THE complexities of our contested past and who is in charge of what goes down in history when there is no single accepted narrative raise their heads every day in our contemporary society.
A documentary scheduled to come out from BBCNI this autumn – 'Secret Army' – which has at its core documentary footage taken around 1972 inside the IRA will poke this bear once more. During the Docs film festival they showed snippets with a panel discussing it in between.
The footage turned up on a VHS cassette when making 'Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland'. When filmmakers started watching it they realised that what they were watching was real footage.There then followed a five-year process of tracking down the two original American filmmakers and authenticating different bombings being depicting. Tracking down training camp locations was also undertaken. Were any of the young Andersonstown girls depicted talking about their good Catholic upbringing as well as diligence in their schoolwork and "participation in the war" still about? What about the priests mentioned?
Sitting behind three senior Sinn Féin members watching the film as bombings were portrayed, I felt a deep trauma rising in my body.
I was six years old and living in Portaferry at the time of these snippets. I have sometimes explained the Troubles as being an incomprehensible wall of hate to me growing up, where people came out and murdered friends and fathers and mothers.
It turned out that the three-minute warning footage was filmed afterwards and edited in. A forensic film archivist sat beside the filmmakers as they watched the original film, aware of its delicate nature as well as its historical significance
Martin McGuinness features heavily, patrolling Derry and explaining at what point people get kneecapped. There is some alarmingly jaunty music to run alongside a car bomb being planted. One filmmaker is still alive and was interviewed. How morally could he take actual footage of a bomb knowing how people will be injured and maimed? Did he not want to warn anyone? Did he not know it was a crime to do so?
We are forced to consider the horror of what we have experienced as a society, the glorification of violence, lack of a taught shared history, copious amounts of intergenerational trauma and the proximity of victims and perpetrators. Lifestyle peacemakers are more interested in travelling the world than working at the nitty gritty issues at home. How do we deal with this playing out in real time?
After the experience of the event and finding myself unable to speak, I went to St Anne's Cathedral three o'clock Evensong and found the trauma in my body lifted and spirits raised once again.
