Former Methodist Church president Harold Good, whose house played a prominent role in in ending The Troubles, opens up about the challenges of peacemakers
Rev Harold Good, who played a vital role in the Northern Ireland peace process, sits in the garden of his Holywood, Co Down, home where conversations were held with politicians involved in the negotiations.
“There was one occasion when I was nervous. I noticed workmen on a roof. I thought, ‘Those guys, they’re looking to see what’s happening.’ But folks were careful and always made sure to come and go at different times,” he says. Growing up in Derry, he confesses that he was “ignorant” about Catholics’ “legitimate grievances”, but, equally, he did not fully understand until he went to live on the Shankill Road how the Protestant working class were taken for granted by unionist politicians.
Afterwards, Craig and others drilled young Protestants on the Shankill Road, leaving them with “good reason to believe that they were being enlisted to serve and protect their community in a time of crisis”., William Moore and Robert Bates, moments after they had been given full life sentences for killings, barbaric even by the standards of the time.
Some Protestants “deny the history of what their part of the community inflicted upon another. We’re not about to acknowledge that from within the Protestant unionist community. There’s always the ‘Ah, but’”, he says. Even today he is obliged by confidentiality, but he fills in some of the “colour” surrounding the days that followed, including meeting senior IRA figures in the Redemptorists’ Marianella house in Rathgar in south Dublin.
Quite honestly, if I was fixated on a united Ireland, I’d be saying, ‘Let’s build this place to be a happy, contented, successful entity in its own right.’ Then, it would have something to bring to the table Good did not doubt then, or since, the sincerity of those involved or their regret for a “bloody and senseless conflict” … “they did not want their children and their children’s children or anybody’s children to live through what they had lived through”.
Many Protestants and unionists were, and “some still are slow learners” about why Catholics felt the way they did about Northern Ireland, given the discrimination that they endured.
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