Shankill Road 30th Anniversary Alan McBride
Shankill Road 30th Anniversary Alan McBride
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00:00 I'm just speaking to Alan McBride, whose wife Sharon was killed in the Shanklin bomb just
00:06 after the 30th anniversary church service.
00:09 Alan, can you give us a wee idea of what your thoughts are today after that service?
00:14 Well, 30 years, and it seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye, and yet in many
00:21 respects it's also been a lifetime.
00:24 The last two years have been particularly difficult for me, just I think it was my daughter
00:27 becoming older than her mother was when she passed away, and then my little granddaughter
00:31 being born.
00:32 The anniversaries come and go for me every year, but it's those big things, those lifetime
00:37 markers that mark your life.
00:42 Of course, I'm doing those without Sharon, without Desmond, as he passed away a few years
00:49 ago.
00:50 Desmond, your father-in-law?
00:51 Yeah, it's incredibly sad.
00:57 It's so good to be here and have so many friends that I've met along the way.
01:00 I was just talking there to Rhys Foyle and John Taggart from the Ballie Murphy family.
01:04 There's a lot of families, no matter where you're from, Catholic, Protestant, Nationalist,
01:09 Unionist, and we all suffer.
01:11 The pain is exactly the same.
01:12 I suppose my appeal on this 30th anniversary is that we need to do more to build peace
01:17 and reconciliation here.
01:19 I decided after today that I'll be doing no more media interviews about the bomb.
01:22 I've been doing it for 30 years now, so this is effectively my last series of interviews.
01:28 I just want to make the last interview to be one of just appealing for politicians to
01:33 get back into government, to get back around the table, to start to make this place work,
01:37 because there's nothing more important, and I don't care whether it's Brexit, Windsor
01:41 Protocols, whatever.
01:43 The most important thing is peace and reconciliation.
01:45 It's being able to give our children a future that we never had.
01:49 Can I ask you, can you unpack that a little bit, Alan?
01:52 What would peace and reconciliation programs or actions look like on the ground that you
01:58 would like to see going forward?
01:59 Well, I would like to see going forward, I know it's going to take us a bit of time to
02:02 get there, but I was doing a talk recently in the Salvoy School on the Falls Road, and
02:08 a young person basically stood up and said, "Look, the troubles are over now, and we all
02:11 need to move on."
02:12 And I asked him then, there was probably about 10 kids involved off on the Falls Road, and
02:16 I asked them who would be, whenever they were the age to buy a house, consider buying a
02:20 house in the Shankill, and of course not one of them would.
02:23 And that's abnormal.
02:24 I mean, the Falls Road is like literally 10 minutes from here, so why would you deny yourself
02:27 an entire housing stock?
02:29 So normality for me is whenever we go forward, and whenever it's okay for Catholics and Protestants
02:33 to live, to move, to go where they want, and maybe I'm being an idealist in that, but that's
02:37 peace, and that's going to take us a bit of a while to get there, I know that, but it
02:41 has to start at the top, and it has to start with our politicians, to start to reach out
02:44 the hand of friendship.
02:45 And I think one of the things that Brexit has done for us is actually started relations
02:48 north and south, but also between Nationalists and Unionists here, and so on the 30th anniversary
02:54 of the Shankill bomb, 25 years off the Good Friday Agreement, we were promised a peaceful
02:58 and prosperous future going forward, and the fact that we don't have that just yet because
03:02 our politics is far from normal, that's my opinion today.
03:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]