DAVID DUNN

Blood Red Wreaths

The Aftershocks of Violence

The moment I pulled up at the churchyard, I knew I was out of place.

  It was November 10, 2023, in a border village in Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. In a corner of the cemetery, a silent crowd of about fifty stood by as individuals walked unsteadily to the memorial, where they laid wreaths of red poppies. In sober suits and dresses, most wore poppies bearing a green leaf. My eye wandered across the attendees, to the old men who stood ramrod-rigid, proudly bearing the medals on their chest; to the soldiers in fatigues and berets, symbols of a militarism that still made me squirm.

I saw Remembrance, with its military trappings, as a glorification of war and had never attended a ceremony before. Because of its imperialist history, the occasion had additional baggage in the Republic and among Northern Irish Catholics.

After decades living in Canada, I wanted to understand how the Troubles, Northern Ireland’s brutal nationalist-sectarian conflict, are remembered on the border. I had been invited to the ceremony by Kenny Donaldson, Director of Services for the Southeast Fermanagh Foundation. But in this intimate, sad, setting, I couldn’t have felt more like an outsider.

I huddled in my coat against a chill breeze that foretold winter. I had no idea why I was there.

From a distance, I spotted Kenny shaking hands and helping older attendees to their chairs. I had met Kenny on a visit to Ireland the previous year. A solid six feet with a shock of unruly black hair and a ready grin, he is friendly in a winking, conspiratorial way. His daily dress code is crumpled casual. When he has to wear a suit, he looks uncomfortable in it and a bit confined. “Too many pies,” he says, pointing to his belly and flashing the grin. Behind his cozy demeanour is fiery commitment to those who lost loved ones in the Troubles.

SEFF supports victims and survivors of violence. One of the first things he tells me is that SEFF is nonsectarian. The only division that matters, he says, is the one between those who advocate violence and those who do not. “If the core, fundamental value is that the sanctity of human life matters more than anything else, then we can always debate the other stuff,” he says. “But if you believe there are circumstances where you have a right to put a bullet in somebody’s head, then we’ve not got very much common ground.”

            Still, it would be naïve to suggest that the sectarianism of the past is forgotten. Though SEFF’s clients come from both Protestant and Catholic communities, most are Protestant, since most victims in the border area served by SEFF were Protestants. Inevitably, SEFF is regarded by some nationalist Catholics as a Protestant organization.

Kenny, a Protestant, grew up in the 1980s in a farming community in perhaps the most avidly nationalist part of Northern Ireland. South Armagh was overwhelmingly Catholic—except, he told me, in his village of Creggan, for sixteen people. “Not sixteen families, sixteen people,” he added for emphasis.

“[My family] weren’t in the Orange Order; they weren’t in bands[1]; they were just around for the [12 July parade],” he said. Their Catholic neighbours helped out: “They looked after the farm for the day. They would have even given us a few quid, to enjoy.” I heard similar stories from others: in villages and towns where everyone knew their neighbours, Protestants and Catholics lived side by side in peace, until sectarian attacks drove them apart.

Yet in heavily militarized South Armagh, ordinary living was frequently interrupted by violence. In February 1988, when Kenny was seven, an explosion shook his home as two IRA members blew themselves up carrying a bomb to attack the local police station.

Where others in his Protestant community would have seen the death of two IRA men as no great loss, his father thought only of the families of the dead men.

Kenny would never forget his father’s words: “There’s more kids without dads.”

After graduating from school, Kenny moved to England to study Journalism at Leeds University. To make ends meet, he applied for a job as a bouncer with the Student Union. He worked the door with two other Northern Irish lads, one a Catholic from the Protestant town of Ballymena, and the other from a mixed Protestant/Catholic family.

“To the English, we were just three Paddies … You were always watching each other’s backs,” said Kenny. “Whenever you take people out of the environment of this place, there’s a connection between them that’s very, very tight.”

But once back in Northern Ireland, close relationships across the sectarian divide did not typically last. In Kenny’s case, the three stayed close after they returned, but it took an effort. Many others went back to the old divisions after they returned. “Unfortunately, people are able to see their similarities much better if they’re outside of this place—but they can’t see them whenever they’re inside this place.”

In those days, he was skinny, and when he approached the head bouncer in a club looking for a job, he was laughed off. “Tell you what,” says Kenny, “we’ll arm wrestle. And when I beat you two nil, then we’ll have a third round, and if you beat me, then that’s it, I’ll walk away. Just three nil.”

The bouncer shook his head. “There’s only one explanation: you must be a farmer,” he said, chuckling. Kenny, the arm wrestler, got the job.   

Away from home, he had developed a new confidence, and when he returned in the early 2000s, he took on a different kind of arm wrestling. “Once I came home,” he said, “I was going to be who I was, and stop hiding back from it.” In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, or the Belfast Agreement, as he called it[2], the pain of victims and survivors of the conflict had been “almost left by the roadside,” and he resolved to contribute by serving these individuals and families. After working with a rural support network for a time, he joined SEFF in 2008.

While he was quick to point out the fallacies his Catholic neighbours subscribed to—that Protestants were interlopers and not truly Irish—he was just as quick to burst Protestants’ balloon. In myth-busting talks in schools, he would show how the victory of William III over James II was not, as it is often represented, a simple triumph of Protestantism over Papism. Many Catholics fought on both sides.

            In his way, Kenny was fighting for neutrality, for a middle ground that scarcely exists. When he invited me to the Remembrance ceremony, he may have sensed that I would be uncomfortable. He stressed that it would not celebrate militarism, but commemorate victims of violence on all sides. I could believe this from Kenny, but still wondered why he had invited me.

In sharp contrast to Remembrance was the pressure to forget. Border communities are still traumatized by the Troubles, and many people want them firmly consigned to the past.

One issue that seemed to unite those on both sides was the British Government’s Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, which had been passed by the UK Government a few weeks earlier, granting amnesty to former soldiers and paramilitaries. The amnesty provided by the legislation was struck down by the courts, but a new legacy bill has been proposed offering protection for veterans—which may appease Northern Irish Protestants but will probably offend Catholics.

At 11:00, prayers and bible readings began, to mumbled Amens. I followed the prayers on the pamphlet, noting the repeated phrase “who have lost their lives in war or acts of terrorism,” and the absence of any celebration of victory.

The ceremony drew to a close, and the mourners shuffled down the hill to the church hall. Kenny and I chatted on the way down. As if to soften the military symbolism, he repeated his mantra of nonviolence. I congratulated him on recently being awarded Member of the British Empire. He seemed embarrassed. “There’s still enough o’ Crossmaglen in me not to take these things too seriously,” he said.

“I’d like to introduce you to someone,” he said. Inside, he looked around and found David Kelly. Stocky, in his late forties, he had a broad, genial face and heavy eyebrows; his round head was clean-shaven. He was keen to tell me his story. We spoke briefly, though it was loud in the hall so we arranged to talk later in a more private setting. I had little idea what a dark story it was.

The death of David’s father, Patrick Kelly, in December 1983 was one of the highest-profile incidents of the Troubles, and the subject of a book, The Kidnapping[i]. The incident took place in an isolated forest just inside the Republic, when Kelly, a private in the Irish army, took part in a search for a kidnapped supermarket executive.

            Not long after his ninth birthday, David, the eldest of four boys, was at home with his mother and three brothers. It was Friday, December 16, at these northern latitudes a time when glittering Christmas lights barely penetrate the black night. The evening was damp and chilly; in the village of Moate, in the Republic, the acrid smell of peat hung in the air. Until that evening, David’s childhood was much like my own: the Troubles, though not far away, hardly penetrated his awareness.

The thought seemed insignificant at the time, but it took on so much meaning later. “Something just came over me, and I said, ‘where’s my father?’” He was about to find out that his father had been shot dead.

“All of a sudden you see men, figures approaching your front door, all in uniform. Garda uniforms, army uniforms, and actually a member of the clergy as well, a priest. And then straight away, as I was looking out the window and watching this, I really did have one of those moments where you fear the worst.” Moments later, he learned that his father had been searching for Don Tidey, the kidnapped CEO of supermarket chain Quinnsworth, when a gunman opened fire and riddled him with bullets.

Horrific as this news was, worse was to come. “I lost my mother that day as well,” he added. In the ensuing weeks, she became quiet and withdrawn, numbly going through the motions of family life. “She went very inward on herself. I don’t think she knew how to help herself. She slipped into a terrible deep depression, an awful deep depression.”

Not long after that evening, an army colleague of his dad seemed to David to be showing up more and more. He gave David’s mother driving lessons; then he helped her buy a car. Soon, they were in a romantic relationship, raising eyebrows in the local community. “She fell pregnant,” he said. “This was 1980s Ireland, and … there was a lot of talk about that kind of thing.” To escape the scrutiny of local gossips, the family moved first to another town, and eventually to London.

But by then things were not well between his mother and her new partner. “I just got a bad vibe, I just felt he was becoming more controlling,” David went on. “There she was,” on the flight to London, “holding the baby, and she was looking out the window, and she looked very anxious, and then I looked to the right. And there was my younger siblings, as well, just little boys. And I just got a really bad feeling.” His premonition turned out to be accurate.

The family, now numbering seven, ended up in a temporary one-bedroom apartment in an Irish part of London. “We weren’t there long before the physical beatings started. He said he had full control, now he had got her over there to London.” The family lost the apartment and were homeless for a time. They were housed in emergency accommodation for several months while the state found them a house. The abuse and control continued for years.

With hindsight, David felt he and his siblings should have been put into foster care. What he did not know at the time was that the board of Quinnsworth had set up a trust fund for him and his brothers. Lost in her own world, his mother never told him: “She just went into a very dark place, and I don’t think she could see a future.”

She took a course in assertiveness at a local college and eventually began to turn things around. Bit by bit, she built her confidence. She became a teacher’s assistant at a local boys’ school. In time, she found the strength to leave her abusive partner.

The trust fund allowed David to attend Queen’s University in Belfast. But he began to suffer mysterious symptoms. “This inflammation just washed over me…my skin, especially my facial skin, all over my head, my neck was burning, really intense burning.” With hindsight, he believed that his symptoms were due to repressed grief and anger. After two years, he was forced to drop out. Returning to London, he found a job as a postal worker.

As each new detail emerged in David’s story, I could feel my head shaking as he revealed each new outrage. It was tragic to lose a family member by violence—but as if this wasn’t bad enough, it seemed to trigger a decades-long process, the slow implosion of his family.

David never married. In his thirties, he had one serious relationship, but his physical symptoms were still causing him great distress. “It was like the top of an oven cooker, just burning all the time. And it was affecting my life, my confidence, everything.” Eventually, he found medical help, but his reaction to the steroids he was prescribed made things even worse. It was the biggest crisis of his adult life, and the relationship crumbled under the pressure.

After his mother’s death, he returned to his parents’ hometown in Ireland. In the village that she escaped years before, he began to build his life and to seek justice for his father’s murder. He agitated; he collared politicians; he gave interviews with the media. He became a gadfly, a thorn in the side of those who wanted to confine all this unpleasantness to history.

David never gave up his fight for justice. In the early 2000s, he attended a trial at the Special Criminal Court, where one of the IRA leaders involved in his father’s death was in the dock. He sat in the visitors’ gallery, just behind the IRA man. At the end of the first day, David and the accused each stood up to leave.

Their eyes met. “Here I was, face to face with a guy who apparently was in the woods where my father was murdered. That was some moment. I felt a chill down my spine.” But, though it was shown in court that the man was present that day, the trial eventually collapsed.

I could readily identify with David. Though separated in time, our backgrounds as Southern Catholics were not all that different—at least until his life imploded at the age of nine. Yet in spite of his openness and our common background, there was an isolation about him, as if he was speaking from behind a wall, from a place I could never reach.

Not many tried to cross that wall, and as years went by, people didn’t want to be reminded of the Troubles. But in SEFF David found a community of others like him. “It’s been such a source of support,” he said, “to speak to people who know where I’m coming from, who know what it’s like to lose father or a mother, who know what it’s like to deal with authorities, looking for answers.”

In such a long journey of grief, it didn’t seem like much, but to David telling his story was indispensable. I learned from him how a single act of violence unleashes deep, wide aftershocks that repeat themselves and persist over time.

            In the church hall, David and I sat together on hard chairs, sipping hot vegetable soup from Styrofoam cups. A frail older man across from us occasionally caught my eye and smiled faintly. Eventually, he rose stiffly to leave, gathering up his coat and scarf. As he walked by, he leaned down to whisper in my ear. “I have a story for you. Ask Kenny for my number.”

This was Ernie Wilson. Ernie had a very different background from David, one that challenged my preconceptions. When I called him a week later, he told me his story.

The first thing Ernie told me was his age, 88. The second: he was a former member of the B Specials.

The B Specials (officially known as the Ulster Special Constabulary) were disbanded in May 1970, following the Hunt Report’s recommendations to demilitarize policing in the aftermath of civil rights unrest in 1969. They were considered antagonistic by many Catholics, whilst some Protestants viewed them to have been key in the effort to thwart a republican resurgence. The force and its personnel were largely absorbed by two new organisations: the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a locally recruited infantry regiment under military command, and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Reserve, an auxiliary police force formed to aid in local policing. There were instances of infiltration by loyalist paramilitary groups in both the UDR and RUC, with some residual issues still under investigation.

In the Republic, the B Specials had a fearsome reputation as a brutal, sectarian force who needed little prompting to beat up Catholics. As a child on trips to the North, I would see them on patrol, looking sinister in their long black coats, guns at the ready.

Suffice it to say that, when Ernie told me he had once been a B Special and later a member of the UDR, I bristled a little. To a Southerner, this was not far off saying he was a former member of the Gestapo. But I also knew that both the B Specials and the UDR were still respected and revered by many Protestants: during the Troubles, 187 serving members of the UDR were murdered and 67 ex-members who had either resigned or retired met the same fate, while 302 RUC Officers were murdered.

As Ernie told his story, I listened carefully.

Having survived several attempts on his life, Ernie left the Specials in the 1960s. Jobs were scarce, so he moved to Belfast to work as a bus driver, reluctantly leaving his wife in Fermanagh to look after her aging parents. Eventually, he grew lonely in Belfast and returned to the border area, where he found a job driving a school bus. But as his young family grew, it became difficult to get by on a school bus driver’s salary. Like many other border Protestants, he joined the UDR to make ends meet.

On the day he signed on, the signing officer looked steadily at him, giving him a grave warning: he would be a target from now on. “Ye’re in dangerous parts, be careful,” he said. Decades later, the officer’s words still haunted Ernie.

“I was careful,” he said. But from the beginning, he was targeted by the Provisional IRA. Once, he was scheduled to bring students to the swimming pool the next day, and his boss pulled him off the job because his bus was too big. Another driver, with a smaller bus, took the job, and was shot dead. “That was lined up for me,” said Ernie.

He started to take extra precautions. He had an escort everywhere he went, and police would search his bus for explosives each day. His teenaged son James would help the police with their checks.

As Ernie left home on Tuesday morning, June 28, 1988, a summer mist blanketed the local hills. He was delayed on his way to pick up the vehicle at Maguiresbridge school, so James, then 26, drove the bus to the school gates. He passed the keys to Ernie. There was no sign of the police, though Ernie noticed some men loitering nearby. He didn’t make much of it at the time.

“Let’s wait for the police,” said James.

They didn’t show up. Ernie couldn’t keep the students waiting any longer. He started up the bus and set out to pick up the students.

James would always blame himself for what happened next.

Ernie pulled in at the first stop. A few students boarded, taking seats on opposite sides according to their religion. Then the next stop, and the next. With the school term winding down, students were writing exams and there were fewer than usual—only 17, rather than the usual 60 or so—to pick up.

Gillian Latimer and her 17-year-old friend Arlene Foster, who would one day become Northern Ireland’s First Minister, boarded. Ernie pulled away from the kerb. The bus picked up speed.

Suddenly, he saw a blinding flash. A bomb went off, shattering glass and tearing the bus apart.

“I couldn’t get her stopped,” he said. “I thought my legs were off. I was deaf and blind.” When he tried to turn around to look back down the bus, he found his legs were still intact, but badly burned. The bus was still moving with its pedals blown off. He reached for the handbrake and brought it to a halt.

He looked behind him. The blast had blown out the floor and the seats. “I had to get the children off,” said Ernie. “I struggled to get the back door open and handed out the kids.”

 “Ernie, Gillian’s very badly injured,” called Arlene Foster.

“I looked at her arm, and could see through it,” said Ernie. “There was only skin holding it, so I got hold of her arm and tucked it under her skirt.” Though he thought she was dead, he tried to revive her with CPR. To his relief, she started to breathe.

“I was still quite deaf, but I could hear people outside shouting ‘hand her out, hand her out.’” Gingerly, he passed the injured girl out.

In a daze, Ernie stumbled down the road, and met James on his way to work. “I said, ‘the school bus was blown up, James, and I was in it, and the children,’” He looked back at the burned-out bus, and that was when it hit him. He couldn’t believe he was still alive.

Ernie was awarded the British Empire Medal for his heroism that day.

But his tragedy did not end there. A year later, a neighbour told Ernie his house was on fire. He ran home, and kicked the garage door in. James had died by suicide.

James had helped search the bus every morning, but when the police failed to show up on the morning of the bus bombing, he did not. “I think James must have felt that he had let me down—which he didn’t, but he mightn’t have known that,” said Ernie.

Ernie too seemed to be speaking from behind a wall. Here, too, one violent act had led to worse outcomes over time. The manner of James’ death meant he was excluded from the official statistics, but to Ernie he was as surely a victim as if he had been targeted. “It’s an awful thing to live with, desperate thing to live with. I’ll take it to the grave with me.” he told the BBC in 2019. In a community where many want to move on and forget the past, the stigmatization of suicide made it even harder to talk about.

Ernie continued to live in fear. “I might still be a target,” he told Irish News in 2018, before a ceremony commemorating the bombing. Like David’s, Ernie’s struggle was ultimately a solitary one: his wife of 60 years, May, died in 2017, leaving Ernie alone with his pain. But he found solace in the SEFF community.

No-one has ever been charged with the bombing of Ernie’s bus. Perhaps too much time has passed now—but Ernie struggles just to be heard, that James might be recognized as a victim alongside others.

The bombing was just the starting point in a long journey for Ernie, a sad pathway that went on for decades. As it was for David, a violent act was not just a single event: it had come to define Ernie’s life.

The long journey played out in communities too. Both Patrick Kelly and Ernie Wilson were targeted because they were members of the security forces—but others were singled out for different reasons.

“It was personal,” said Kenny. First sons, who would have inherited land along the border, were targeted: the killers walked past the homes of other members of the security forces to find the specific person they wanted. Sheds were burned; animals were led out on the road; residents would wake up to see threatening graffiti on their walls; businesses were boycotted. Many—and this seemed to be the intent behind many of the attacks—were forced to give up their livelihood and move to other parts of Northern Ireland.

Douglas Deering was a case in point. In May 1977, a man walked into Deering’s shop in Roslea and shot him before escaping through the village and driving off towards the border. Deering had never been a member of the security forces, but his loss was felt deeply by the local Protestant community. A devout member of the Plymouth Brethren, he taught Sunday School at a local gospel hall.

“The family tried to operate the business for a short time afterwards, but they couldn’t—the support wasn’t there,” said Kenny.

Assassinations like these were followed by the steady loss of trust between the communities. Catholics, even if they were unsympathetic to the paramilitaries, were intimidated into silence. Protestants were in no mood to make distinctions between Catholics who supported the IRA and those who did not: “All of this turned us against the Roman Catholic community, because we just didn’t know who to trust,” said the daughter of another victim.

I left the church hall. It would take a few weeks, after I had spoken to David and Ernie, for the true meaning of my presence there to become clear.

            After you have lost everything, only your story is left. Yet the sterility of statistics is precisely designed to deprive you of your story: there it is, your father’s murder, a fraction of a number in a spreadsheet. Once written down, it is final. No more needs to be said: the death is recorded, aggregated with thousands of others, interred in a file, in a bureaucrat’s mass grave where it dies another death, a permanent one.

But violent death has a perverse life of its own, a long tale that unfolds over years and decades. David Kelly lost not only his father, but his mother too, his childhood, relationships, and any hope he had for a decent start in life. James Wilson’s death was not even recorded as a statistic, an omission that would cause his father to suffer for the rest of his days.

It is a faint hope, but only telling their stories can draw attention to their pain—and perhaps, someday, attention will lead to justice. But it seemed to me that justice, while important, was not the point. Most victims simply wanted their stories to be heard, not only by other survivors, but by a community that, more than anything, wanted to bury memory under six feet of silence. David, Ernie, and others who had lost everything, only wanted me to carry their story away from Lisnaskea and lay it, a blood-red wreath, at the feet of anyone who might listen.

            I struck up a conversation with an older man in a grey suit. We walked together toward the car park. He was thin, grey, a little stooped, the story of a hard life etched in his grooved face; yet his eyes shone.

He was a retired ambulance driver, he said. I commented that he must have seen some terrible things.

“Oh aye, I’ll tell ye, I’ve seen many things,” he said, “but there’s one thing I’ve never seen: orange blood. Or green blood.”

Blood will have blood. Once spilled, its stain never truly fades.

He told me how God loved me, gave me a copy of the King James Bible, and invited me to join his wee church. I did not join—I am not at all religious—but I treasured that bible. It still occupies pride of place on my shelf.

[1]Active participation in the parade, such as playing in a band, would be considered a sign of deep commitment to the Orange Order and the loyalist cause.

[2]Many loyalists see little good about the Good Friday Agreement, which in their view was balanced in favour of nationalists. Some pointedly oppose the title Good Friday Agreement, with its connotations of sacrifice and salvation, preferring to call it the Belfast Agreement. Another way of telling whether someone is Catholic or Protestant.

[i]Conlon, Tommy and Ronan McGreevy. The Kidnapping: An Abduction, a Bloody Rescue and a Manhunt that

Shocked Ireland. Penguin UK, 2023.

David Dunne is an Irish-Canadian writer based in Vancouver, Canada. Having grown up in a border region, his nonfiction work explores how people straddle different worlds. His articles have appeared in literary, scholarly, and business journals, as well as in news media. He has published three nonfiction books, one about education and two about design.