Some say raking over the past is futile, but the past is still a key part of life for many in Northern Ireland, where creating a real future is the long-delayed priority, wrties Bryan Coll.
LOOKING DOWN Enniskillen's long, meandering main street today, it's hard to imagine the event that catapulted this quiet market town to worldwide notoriety during the Troubles. In many ways, Fermanagh's county capital could be a poster town for the emerging Northern Ireland.
Hurried locals and migrant workers mingle with large groups of tourists, perusing the dual-currency bars and shops. Amidst this quiet buzz of activity, Enniskillen seems a most unlikely place to bear the scars of the Troubles. Indeed, only the most perceptive of visitors could identify any trace of the event that hit the peaceful town over 20 years ago.
Beneath the town's war memorial, which lists off the names of scores of local servicemen killed overseas in the first and second World Wars, is placed a long, thin plaque bearing 11 names.
These victims may appear as an understated footnote to the loss of life from much bloodier conflicts, but their violent deaths in the IRA bomb attack on the town's Remembrance Sunday service in 1987 continue to weigh heavily on local minds.
"I almost went up there that day," says William McCafferty, gesturing towards the war memorial from the town's Corner Bar. Like many local people of his generation, McCafferty can recall his exact whereabouts on the day of the bomb. "I was in this very same bar and I can still remember the noise," he says. "I knew a lot of people that died that day."
One of the television sets in the Corner Bar is showing footage of a more recent landmark event in Northern Ireland's history. Competing against the Down Royal horse races for patrons' attention is the build-up to Ian Paisley's formal resignation as leader of the DUP.
The television pundits discuss at length the First Minister's transformation from Doctor No, the vociferous opponent of power-sharing, to one half of the Chuckle Brothers.
In Enniskillen, this changing face of Northern politics has been a bitter pill to swallow, particularly for those most affected by the Poppy Day bombing.
A recent documentary film on BBC television alleged that Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness may have known about the Enniskillen bombing in advance and that he had overall command of the IRA unit that co-ordinated the attack. McGuinness has denied the allegations.
In the BBC film, Joan Wilson, widow of the late peace campaigner Gordon Wilson, who lost her daughter, Marie, in the bomb attack, wished the Deputy First Minister well in his political office, echoing her husband's famous statement of forgiveness broadcast the day after the bombing.
"The main voice that came from Enniskillen was the Gordon Wilson interview," says Denziel McDaniel, editor of local newspaper The Impartial Reporter. "The sense was that Enniskillen had forgiven and moved on - even though not everyone had."
Despite the fact that no one has ever been brought to court for the Enniskillen bombing, the families of those killed maintain a low public profile in comparison to victims' groups from other large-scale attacks, such as the Omagh bombing.
According to David Bolton, director of the Omagh-based Northern Ireland Centre for Trauma and Transformation (NICTT), the political landscape of 1987 means that the legacy of Enniskillen, as well as other pre-ceasefire atrocities, has not been fully dealt with.
"When Enniskillen happened, the Troubles were still raging in Northern Ireland. People thought others had suffered just as much as them," says Bolton. "The starkness of Enniskillen was not as pronounced as Omagh."
Established in 2002, NICTT offers cognitive therapy to treat sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder. Today, more than 10 years after the signing of the Good Friday agreement, treating patients for Troubles-related trauma still constitutes around 20 per cent of the centre's work.
"We see people who have been living with it for 30 years, way back into the early days of the Troubles," Bolton says. He believes that the delay in coming to terms with past events, such as the Enniskillen bombing, is due both to a new awareness of mental health and to a change in the Northern frame of mind.
"In previous generations, we did not have the range of services we have today," he adds. "But there is a cultural dimension to this as well. Previously, people lived with it and suppressed their feelings. There was a lot of stoicism here."
For McDaniel, it was Enniskillen's history of cross-community co-operation prior to the 1987 attack that made the bombings such a shocking event. "Unionists and Sinn Féin were sitting together in local government here as far back as 1985," he says. "Even during the worst of the Troubles, it was very integrated in the town."
Today, that lead is being followed by the Spirit of Enniskillen Trust (SOET), an organisation set up by Gordon Wilson in the aftermath of the bombing.
From its head office in Belfast, SOET organises leadership courses for young people across Northern Ireland and workshops with Protestant and Catholic schools. In recent years, SOET has added a new dimension to its work, rolling out social programmes in areas outside Northern Ireland.
A delegation of young people recently travelled to England to suggest ways of reducing conflict between young white and Asian people in the Oldham area. Delegations from Sweden and Cyprus have visited the centre to apply a Northern Irish model to their own experiences of segregation.
Despite the social work of post-conflict Northern Ireland becoming as exportable as its political settlement, SOET's director believes improving cross-community relations remains the North's greatest challenge, citing the organisation's town of origin as an example.
"The perception in Enniskillen is that relations are good, compared to elsewhere," says Chuck Richardson, referring to a recent SOET schools project in the town. "But the young people we worked with were shocked at how little they interact with each other. We still live parallel lives here."
Yet, despite the persistence of habitual segregation, Richardson believes support for cross-community groups such as SOET is flagging. The groups are, he claims, a feature of Northern life that sits uncomfortably with the North's new post-conflict image.
"People think if you publicise this kind of work it means admitting that there are problems, and that creates a negative image for business," he says. "We're telling the outside world that it's settled here, but we all know there is as much division as there ever was. The question is: are we happy with that, or do we want to change?"
In contrast to Enniskillen, the hallmarks of conflict on Belfast's Shankill Road are easily spotted. Memorials, murals, flags and banners create the impression of a community soaked in the history of the Troubles. But, on closer examination, the old loyalist insignia that decorates houses and pubs is making way for a new kind of message. Warnings about drug use, joy-riding and binge drinking are as much a part of the area's visual landscape as UVF murals and memorials of the Somme. On the hoardings around a large building site are scrawled new kinds of graffiti, calling for "No Surrender" to property developers.
"Meet local need, not developers' greed," reads one of the messages.
"These are the issues that are replacing orange and green politics," says Alan McBride, of Healing Through Remembering (HTR), an organisation set up to debate ways of dealing with the legacy of the Troubles. "It's time for people not to think of themselves as coming from the Shankill or from the Falls, but just coming from Belfast."
McBride lost his wife and father in the 1993 Shankill Road bombing, an event acknowledged by a discreet plaque on the wall of the former Frizell's fish shop, now a credit union. The building is a regular calling point for the scores of political tourists who visit the Shankill every day, for whom souvenirs such as red, white and blue Shankill Road rock are available in local sweet shops.
For McBride, the Shankill's promotion of its own notoriety can help locals to overcome the painful legacy of the Troubles. "People say you shouldn't rake over the past," he says. "But whether we like it or not, the past is part of life here. I can't see any benefit in collective amnesia."
McBride is currently chairing a HTR sub-group which is surveying public support for a museum of the Troubles in the North. His fellow HTR members include former republican terrorists, a partnership McBride admits he struggled with initially.
"I still hear people saying that former terrorists should be thrown out of government," says McBride. "But claims could easily be made against Paisley for incitement to hatred in the past. Whose hands are truly clean? Northern Ireland isn't a perfect world. This is what we have. Let's make it work."