listened to their stories, it became clear that along with police and emergency services workers, ministers were among the first responders to violent events. This was exhausting work that could leave them too emotionally spent for much else. Some ministers felt that peacemaking was their calling, devoting themselves to reconciliation initiatives with Catholics. Others feared that peacemaking would leave them vulnerable to attacks from Rev. Ian Paisley and his Free Presbyterian Church, or from members of the Orange Order in their own congregations. Others recalled the cautionary example of Rev. David Armstrong, whose elders asked him to resign after reaching out to Catholics in his town. To capture the range of experiences, we have organised this chapter thematically: ministers as first responders, preaching, fear of Paisley, David Armstrong and making peace.
Ministers as First Responders
‘I cried in a way I never cried in my life, before or since.’
On Remembrance Sunday morning 1987, David Cupples was in his study putting the finishing touches to his sermon. He had been installed as minister in Enniskillen Presbyterian just two months before. ‘I was beavering away, preparing the service upstairs at quarter to eleven when I heard this bang.’
The Remembrance Day bomb in Enniskillen is one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles. Eleven were killed and sixty-three injured in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) blast as they waited at the cenotaph for a service to begin. Six of the dead were from David’s congregation.
As the sirens of emergency services began to wail, it became clear that there had been a major incident. David made his way to the church hall in the centre of town. ‘Everyone was sitting around the church hall with their mouths open, and there was this deathly silence. I could feel myself physically beginning to crumble. I could feel the level of trauma in the room and I immediately knew I was going to have to deal with an absolutely overwhelming pastoral situation. But I physically looked up and I said: “Lord, I’m making a decision here not to panic. I’m trying to exercise faith.” And I felt strength coming back into me.’
Rumours began to filter in about who had died. He went to his church. ‘Some people were waiting for the service to begin, believe it or not. I said: “There will be no service this morning.”’ He visited the hospital, had lunch, and went to the house of a couple whose baby was to have been baptised that morning. ‘I went to their home and actually did the baptism, believe it or not.’
There was an evening service scheduled in David’s church. ‘We allowed the media into the church and they filmed the service. There is footage of me standing in the pulpit announcing the names of the dead and injured and breaking down in tears and trying to gather myself to continue to read out this list of names.’
Then there were the funerals. David was assisted by the Moderator and by previous ministers of the congregation. ‘You were working on adrenaline that week. I believe God gave me grace and strength. Anger within me surfaced later. Just on one or two occasions, in the normal course of events, I found myself angry. When I stopped and asked where it was coming from, I realised that it was from that incident.’
After the last funeral, David heard that another member of his congregation, Ronnie Hill, had lapsed into a coma. Ronnie was Enniskillen high school’s head teacher and had been at the cenotaph with his Sunday School class. David visited his clerk of session.
I said to him, ‘John, I honestly fear I am about to go over the edge. If a phone call comes through that Ronnie has died, I don’t think I can cope with it.’ So, John read a psalm and we both knelt down to pray and that’s when the healing took place. He prayed, very, very calmly. But when I started to pray, I cried in a way I never cried in my life, before or since. There was just this absolutely enormous reservoir of pain and sorrow that built up during the course of the week.
Ronnie entered a vegetative state. David visited Ronnie and his wife Noreen twice a week, every week, till the family left the area in 1991. Ronnie never regained consciousness, dying in 2000.
‘I was in over my head.’
Russell Birney, the son of a grocer in Lisnaskea, Co. Fermanagh, felt called to minister around the border. In 1973, he submitted his name for the vacancy in Downshire Road, Newry. He was called, and shortly after added the convenorship of the rural congregations of Newtownhamilton and Creggan to his charge. ‘Newry was afflicted with bombings and killings of neighbours of mine. Creggan is about a mile from Crossmaglen, which was the cockpit of the rural campaign of the IRA. It was one incident after the other. I had to travel up from Newry along roads, day and night, that were potentially booby trapped for the army.’ A rota of men was organised to guard his church in Newry, day and night, ‘because there were incidents of churches being attacked and people being attacked coming out of churches’.
On 1 September 1975, Russell got a call ‘about an incident in Tullyvallen’. The IRA had opened fire in an Orange Hall. Four men were killed instantly, and a fifth died later of his wounds. Eighty-year-old John Johnston, a member of Russell’s Creggan congregation, was among the dead.
That night, Russell visited the families.
I wasn’t trained pastorally for an incident like this. When I came down from Tullyvallen that night, having visited those homes – I hadn’t seen any bodies, I was just with the relatives – I sat on the edge of my bed and cried. I saw the children of some of the deceased and seriously injured. I called in hospital and I had seen some of them being treated. It was hard at that time. It was an aspect of ministry that I wasn’t prepared for. I was in over my head, so I had to adapt.
Five months later, two of the guns used in Tullyvallen were turned on the ten Protestant workmen murdered in the Kingsmills massacre, just a few miles away. None of Russell’s congregants were killed in Kingsmills, but he took part in the funerals and provided pastoral support in the community.
Russell also needed support, which he found in other local ministers and his congregations. ‘They were very dark days and they demanded a lot of time. My congregation was very good in allowing me to give that time, because they were sympathetic in every sense to it.’
‘I had to keep it all together for their sake.’
One minister served in both rural and urban areas. He had members murdered or forced out of their homes in every location. He recalled the names and manner of death of many people. ‘The Troubles disappointed me. I felt so sorry that so many lives were lost. Meaningless, meaningless. You are sitting beside a widow who has just been told that her husband has been shot dead or blown to pieces – it’s not easy.’ Like other ministers, he had not been trained for this aspect of his job. ‘You deal with it differently in each home. Sometimes you don’t say anything. There is nothing to say. What can you say? Except that you are deeply sorry. You sit with them, and weep with them.’ He said he ‘prayed constantly’, and leaned on his wife for support.
When you got a phone call, you didn’t know what you were going to see. That can be quite shattering. So, you prayed that God would give you the strength to cope with this situation. You go to the house. However much you are breaking up inside you have to be in control for their sake. Because they’re going to say, ‘What are we going to do now?’ Even the very practical things of arranging a funeral, the very practical things like there’s no wage going to come in at the end of the week. I had to be able to keep it all together for their sake.
‘You never hear our stories.’
William Bingham grew up near the border in Markethill, Co. Armagh. One day a bomb in the town centre damaged his home. A few years later, the IRA left a bomb outside his family’s house when they couldn’t get close enough to detonate it at the police station. William was at school. It destroyed the house, injuring
