By Steve

(Please note that Steve's surname is not known to us and therefore cannot be printed)

November 2003

I noticed that your web site takes great effort to stress that it expresses only the views of those who submit, and the site itself is objective. I was wondering if you would like to add my own story. My dad was busy trying to earn a living delivering milk on the streets of Derry in 1973 when he was gunned down. His crime was nothing more than his religion. Those who pulled the trigger knew him, knew he was not a terrorist and knew he was unarmed. But their bigotry and hatred made them fire anyway. What did it achieve? Perhaps if my father had not done such a good job of teaching his children that "the other side" were not all "demons from hell" then those kids would have grown up bitter and twisted.

The boys in the family would have took arms to seek revenge. Fortunately they didn't and in doing so didn't inflict the same pain on a family on the other side of the divide. One thing I learned from all this is that every coin has two sides, both shine as brightly, both are equally tainted. The most enlightened people check both sides of the coin because if you look at only one side you miss half of the information and become mis-informed.

Oh as for that milkman... well he was a protestant and was shot dead by a member of the IRA so I suppose you won't be wanting his story after all. Was he a paramilitary? no. Was he in the pay of the crown? no. Was his murder any more or less a crime than that of a Catholic at the hands of the Shankill butchers?no. But if readers of your site ever want to know, yes, Protestants grieve in exactly the same way as catholics. A seven year old child cries for his daddy with as much pain in a Methodist church as his counterpart in a Catholic church. In closing I will say this to any reader who stumbles across any site dedicated to the troubles in Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Down and L'Derry. Few if any of these sites present a level and two sided account of what really happened in human terms.

Protestants set out to hurt and kill Catholics while Catholics set out to hurt and kill Protestants.

Neither side was the goodies or the baddies but both sides suffered the pain and both sides were left with events they inflicted on the other that they could not justify.

This site, like every other I have come across, wishes to paint the picture that one side suffered. Catholics were burned out of their homes in West Belfast while Protestants were chased out of their farms in Fermanagh. One took a day, the other took years but both were equally evil and both delivered the same high cost in human life. Let us hope that one day those who are intent on claiming that one side suffered more than the other will shut up and bow to those who actually suffered, the families of the dead whose religion or political belief matters not one jot.