Friday, 28th November, 2025
I’ve lived an interesting life. I wanted to share it with a wider audience. You always have detractors – people who try to knock you back. I didn’t let them impede me. I kept driving on.
I was a very lucky journalist. I crossed barriers with great ease. I have an attitude in life – don’t patronise people and always treat people like human beings.
I think that paid off. In the Protestant/unionist community, I found that I could move very easily – that I could operate in both communities.
In my view, nothing would justify a return to so-called armed struggle or violence. No one wants to return to the ugliness of the violence that we all experienced in Northern Ireland.
Making the Good Friday Agreement wasn’t easy. If one leg of that deal falls, the whole deal could follow along.
The Catholic/nationalist community wouldn’t support that a return of violence, either covertly or overtly because the world has moved on.
With a focus on border areas such as Armagh, education has become the big driver.
In the area from which I came, the only graduates known to us were the local doctors, the parish priest and a local teacher. Families you find today can have two, three or five graduates and you’ll find skilled tradesmen – electricians, plumbers, joiners – earning good money.
The IRA mainly operated from these regions. I think because people are more prosperous than before, support for a resurgent IRA would be minimal.
I don’t know, but I pray that the days of soldiers on the streets of Northern Ireland are over. It’s a very new world and I’m very optimistic. First Minister Michelle O’Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly both understand suffering.
Today, both republicans and unionists are deprived equally of the same civil rights, a contrast from the civil rights movements of the late 1960s in Northern Ireland that were predominantly focused on inequalities levied against nationalist communities.
(Belfast Media)