Seeking peace (From The Northern Echo)

Seeking peace

2:08pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Latest Features By Emily Flanagan, Reporter

When Margaret McKinney’s son failed to return home one evening, she began a tortured 21-year search for his body, scouring fields and building sites with her bare hands for his remains. Emily Flanagan reports.

MARGARET McKINNEY is pottering about her Harrogate home, having a good-natured grumble. She’s going on holiday to Spain with her two daughters in a few hours and doesn’t see the need to take all the clothes one daughter has put out for her to pack.

“Spain! I’d rather be going over to Belfast,” she adds with a twinkle in her eye.

Margaret, 80, regularly travels to Northern Ireland to visit the grave of her son, Brian, and to keep contact with victim support group Women Against Violence Empower (Wave), which helped her in her 21-year struggle to find her son’s body.

Her heartbreaking story became a motivating factor in negotiations to find the bodies of victims of paramilitary violence.

Margaret had always been protective of her Brian. As a child, he was in and out of hospital constantly with asthma and had learning difficulties.

She says: “They diagnosed him when he was 14 as having the mental age of a six-year-old, but it didn’t matter to me because he was happy.

“The only thing was, I had to make sure he didn’t go to this place or that place with the troubles in Belfast.

“His friends were all very protective of him too. I still wrack my brains at night thinking why anybody could want to take him away and harm him.”

Brian found work as a council gardener, but one evening, in 1978, the 22-year-old did not come home.

Margaret says: “Thursday was pay day and he wasn’t going to miss work on a Thursday, God love him. He never missed work because he was so happy there.

“He went to work as usual and I had my dinner ready for him as usual. But when he didn’t come in, I tried to figure out what was keeping him.”

Margaret’s husband went to his son’s workplace and was told he had not come in that day.

She says: “I thought he might have gone out with some lads from work. It wasn’t something he did, but I was trying to think of a reason why he hadn’t come home. Days and nights went past and – oh my God – the weeks and months went past. I knew something terrible had happened. I didn’t cope. I don’t know who looked after my children – who took them to school, who washed them or ironed their clothes. All I could do was cry from morning till night. I had a heart attack that year. I wasn’t aware of anything, just wanting to find his body. I looked everywhere.

“I would walk around building sites in the early hours of the morning looking for his body, before the workmen came in.

“That was the way I lived for years.”

Brian had been murdered by the IRA. He had stolen £70 from an IRA-run social club, in an attempt to “pretend he was like a big fellow”.

Margaret repaid the money to the IRA, but it didn’t save him.

Eventually, she was put in touch with Wave, in Belfast, which helped those who had suffered trauma as the result of paramilitary violence.

The group became involved in the peace process talks, which culminated in Margaret speaking to John Major, having lunch with Prince Charles and meeting Bill Clinton in the Oval Office.

But Margaret still does not see herself as a political campaigner. She said she was only ever motivated by wanting to find her son’s body.

She says: “I told President Clinton the whole story. It helped me to be able to talk about it because we were denied that in the beginning.

Because it was the paramilitaries, you were always being warned to stop asking questions.

“Bill Clinton was wonderful. He took my hand and said, ‘I promise you I’ll help you find your son’. Six weeks later, Gerry Adams came up to me and said, ‘You’re going to get Brian’s body back’.”

They were told Brian had been murdered just over the Northern Ireland border, in County Monaghan.

Margaret’s need to find her son’s body was so acute she did not spare herself the ordeal of watching a bog being scoured for his remains.

She turned up every day for six weeks to watch police dig for her son.

“They were digging for six weeks. I turned up every day for those six weeks. The bog was massive. They had to take millions of gallons of water out before the digging could even start.”

EVENTUALLY his body was found. As traumatic as the recovery of his body was, Margaret says she was prepared for it. But hearing a description of her son’s last moments is something that haunts her to this day.

She says: “The coroner told me Brian was put into his grave while he was still alive, because the bullet that they shot him with came right out the back of his head and deep into the soil. It’s a vision that’s in my mind. It makes me cry. How he died doesn’t leave me, it never will.”

Margaret says she finally felt some peace when she was able to give her son a funeral, 21 years after he was murdered. Members of the Garda who had dug for his body were among the congregation.

He was reburied at a cemetery near her home, allowing her to visit Brian’s grave two or three times a day, keeping a candle lit by his gravestone.

After the death of her husband, Margaret moved to North Yorkshire, but says she still returns to Belfast to “keep her sanity” and speak to other families who have suffered at the hands of Loyalist and Republican groups.

Seven bodies of people who disappeared are still to be found.

Margaret says: “I don’t know how I came through it. I have had that many heart attacks and so much stress I don’t know how I’ve lived to this age. But I still go and see families who have lost people in the Troubles. It helps telling your story, so I go and listen to them.”