Caught up in the romance of violence, a Catholic choirboy turned outlaw
If he had grown up in a city other than Londonderry, Shane Paul O'Doherty might have considered the priesthood. He attended mass several times a week as a boy, recited the rosary every night and donned lacy robes to sing Latin hymns in the choir of St. Eugene's Cathedral, the dark stone edifice that towered above his home on a tidy street in Northern Ireland's second-largest city. "Life was very much bound up with God, religion and that cathedral," says O'Doherty, 43.
But events in Londonderry—which, reflecting the ancient rift dividing its citizens, Catholics call simply Derry—steered O'Doherty in a different direction. Beginning in the late 1960s, Catholics took to the streets to protest centuries of political and economic domination by the city's Protestant minority. Their marches erupted into violent confrontations with Protestant police, beginning the Troubles that plague Northern Ireland to this day.
Young O'Doherty yearned to take part in the struggle. At age 10, he hid a note in the attic of his family's Georgian-style townhouse on Clarendon Street: "When I grow up," he wrote, "I want to fight, and if necessary, die for Ireland's freedom." As it happened, he didn't have to wait long. On his way to school one morning in 1970, O'Doherty, then 15, was asked by his best friend to join the Irish Republican Army with him. For the next five years he used guns, land mines and mail bombs to injure civilians, soldiers and policemen. But O'Doherty, now a computer trainer and freelance journalist in Dublin, made what he considers his most enduring contribution to his people's quest for justice only after he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. With time to reflect on his crimes, he embarked on a remarkable journey from terrorist to peacemaker. He wrote letters of apology to his victims, denounced terrorism and publicly challenged the IRA, from which he officially resigned in 1978, to lay down its arms.
Republican extremists have never forgiven him. But for many in his battle-weary country, Shane Paul O'Doherty's message of peace has made him a hero. "He was angry—justly angry—at the injustices in Northern Ireland," says peace activist Mairead Corrigan-Maguire, 54, cowinner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. "But he realized that to kill and hurt is never justified. He had the courage to break ranks."
O'Doherty was raised on one of the few streets in Londonderry where middle-class Catholics and Protestants lived side by side. Yet the line between them was clearly drawn. "In games," he recalls, "we divided fifty-fifty down the middle." O'Doherty describes his late father, Bernard, a teacher at a Christian Brothers elementary school, and his mother, Sarah, now 82, who raised the couple's eight children, as peace loving but patriotic. His father spoke admiringly of one of Shane's uncles who had fought in the 1919-21 war that won Ireland—all but the six counties of the North—her independence from Britain. They also bitterly resented the chronic unemployment among the city's working-class Catholics, many of whom crowded into tiny rented houses without indoor plumbing. "There wasn't a Catholic in Derry who didn't think they were being looked down upon," he says.
On the night after the morning he decided to become a terrorist, O'Doherty reported to a house in the Bogside Catholic ghetto, scene of Londonderry's fiercest rioting, and was sworn into the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Several weeks later two commanders appeared at his family's house and asked him to hide a backpack containing a bomb. Instead he placed the crude device at the door of a police dormitory at 3 a.m., causing extensive damage. "I didn't want to end up like my father, who only heard about the struggle," he says. "I wanted to be my uncle, at the heart of it all, getting the kudos."
After a stern lecture from his commanders about discipline, O'Doherty was welcomed into the inner circle of the IRA's Derry Brigade. Each morning he went to school; after classes he shot at British soldiers on patrol and used American munitions manuals to make bombs he planted on downtown streets. "They were delighted to have someone who rocked and rolled," he says of his colleagues.
By the time 14 Catholics were shot and killed by British troops during a demonstration on Jan. 30, 1972—Bloody Sunday, as it came to be known—O'Doherty had lost all qualms about attacking the soldiers: "I saw it as time for Irish people to fight for freedom and get the [British] bastards out of here." When civilians, too, were hurt by his blasts, he recalled the commander who'd told him, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
In 1973, armed with a pocketful of English currency and a copy of Who's Who, O'Doherty accepted a special assignment. Working from a small apartment in London, he mailed some 50 letter bombs to British politicians and military officers. Some reached their targets, but many injured security guards and secretaries, including a woman at the British Embassy in Washington whose left hand was blown off when she opened a parcel that August.
Police used fingerprints to link the bombings to O'Doherty, and in 1976 he was convicted and sentenced to 30 consecutive life terms in prison. Like many IRA prisoners, he refused to wear the uniform given to common criminals. As a result he spent nearly 15 months naked in solitary confinement. That stretch, O'Doherty says, gave him time to study philosophy—and to examine his conscience. "I read the Bible for the first time and felt tremendous guilt," he says. "I read the statements of the victims at my trial and was utterly damned. My conscience was giving me no ease about hurting innocent people, and I even started to question whether there's any such thing as a legitimate target."
While in prison, O'Doherty resigned from the IRA and, in an open letter published in the Deny Journal in 1978, called on the group to lay down its arms. In retaliation, fellow IRA prisoners refused to talk to him for eight years. O'Doherty was released in 1989, after a letter-writing campaign on his behalf by sympathetic politicians and clerics. Still, not everyone accepted his redemption. Said Derek "Woodward, a Bank of England guard who had lost an eye and a hand to one of O'Doherty's bombs: "[He] comes out, goes to university and carries on a perfectly lovely life, but I have still got to serve my life sentence."
After his release, O'Doherty studied at Trinity College in Dublin, where he earned a degree in English literature in 1993, wrote a bestselling autobiography and became an outspoken advocate of peace in the North. In class in 1991, he caught the attention of a recently arrived Chicagoan; on their first date she assumed O'Doherty's talk of the IRA had to do with Individual Retirement Accounts. "I thought he was studying to be an accountant!" says medieval-literature instructor Mickey Sweeney O'Doherty, 30, who married him in 1995, convinced of his conversion to nonviolence. "He doesn't like to be wrong, and to discover he was so very wrong must have been painful."
Visiting Londonderry on a bright spring day this year, O'Doherty walked through gritty streets where he had once carried a gun, pausing to ask a group of teenagers what they thought of the historic peace proposal. "I'm for it," shouted one before rushing back to his soccer game. For O'Doherty, who has talked about his life to youth groups all over Ireland, the answer was encouraging. "I frequently think of friends who died in the armed struggle," he says. "What, I ask them, did you die for? They died so that we might learn the truth: that armed struggle is a lie."
A onetime Protestant killer walks a delicate line in the direction of peace
Strange as it may seem, it is a sign of progress in Northern Ireland that Billy Hutchinson lives in even greater danger now than in the past. Hutchinson, 42, a convicted hit man for a Protestant paramilitary faction, used to worry only about staying out of the crosshairs of the Catholic IRA. But nowadays, as he lobbies for peace and preaches against violence, he knows that his old hard-line Protestant comrades have targeted him as well. Hutchinson has gotten a bomb sensor for his car but knows there is only so much he can do. "The device is not foolproof," he says. "Even cats can set it off."
As the historic May 22 referendum on the proposed peace accord looms, an air of anxious hope hangs over Northern Ireland. If, as expected, the agreement is endorsed by a majority of voters, it will represent the best chance yet for ending the violence. In that case, no small credit will be due to onetime extremists like Hutchinson. Now a director of a Belfast community organization, as well as an elected city councillor, Hutchinson has been spending many of his 15-hour days pushing for approval of the accord. "Billy took a number of personal and political risks to develop the links between Protestants and Catholics—[in the interest of] saving lives," says Jim McCory, a Catholic who has worked with him on community projects.
In his transformation from terrorist to moderate, Hutchinson is, in a sense, returning to his roots. His mother, Elizabeth, a cleaning woman, and his father, William, a bookmaker's assistant (a lawful profession in Britain), were both moderate Unionists who wanted Ulster to remain part of Britain rather than be united with the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic of Ireland. But despite the fact that the family lived in the Shankill Road, a poor Protestant Belfast enclave, his father was friendly with several Catholics.
All the same, young Billy got sucked into the city's vortex of hatred. Though once a good student, he dropped out of school at 15 because of ill health and waning interest. He went to work as an apprentice machine-parts maker in a Belfast factory that employed both Protestants and Catholics, and often joined in heated political arguments. At one point a fellow Protestant apprentice was roughed up by Catholic thugs demanding to know where Hutchinson lived. Angered by IRA bombings and shootings, Hutchinson joined the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a quasi-underground organization of some 3,000 hard-line Protestants. "I'd seen babies and old-age pensioners being pulled out of the debris when the IRA planted bombs in shopping malls full of innocent people," Hutchinson says. "I felt there had to be some paramilitary activity against the IRA." At 16, he was already involved in UVF strategy sessions. On Oct. 21, 1974, two Catholics-Michael Loughran, 18, and Edward Morgan, 27—were shot to death while walking to work in Belfast. Hutchinson and a friend, spotted by police in a car near the scene, were charged in the killings. Pleading guilty to murder, Hutchinson was sentenced to 15 years in prison. "I don't protest my innocence," he says.
Hutchinson spent the years in grim Long Kesh prison, outside Belfast, where inmates lived in huts. He remained active in the UVF while imprisoned but also returned to his studies, eventually earning degrees in social sciences and town planning. He also rethought his commitment to violence—though not because of any spiritual conversion. "Some people go to prison and get this Christian experience. That's not what I got," he says. "I'm not a pacifist. I believe people have the right to take up arms."
He came to see that negotiation could be more effective than bloodshed as a means of achieving the Loyalist goal of keeping Ulster part of Great Britain. He and some friends in Long Kesh were particularly struck by the way Britain brokered a deal in 1979 that allowed the former white-dominated colony of Rhodesia to evolve into democratic, black-majority Zimbabwe. In the case of Ulster, they realized that some power-sharing with Catholics would be necessary, he says, and "we could resolve this conflict without violence."
When he was finally set free in 1990, Hutchinson was determined to put his new convictions to the test. But first he took care of some personal business. He had been visited in prison by Eileen Stewart, a childhood friend who had first come to see him at the behest of his cousin. A few months after he left prison they were married. "At the congregation there were quite a few ex-prisoners," laughs Eileen, 44, a supervisor at a Belfast community center.
Hutchinson eventually began working for a publicly funded development organization in Belfast that promotes peace by, among other things, counseling children on both sides of the sectarian line. Peace, however, comes at a price. A year ago, Hutchinson, his wife and stepson Christopher, 14, had to leave their home on a moment's notice when police picked up clues that an IRA splinter group was casing the place for a possible attack. The Hutchinsons recently settled into a small three-bedroom home outfitted with bulletproof windows and a plastic letter box so that potential mail bombs are visible. Asked if he feels any guilt over his terrorist past, Hutchinson offers a starkly pragmatic view that could well serve a country where ancient grudges persist at great cost. "I don't believe in regrets," he says. "I believe in getting on and building a future, helping enhance the quality of life."
Bill Hewitt
Nina Biddle in Belfast
- Contributors:
- Nina Biddle.
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