army. The police is the most outstanding example in Northern Ireland , because you had so many police officers physically maimed and badly wounded they had to put into place some form of welfare organisation. And that again is very much run by friends of the police; relatives of those who were killed or injured. And to this day it's still called the RUC Benevolent Society, even thought the police force has changed its name. To an extent it's the civil version of the British Legion looking after members of the police and their families.

So those things have been going on, they will go on for decades probably because they are so entrenched in their own community or in that section of the community from which they've sprung. They'll be there for decades and there's a great belonging-ness for the people who are part of those. They feel it's a family outside the family, and they've got to know each other over the years. And the support they got at the time when they needed it was so important, whether from a paramilitary's perspective or from a member of the security forces. Those people will never forget that support and that's why, I think, it continues to this day and will continue for days to come.

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