NORTHERN IRELAND
Irish Times
Susan McKay
Thu, Dec 18, 2014
One night in late 2011, after the announcement by the Northern Executive that the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIAI) was to be set up, Jon McCourt walked onto Derry’s Peace Bridge and struggled with the urge to throw himself into the river Foyle.
It wasn’t that he was opposed to the inquiry. Having spent 10 years of his childhood in one of the institutions to be investigated, McCourt is one of those who had campaigned for years for this. He had been in Stormont for the announcement, and had felt elation and pride as he stood with other survivors on the grand steps in front of the television cameras and welcomed it. But on the journey back across the Glenshane Pass to Derry the ghosts had come. “In my head I began to see all the people I knew who had taken their own lives,” he told me. “Out of about 40, more than a dozen had died. One hung himself. Another drank a bottle of anti-freeze. One threw himself off a bridge in Donegal. Someone walked out into the traffic in London.
Lives of addiction
A few died young after lives of addiction to alcohol and anti-depressants. My own sister died in her 50s from cancer – there was a proliferation of cancers.”
McCourt did not see these people as adults. “I saw them as the children I knew when we were all five or six-years-old.” He has no doubt about the reason for their difficult lives and tragic early deaths: “It was the inability to deal with the trauma.”
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