Mobilising the force of human goodness

IN THREE or four minutes, Thomas Hamilton committed an obscenity which has shocked Scotland, Britain, Ireland and the wider international community. Death blows a hole in what we normally know and take for granted as human reality.

But the pursuit and killing of young children and their teacher is at such an extreme that it is radically unspeakable and unimaginable. This absolute, sudden and enormous presence of the total deadness of death in the centre of a quiet country community like Dunblane is complete in itself. Silence and desolation.

A sense of this was indicated by the courage of both the Secretary of State for Scotland, Mr Michael Forsyth and his Labour Party shadow, Mr George Robertson, when in the town itself they refused to be drawn into arguments about gun laws and potential psychopaths.

This is always our first impulse, those of us who are some distance away from the rim of the hole of reality, to talk to talk excessively. That same evening the media was talking trying to find reasons: Hamilton was "odd", "weird"; he had been dismissed by the Scout Association for what was regarded as "improper behaviour" around young boys; there had been complaints, he was a loner.

All this in a vain attempt to fill the hole. Talk and images of the disaster to fill in the hole for those of us on the periphery: four pictures in The Irish Times, many column inches, comparisons with Aberfan, Hungerford, Lockerbie. How did they manage to take those pictures? The cameramen moving in the silence trying to capture pictures of children as they fleetingly came into view along the empty forlorn streets.

With dignity, community leaders politely asked the world's media not to attempt to interview any of the parents. So anxious are we to fill the hole with information, talk, comparison and images that virtually no time can elapse for silence, what Frank Millar reported as "terrible silence". The hole must not be left as a hole. There is always this sense implied: what can we learn from this? Let us recover the abysss with information, with reconstruction. How can the children be helped? How can the parents be helped to recover, to heal? For the media it is a story competing with other stories, entertainment and commercials.

But the story has at least one good effect. It mobilises the sheer force of human goodness in the shape of flowers, prayers, money, offers of help, gestures of solidarity.

I remember hearing of the death of a teenage boy in southern Crete in an accident. This death was marked by a ban on music in the town for two years. In Dunblane, the cathedral is open for the same silence.