G06 John Adams

And, yeah, that should be going there, so we’ll start the interview now. Just before we start can I just get your verbal consent that you’re okay for this to be recorded and everything, you’re–

Yes, I consent.

You’re fine with it, yeah, okay, brilliant, so shall we start then, could you just tell me your full name and today’s date?

Yeah, my name is John Adams and today is the fourteenth, Tuesday, the fourteenth of July.

Yeah, and, right, if you would like to start then by telling me when and where you were born?

So I was born in County Armagh in 1961. My parents live in a village called, lived in a village called Hamiltonsbawn and I was born in the local nearby town of Portadown.

Right, okay, and you grew up in, in that village then, yeah, in Hamiltonsbawn?

I grew up in Hamiltonsbawn, yes, so a little village of about two hundred, two hundred and fifty people in, about five miles from Armagh.

So that was quite a, yeah, quite a s-, quite a small intimate place to grow up in then, presumably?

Yeah, very small community, my, my grandparents had moved there in the 1920s and we were still regarded as the incomers even forty years later, yeah, it’s quite a small-knit farming community basically.

Yeah, very rural and that sort of thing, and what did your parents do for a living?

They were both schoolteachers, so they, primary schoolteachers in, again, locally in County Armagh.

Yeah, so just, just in the local, local schools, then, and what were their, what were their kind of interests, like, outside of, outside of work? Did they have anything that they particularly liked to do or that you did as a family?

Yeah, my, my dad in his younger days was a big rugby player, he played for Armagh rugby club, had several injuries to prove it, he got to play with some of the greats like Mike Gibson and people like that, so he was, he really enjoyed his rugby. He also enjoyed, he was a member of the Ulster Special Constabulary, the B-Specials and I think the thing that he really enjoyed there was shooting competitions, which they were really good at. In fact, the, the local, the local platoon that he was in charge of won this major cup back in, like, 1967, which beat the entire sort of army and police garrison in Northern Ireland that year and that was a really massive thing for him, he was really proud of that. He was also a member of our, he was, my grandfather was a founding member, my dad was, was also a founding member of our local brass band, which was based in the local Orange hall, so he was a, he was also a member of the Orange lodge as a Black, usual sort of things. My mum was, was much more family-oriented, she was, she had a lot of, her sister lived nearby and she had a lot of close friends who were usually all similar age teachers, so, and she didn’t have any real sort of outside interests other than sort of family, teaching and her friends.

And did you have any siblings?

I’ve got three, three younger brothers, one of whom sadly died at the age of eighteen months. He was, he had Down’s Syndrome and a heart defect, congenital heart defect and he died when I was about six, which I, I remember, and my other two younger brothers are, you know, they were, they weren’t born then and I think the thing, the thing I’ve been reflecting on over the past couple of decades is the impact that that had on my parents, having a child die, you know. My, my father went grey overnight basically and the amount of grief that they were processing in a world where grief wasn’t really talked about must have been quite overwhelming.

Yeah, it must have been really difficult and, and was, was it quite a sudden death of your brother, like, it was, it was?

I, I think, I think it was, I think it was just his heart gave out one night and I, I actually remember waking up, walking into the room and going, where’s Derek, and being ushered out, you know. I must have been three or four, well, probably four or five at the time, and so I think I was just ushered off to an aunt’s for a, for a week while they did all the funeral and everything, but I think the shock was, was really quite high.

It’s interesting you say it was, it was like a world where grief wasn’t really allowed to be expressed, or, or at least expressed in the way that it might be now. Did they get a lot of support from, like, the local community and stuff when, when that happened or, if you remember?

I believe they did, yeah. I think, I think they obviously got a lot of support from the local church, from my, our, my mum’s family. My dad was an only child, so my mum’s sisters and brother were really supportive and helpful. Obviously they, they took me away and looked after me for a week, that sort of thing, but I think the, you know, at that time it was just yeah, get over it now, go and have another one, rather than, yeah, sort of help people to process through that grief.

And, and what did you think of the, the area growing up? I mean, was it a nice place to grow up as a child?

Yeah, it’s, I abs-, I absolutely loved it. Again, I remember being, being about, you know, ten or eleven and my, my dad was thinking about taking another job in another part of the county and with that job would come a, a tied house for the headteacher and I remember absolutely, yeah, I was beside myself with grief about the idea of leaving the village. I vowed I’d never ever leave the village ever in my life, so, you know, it was that sort of, it was a, it was a very sort of safe, secure environment.

And you would have had, had friends and stuff who lived locally, presumably?

Yeah, yeah, I had friends who lived across the back in the fields. We used to take the dog out across the fields, you know, it was just, there was quite a, you used to disappear in the morning, go off, you know, come back at teatime, that sort of thing.

And did you go to school fairly locally?

So my primary school was, was actually the same school that both my mum and dad taught at and at one time they were the only two teachers in the small school.

Wow.

So it was a little, a little school called Salters Grange which is on the, between Armagh and Loughgall. There was probably about forty pupils in the whole school split into two classes, a junior class and a senior class and I think my, yeah, there were four people in my primary seven class, and my, my dad taught the seniors, my mum taught the juniors, which actually then meant that when I went to secondary school, I went to Armagh Royal which is a grammar school, I, that was a big shock for me because it was away from parents and I was, I’d, I’d also, I was also up a year, I was, I was put, put forward a year, so I was, you know, a year, eighteen months younger than all my peers and yeah, that was a, school, secondary school was a tough time for me.

Yeah, I was going to ask–

Didn’t enjoy that.

I was going to ask what it was like being taught by your parents, if it was strange at all but I suppose it was also just what you were used to as well?

It was, it was strange and normal, there, you’d go from, you know, saying hey mum and hey dad, on the way to school to, yes, Mr Adams at school, you know, it’s, it’s trying, trying to fit in and, you know, just be like all the other kids.

And were you, were you a member of any sort of clubs or organisations, like, outside of school? I’m thinking, like, the–

I, I went to the cub scouts for a couple of years, but I was pretty rubbish at football, so, and that’s all they ever seemed to do.

Right, so you didn’t, you didn’t stay too long.

So I didn’t, didn’t stick with it. When I was at, when I was at, at secondary school I was a member of the army cadets, so, and that, that played, that was quite a big, a big thing when I was a teenager.

And so you went to secondary school in, did you say in Armagh?

Yeah.

Yeah, and, and that, yeah, that was, that would’ve been a bit of a shock cos presumably that was a much bigger environment and–

Again, again, by, by modern standards, you know, there’s three hundred and fifty pupils in the whole school, my year was probably forty, fifty people, so by, you know, today’s comprehensive school standards, really tiny. It was a selective grammar school, it was boys only, it was ninety-nine per cent Protestant, it was ninety-eight per cent white, you know, it was as closed, protected as it possibly could be.

And you said, you said you had a few, or you found it a bit difficult sort of making that transition.

Yeah, I got, I got [00:10:00] bullied for the first three or four years.

Really, yeah.

Kind of mercilessly so, you know, personally it was a fairly tough, tough growing-up experience.

And what, what about academically, did you get on okay on that side of things?

Yeah, I, I did fairly well, and wasn’t the brightest in the class, but then I was a year, eighteen months younger than everybody, so I, I wasn’t in the, like, the top star cohort, but I muddled through fairly well.

Out of interest, why, why did you get brought forward a year, do you know, was it just that your, your grades were really good, or–?

Yeah, I think I was, I was, I was performing really well and my, I had the opportunity to go, you know, repeat primary seven effectively, but my, the, I think the headmaster of the, the big school persuaded my parents that, no, he’s bright enough, he can go straight into year one. In retrospect it’s probably a mistake, parenting fail 101, but, yeah, I, I got through, I’m, I’m doing okay.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and you mentioned church as well. Was that, was that an important part of your life growing up?

Yeah, it was, it was, you know, it was a small Pres-, small country Presbyterian church, my dad was an elder in the church, my mum was a member of the committee, it was, you know, it, a lot of stuff revolved around Sundays and around other events going on. There wasn’t much going on outside Sundays, there were no youth clubs or anything like that, but there was a, you know, a fair amount of that. I was also a member of the local band. My dad being the bandmaster, he’d go right, son, at the age of eleven, you’re going to learn the, learn the cornet, okay dad, and so I, I was a member of the band. That was a big part of my life, you know, I really enjoyed the, all the parading, all the concerts, all the, that sort of thing, you know, the, the Twelfth of July was an absolutely massive part of my teenage life, mainly because of the music and yeah, and that was interesting thing in my twenties, sort of diverging away from that politically, but still thinking oh music was quite good.

Yeah, that’s interesting and I think it’s definitely something we’ll talk about. So you, so you got into that age eleven you said, and how often would you have practised then as a band?

So that was a weekly, that was a weekly band practise, every Tuesday night, and, and then we’d, during the summer months we’d be parading at least once a week in local villages.

Yeah, I was going to say, it must have been, sort of especially during the summer you would have, that’s when you would have come into your own, and, and the Twelfth–

And, and, and to be, and to be perfectly honest, it was really enjoyable.

Yeah, I mean, there, there’s definitely like a real, a real camaraderie around that, that kind of thing and around, round the Twelfth and things.

Yeah.

And so what are your memories of events like the Twelfth? I mean, what, what would you have done as a, as a family or as a village?

Yeah, so as a, as a village we would, you know, we, the band and the Orangemen would all meet at the, the local Orange hall, usually fairly early in the morning, we’d parade through our village, then we’d move to Richhill, which is the next village across and parade through there with a couple of other lodges, and then we’d go to wherever the big, the big parade was. County Armagh Twelfth parades are probably the second biggest outside Belfast.

Really, yeah, mm hmm.

So they’re, they’re really massive events and, but they’re totally different from what you get in Belfast or indeed Glasgow. They’re, they’re really a, they’re basically a country fair with music, you know, there’s a bit of colour, there’s a bit of banners, there’s people parading, there’s people saying hi to their neighbours, there’s, you know, lots of chat going on, there’s, it’s a real buzz of sort of a community, family, family-friendly feel. We were there for the music, so we’d, we’d do out bit of parade then we’d head back out and go and watch the other bands. We’d have a lunch together, we’d then, you’d then parade back, you’d parade back through your home village, you’d have a big, a big slap up meal in the Orange and then because it’s County Armagh you’d do it all again the next day on the thirteenth at a little place called Scarva for the, the sham fight, and that was the, the Twelfth was the Orange Order, the, the thirteenth was the Black, so, and, and so you’d two day, two full-on days of feeling like you were in the, you know, in some sort of big special thing, you know, you were pretending you were in the Trooping the Colour or something like that, it was that sort of type of feeling for a bandsperson.

And did most people in the village join in with this sort of thing? Was it the vast majority of people, do you think?

Vast majority of people. There were a couple of Catholic families, our, our village was predominantly Protestant, there were a couple of Catholic families and yeah, I was sort of acquaintances with a couple of the youngsters who were our age and they were, some of them were, were out and going, yeah, let’s just watch it, it’s our neighbours doing stuff, and not, not really that exercised. Others were actually, hold on a minute we’re Catholic, we’re getting out of here, and they, they wouldn’t, they wouldn’t watch or participate and, you know, totally understandably, but yeah, it was just that, that difference in two different families going, actually we’ve got two different reactions to this based on who our friends are, so it was interesting.

And did you have a sense sort of when you were a teenager and stuff of the kind of politics that surrounded these events or was it just very much for the, as you said, for the music and that sort of thing?

For, for, for me my participation was about the music. My dad did ask me at the age of seventeen, the only conversation we ever had about it, he said to me do you fancy joining the Orange, and I went no thanks, and we never spoke about it again [laughs], and so I think he realised that there was something, you know, he was going, I’m not going to dr-, you know, my, my grandfather had been, you know, worshipful master of the lodge and things like that and my dad had been in, in the Orange for years, he’d be probably dragged down at the age of seventeen, but he didn’t try and force me into it, which probably says something about his mindset at the time, that I think he recognised that, you know, there was a lot of sort of, I’m going to use the word radical in a soft sense, there, there were a lot of people who were, weren’t really, you know, were there for the politics rather than, and he wasn’t, he wasn’t that interested in that sort of thing, but politics was everywhere, 1970s Northern Ireland was, was full of politics, you couldn’t escape it, you couldn’t escape sectarianism, you couldn’t escape the fact that there were us and them, the fact that there were, you know, killings and bombings and things like that, so, you know, I think a lot of that, you know, a lot of me was going actually there’s a lot of extreme, extreme opinions on both, on both sides and actually some of the Orange opinions were, were getting to be very extreme.

And was that why you didn’t think it was for you?

Yeah, I just wasn’t, I wasn’t in that headspace. I was, I was, I was thinking of things, like, you know, my career’s probably not going to be in Ireland, so, you know, why do I need to get sucked into that.

And did your, I mean, you say politics was everywhere, did your family talk about it a lot and dis-, discuss it?

We did, we did, at, at, at sort of tea tables and things like that, you know. My parents are, were unionists, they were, they were probably in the sort of moderate unionist branch. They were definitely anti-Paisley, they thought Paisley was a hot-headed firebrand to put it mildly, but, and so they, you know, there was a lot of talk about politics, we weren’t, they weren’t, and I don’t know if they were mem-, they weren’t members of any political party, they weren’t involved in activism or anything like that, and the only activism, you know, my dad, as I think I said to you earlier, my dad was a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, so actually I think that was, he was, he, he saw himself more as a peacekeeper, sort of law keeper rather than lawmaker.

Right, and I was kind of wondering with your, with your dad being in the UDR and, and that sort of thing, was, was that, was that ever a, like, a source of controversy, or I mean, I know the local population were probably, as you say, mostly Protestant themselves, but did that ever put him in the position of danger or anything, anything like that, do you know?

Yeah, absolutely. He, I think that was a constant theme through, through the seventies and eighties was, you know, we were all wondering when my dad would get shot, to be honest, we, we got into the habit of looking under his [00:20:00] car for a bomb every morning, you know, those, those little habits that you, you sort of think are normal and then, and then you realise that actually, hold on, this is quite exceptional. He taught in a school in, in south Armagh, a place called Mountnorris, which is just about three or four miles south of Markethill. His, he was the officer in charge of the Ulster Defence Regiment base at Glenann, which was, you know, right on the edge of what they’d call, what they used to call bandit country, for, so, and one of the incidents I remember is the Kingsmills massacre where I think my dad was one of the first people on the scene because that was local to his army base, you know, and there were thirteen, fourteen people killed at that, and I think, you know, he didn’t talk about it, but you knew that he’d been really impacted by it and that was al-, you know, that, that massacre was also probably a few hundred metres away from where my grandad grew up, so they, the whole, you know, south Armagh’s not this, it’s this patchwork of communities which are, you know, some of them intensely Protestant, some of them intensely Catholic, but they’re actually cheek-by-jowl and they’re neighbours to each other in many ways, and yeah, so I think there was a, there was a, my dad used to carry a pistol around with him, but he, he, he went, his attitude was more, look, if they’re going to shoot you, they’ll stick a gun out from the hedge and you won’t even know about it, so I think there’s that, that was an under-, you know, that was an undercurrent in my whole childhood. The other, so there’s, there’s that danger from republican terrorism, and that there was, but he also came up against loyalist activism as well during the mi-, the Ulster workers’ strike in 1973. My dad was dead against that and he ended up, you know, having arguments at informal roadblocks that are put up on his way to school one day where the UVF or UDA, or whoever it was, stopped my dad in the car. I think my brothers were in the car at the time and my dad had a full argument with them to say no, I’m going to work, you’re not stopping me, you know. I think he hin-, he tried to do that sort of middle line between, you know, to do what was moderate and what was right, I think that was the thing that really struck me about him.

So he was against that kind of more, more extreme element of unionism as well?

Yes, yeah, he was, and he, and to be honest, he came across in UDR as well because, you know, there were ex-, there were members of the UVF, there were people who were members of terrorist organisations in the UDR at the same time and, you know, I think my dad had to play a part in identifying who, who some of those were in making sure they were brought to book in, in, you know, you know, actually disciplining people who were getting involved in stuff they shouldn’t have been involved in, so, you know, again, it’s a tough gig.

Yeah, absolutely, and did you, did, did he or you or, or your family know many Catholics?

Not many, though there are a couple of really good relationships, so the, my, my family had built a bungalow across the road from where my, my grandparents lived, my dad’s parents, and next door to them was a Catholic family and my dad was actually born on exactly the same day as their daughter, who subse-, subsequently became a nun, and so my dad and this nun were actually really good friends and, you know, again, there was something about, yeah, you’re two people who are from different backgrounds can get on together, can have a laugh. There are certain things that my parents always said, don’t ever talk to anybody, you know, anybody, anybody about your dad’s work in the army, you know, that’s a security thing, so there’s a, there’s a bit of an element of mistrust, but there was also a good neighbourli-, neighbourliness, you know, we used to go and get manure from Mr McParland’s farmyard and use it for the roses and, you know, there was, that sort of being friendly neighbours was good.

And what about you, did you have any, any sort of Catholic friends growing up?

I didn’t have any Catholic friends until I went to university at the age of seventeen.

Okay, and what do you think sort of, either from your peer group or just more from the community in general, what was the sort of general perception of Catholics, was it one of suspicion do you think, or, or was–?

Yes.

Yeah, mm hmm.

Yeah, don’t, you know, basically don’t trust them, you never know who they’re talking to.

Yeah, sure.

And, and seeing, seeing, seeing them as a group, not as individuals, you know, all the sort of, you know, things that diversity training’s knocked out of me in the past thirty years.

Yeah, sure, but I suppose growing up when you’re only mixing with people from the same background, it’s very difficult to not share those views, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, and it was reinforced at school, it was, you know, I, I was probably seriously right-wing at school because of the people I was hanging around with. It was also the same time as, you know, sort of Angola and Cuba and sort of global things where America was exercising its muscles a bit, so we were quite happy to follow some of the right-wing stuff.

Yeah, that, that was kind of going to be my next question actually, as, as to what your, your own sort of political views growing up were, if, if you had any, like–?

Yeah, so I, yeah, I was probably, I was, I was probably, I was fir-, probably first and foremost a unionist. I would argue with anybody who, who argued for a united Ireland and, I, but I was also, there was also an overlay of that sort of anti-communist right-wingness that you probably get in fairly conservative societies. I was probably also, I probably also had a very conservative faith position as well at the time, yeah, I was sort of, not quite fundamentalist, but certainly on the conservative wing of Christianity.

And did you have any views on, or did you even know much about things like the civil rights movement which was, which was going on in, like, the late sixties, or, or, you know, the campaigns?

I was probably a little bit young for, for, for that, but my family would have viewed that with suspicion.

And what about, cos you kind of talked a bit about the Troubles and, and, and the effect that had. Do you, I’m wondering what your memories are of, like, the, the start of the Troubles and, and the first few years? I mean, presumably you would have been, what, about seven or eight when it started? I don’t, I don’t know if, if you were a bit young then, or if there’s anything that stands out?

Yeah, I, I know my, I know my dad and the B-Specials did go to Derry at the very start and, you know, subsequent history’s quite tough reading when you, when you think about that. I know my dad then was one of the first members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, he was immediately a major because of his seniority in the B-Specials and, so he’s quite a senior officer. I remember helping him fill, do things like fill sandbags at, you know, points of, where they were adding extra security, like, you know, power stations and, and things like that and just going out and helping out in the early days. I also remember at the end of, I think it was a thing called Operation Motorman where the army went in one, I think it was July or August and basically tore down the no-go areas like Free Derry and things like that. We were actually on holiday in Portrush at the time and we were sat in the hotel and looked out to the bay and there were three or four warships standing out in the bay and we were sort of wondering what, what that was going, what was going on, and then my dad got a phone call and basically the UDR were called up at that point and then we heard that the army had gone in and torn down the, the no-go areas, so there, you know, there was that sort of juxtaposition of what’s going on on my holiday, my dad’s disappearing and there’s this thing in the news, so yeah, there’s quite a lot of, a lot of that and when I was at school there were, at, you know, there were things like the Ulster workers’ strike, there was the, there were quite a few bombings in Armagh. I remember being sat in a class one day and the, the, a bomb went off in the city and the, you know, our seats lifted off the ground and bounced back down again and then we just continued, you know, there was stuff like that, our school, there was a big army base quite close to the school, and so the soldiers used to use our, our gym and things like that for recreation, but I remember one sad incident, incident when, probably I was about sixteen, [00:30:00] a soldier had driven in to use our facilities in school, had stayed in the van and sadly shot himself, so, while all the pupils were scattered around the school, so, you know, to have someone take their own life while you’re a kid at school, you got ushered out and ushered home fairly quickly, yeah, just stuff like that that made it, made it a bit more real.

And I’m wondering, like, how you kind of, if you can remember how you felt about these sorts of things at the time, I mean, was it scary, or, or was it just normal?

I think it was probably more normal than scary. I was worried, you know, I was anxious that my, you know, about my dad getting shot, that was a constant low level, underlying anxiety, but I quite, you know, I was, I was in the cadets at school, I quite enjoyed the, you know, the military-type, type stuff, I enjoyed, you know, some of that sort of thing, so, and, and seeing, you know, things like roadblocks and all of that sort of stuff because, you know, it was the military doing it and the military were on our side as, as it were. Then there was no sort of fear of, there was no fear of what soldiers or police could do, they were always ours, and so it was, it was more the fear of what’s happening in the hedge when you’re driving down the country road, it’s, it’s a different type of fear.

So it was very much a fear of the other side?

Yeah, yeah, and I think our, our con-, you know, my Catholic contemporaries would probably have felt different about the security forces, very much so, but we were, we thought they were there, we felt they were there to protect us and there were a number of people who I, you know, I know a few people who, who were murdered, you know. There’s, one in particular was a husband of one of my dad’s colleagues who was a, a milk, a milk lorry driver and he was kidnapped and they didn’t find his body for five days, so, you know, the things like that went on that, you know, quite, very, very traumatic, but as a, as a kid you would just go, yeah, that’s somebody else dead.

Yeah, I suppose if it was, the more frequent it is the more normal it seems, in a way.

And we used to joke about my dad going to funerals as a hobby.

Right.

You know, it, it sounds macabre now, but, you know, he’d, he’d get dressed up in his dress uniform, he’d polish his boots, he’d, you know, he’d head off with his black armband on and you’d be just going, yeah, dad’s off to another funeral then, not realising that this is, you know, somebody he’d known and worked with and, you know, it’s, yeah, the weird mind of a teenager, but–

So he lost quite a lot of colleagues then?

He did, he lost a lot.

Yeah, no, that must’ve–

I think–

Yeah.

I think the County Armagh battalion of the UDR probably lost most, more, more people than any other, I think it was one of the, the hardest hit battalions.

That must’ve just been really difficult for your family, like, your mum and siblings and stuff, just the thought that your dad might not come back one day.

Yeah, so my dad was probably out, probably at least two or three nights a week and, and a couple of, so there’s a couple of impacts it had on my family. One is my dad was out a lot and so therefore that sort of, you know, when you come home from school about four o’clock he’d, he’d fall asleep for a couple of hours, then he’d have his dinner, then he’d go out and you wouldn’t see him again till the next morning, the, so our relationship, my personal relationship with dad was less than my relationship with mum, so mum and I were in the house with my two very much younger brothers, we’d send them off to bed at, you know, seven, eight o’clock and my mum and I would sit and we had a very good relationship because we sat and talked and watched TV and, you know, ate scones and that sort of thing. I think, thinking back, my, my mum was a very anxious person and I think a lot of that was driven by, by that time of anxiety, you know, she was seeing her husband go out and not knowing if he’d come back, that sort of, about two or three nights a week and it’s, even that’s hard to get used to. My dad began to develop a drink problem, so he would, he got involved in a couple of car accidents because he’d, he’d had a few too many drinks at the officers’ mess, and, you know, because the police were on his side he never got convicted for any of it. There’s a bit of, you know, back scratching going on there, but he, he totalled his car a couple of times.

Right.

And, you know, completely, yeah, irresponsible and reckless, you know. I’d be fairly judging him badly today, but it just seemed like the done thing, and my mum and dad in the seventies and early eighties, they would, they’d go through a fairly rocky patch in their marriage, I think because of a number of compound problems there, and I, I don’t, yeah, I’m, there’s probably more going on in there that I didn’t observe or notice cos some of it happened after I’d left home anyway.

And so I’m wondering then, when you were sort of coming to the age when you were going to leave school, like, what your options were? You mentioned you were in the army cadets. Did, did you ever think of joining the army or anything, anything like that?

I, I always had a dream to join the army, but I was, I was seriously unfit and could never hack the, the physical stuff very well. I enjoyed things like shooting and, you know, parading and things like that. I wasn’t sure about jumping over hills, being shouted at by angry Welshmen, probably it wasn’t really my idea. I was, I was reasonably bright, I did fairly well in my A-levels, but since, since the age of thirteen I’d had an ambition to work in, to work as a geologist because we’d had, we’d had a couple of really good teachers of geography and geology at school and they, they really inspired me as to, this is really interesting, I love this stuff, so I, I really got, got involved in that and that was my ambition through my O-levels and A-levels, was to go and learn how to do, how to go and study geology. This school had some really good facilities for learning that and my, you know, we were doing things like taking thin sections of rocks or polishing rocks at school. We had a massive rock collection that we could look at, so there was a, a lot of energy around, around just studying the earth and really interested in it, so I was, you know, I was determined to go and study geology, I ended up at Queen’s doing that, so, yeah, job done.

So were you the first person in your family to go to university, then?

University strictly, my mum and dad had both been to teacher training college.

Right, okay, yeah.

So they’d, they’d trained at Stranmillis College, so.

So you went to, you went to Queen’s. Was that sort of, you wanted to stay fairly local to your parents?

There was a bit of that, there was a bit of, yeah, I’m, I’m not, I was a bit of a home bird, I didn’t really fancy going very far. I did apply to a couple of places in England and I got a couple of offers, but Queen’s was where I really wanted to be.

And did you move down to Belfast, or did you commute?

I did, yes, I did, no, I moved into halls and then didn’t go home for about six or eight weeks [laughs].

Oh right.

Yeah, I think, I think it was that sort of, my eyes got opened and you’re going I’m really enjoying this, so, you know, Queen’s is one of those universities a bit like, bit like Glasgow, where there’s a lot of people stay at home and commute and a lot of people who are even, you know, living in other parts of Northern Ireland, they, they go home every weekend.

Yeah, I went, I did my undergrad at Queen’s, so I know that very well, yeah.

Right, yeah, and it’s probably still the same, yeah.

Yeah, it is.

But I, I, I did, I didn’t, I really, I really got into things, I enjoyed, you know, getting in with people, doing interesting stuff, having friends at weekends, it was a really, really good growth experience.

And what did you make of Belfast, like, compared to growing up in a small Armagh village, like, what, what was Belfast like at the time?

Yeah, again, around the university was super, felt very secure, very safe, yeah. The, the city centre was a, was a bit different, it was all gated off at the time and, you know, you get into the habit of getting searched at the gates, getting searched going into Marks and Spencer’s, getting, you know, just, having that security presence around you all the time, that was much less evident up at the university, university was, you know, just like a, a normal suburb, so, again, you know, I really enjoyed, I enjoyed, I really enjoyed being in Belfast, it was, I just, didn’t, we didn’t do [00:40:00] anything special, you know, I wasn’t, it, it was just I enjoyed the buzz of being in a city, it was quite nice.

Was, was there a good sort of social scene at the university at the time?

Yeah, sort of varied, I, I was, I, I was in with a lot of the sort of Christian Union-type people, so I, I didn’t end up sort of down, down the pub quite a lot, although I was also studying geology which is quite, quite pubby as well, so, yeah, there’s a quite a mixture of that sort of safe Christian environment and a bit of, hey, let’s go out and have a, have a good time with the guys from the geology club, so, but again, a bit of growth, bit of learning. I was still quite young, I had a couple of, a couple of nice girlfriends, again, relatively, you know, I’d hadn’t, I hadn’t had any girlfriends at school, so I, you know, being in a couple of relationships at uni was quite fun, we ended up, I ended up in a, staying in a flat with three guys from my course and, and that was even more fun, that was, that was fantastic.

Where was your flat?

Stranmillis Road.

Right, okay.

So, right above the bakery, which was quite convenient, and, yeah, we, it was, you know, we, we’d study and then we’d play darts and, you know, we’d have breakfast together most mornings, go to lectures, that sort of thing.

And you said university was also the first time where you met Catholics on a regular basis.

Yeah.

And did, did you, did they seem, did Catholics seem different to you, like, did, was it clear that they’d had a different upbringing, or were you kind of united by the, the student experience?

United by the student experience I think, yeah. It was nice to, to get to know people who had really odd names like Siobhán and Assumpta and, you know, things that were slightly alien to me, but just actually seeing them as people and, you know, sit and have a drink with people, enjoy, enjoy their company, not think too much about. I didn’t think too much about their experience growing up and how that was different from mine, I probably didn’t process that too much, but, you know, again, it was nice to, it was nice to meet and learn from people.

And were, were any of your girlfriends from a Catholic background?

No, they weren’t.

No, okay, would you have, do you think you would have considered going out with a Catholic, or, or was that not something that was, you were open to at the time, or maybe–?

I would’ve been, I think I would have, I would have been open to it, yeah.

And you sai–

And in fact, well, my, my, my last, interestingly, my last year at school, the, the school had this arrangement for the drama club where our old boys’ school would put on joint productions with the local Catholic convent school.

Oh okay.

And so a lot of the guys in my final year at school ended up with Catholic girlfriends, again, that, that’s, you know, it was probably, that was a bit of a cultural moment for them I think.

Yeah, I’m kind of wondering how, how their sort of parents would have reacted to that.

I know, yeah.

Especially if, if, you know–

I never heard.

Yeah, if you had, like, a parent in the Orange Order or something and their son suddenly brings home a Catholic girlfriend, it might be–

Yeah, hey, yeah, hey mum, this is Siobhán, and, and actually, and actually I remember, remember my, I remember, you know, having a chat with my mum about that at one point and, you know, she’d, she’d be quite adamant, no, no Catholics please.

Really?

Yeah.

Why, why do you think that was?

I think suspicion, I think fear and, and pure prejudice.

So you think it was more of a political rather than, like, a theological objection?

Yes.

Right.

Yeah.

And you mention the Christian Union as well, so the church was still quite an important part of your life when you were at uni?

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, did, did, you went to church in Belfast then regularly as well?

I did yeah, yeah.

Yeah, which church did you go to?

It was a, it was one called Fitzroy Presbyterian, which is not far from, from the university. The, the minister at the time was a guy called Ken Newell, and again, interesting, he was an interesting character because he did a lot of work with Father Denis Faul over in the Falls Road and he was really heavily involved in reconciliation-type ministry, so again, as someone coming from a, almost an exclusively Protestant background, to see somebody from my similar faith background beginning to form these bridges of reconciliation and understanding was quite eye-opening for me. I think, you know, it was one of the first times I’d spotted that reaching out rather than retrenching perspective, which actually, probably quite influential I think.

Yeah, that’s interesting, and was there much going on, like, in the way of student politics at the time when you were there?

Yeah, I, I, I stayed well away from that, you know, I’d, I had a lot of friends who were, you know, Free Presbyterian DUP types, I had, and they were quite vocal in the sort of, you shouldn’t let it wash over you at times, but I, yeah, I wasn’t that interested in politics.

Yeah, fair enough, and what about the academic side, did, did the course live up to what you’d hoped it would be?

Yeah, yeah, I did, I did well, I, I really enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed things like the fieldwork that we did, you know, all the, we didn’t get very, any very exotic places, you know, we got as far as the north west of Scotland and the south coast of England, but that was, they were good trips, the, the society, the geology society field trips were really good cos we, we jumped in the minibus on a Friday night, headed off to somewhere in Southern Ireland and, you know, spent the weekend looking at rocks and sitting in pubs.

Does sound good.

What’s not to like, yeah.

Yeah, no, it sounds like a, a really good student experience you had, and then you graduated in, would it have been–?

’82.

’82, right, yeah, and then you went, you went straight on to do a masters?

So, yeah, I, I, yeah, I had a couple of choices. I, I would, was either going to stay around for a PhD, but getting funding for that was quite challenging, and then applied for, applied for a number of jobs as well, but didn’t get anything. There was a bit of a slump in the energy industry at the time.

Were they, were they jobs in Northern Ireland that you applied for?

No.

Oh okay.

No, I was, I knew I’d have to go somewhere else.

Right.

So I, I then applied for a couple of masters, I think Imperial college, Camborne School of Mines in Aberdeen, and Aberdeen was the one that offered me a place.

Okay, and, and what, you said you, you kind of knew you had to leave by that stage. Can you tell me a bit about why that was the case?

Yeah, I think just to, to, to have a career in geology, the happening places were Aberdeen or, or London at the time, or getting into the mining industry and going to somewhere like southern Africa, so it was the recognition there were probably, like, three, three or four geology jobs in Northern Ireland full stop, and, you know, therefore I had to, I had to go and do something somewhere else.

So it was a career move more than anything?

Career move, yeah.

And how did your parents feel about you emigrating or, or moving, moving away from Northern Ireland?

They were, they were very encouraging, they were going look, there’s nothing for you here mate, off you go [laughs]. There’s a bit of, I think there was a bit of a push as well to, to say look, you know, go and stretch your wings, go find somewhere else, you don’t really, you don’t want to be stuck in this place with its problems and its challenges, take your opportunities. It was, it was very much that attitude and, and maybe, and maybe that rubbed off on me as well because it was, I was already going okay, I’ll, I’m actually happy to leave because it’s so complex and so, you know, I can’t see it getting fixed any time soon, you know, and it, it’s, it’s also quite parochial.

And do you know if a lot of people were leaving Northern Ireland at that time?

They were, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot, a lot of people were, were like that, I think, so I think mine was probably fuelled largely by career, but also by, look, there’s not much prospect in, in this place unless, you know, yeah, you could become a teacher and then, you know, stay in the same place, but, you know, my mum and dad had always told me never to become a teacher, strange.

Yeah.

And, you know, I, so I think, I think it was a bit of push, but of pull. I’m trying to think of the, [00:50:00] yeah.

Yeah, no, go ahead, sorry.

No, it’s alright.

Alright, okay, no, I was just going to ask how you felt about moving to Aberdeen, if, if you were daunted or excited or bit of both, or–?

A bit of both, cos I was in a relationship at the time, so I was leaving my girlfriend back in Belfast, so that was probably the, the biggest thing about it, but quite interested to go and explore and find somewhere else and meet new people.

Did you, did you visit Aberdeen before you moved over, or did you just go straight, straight over there?

I think we’d been once on holiday as a kid, you know, literally one night passing through, so I didn’t know it very well at all.

Had you visited Britain at all much as a child? Did you go on lots of holidays?

Yeah, we, we, we had lots of holidays, so when I was really young, I think before the Troubles, we tended to go to, to go on holidays in County Wicklow, and then as soon as the Troubles started it was either, you know, somewhere like Portrush or we’d go to Scotland, and we spent several, several years holidaying in Ayrshire and the Highlands and, and round that way.

So you, you stopped crossing the border then, after the Troubles?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, my, basically it was too much of a security risk for my dad.

Yeah, that makes sense, so what were your, what were your first impressions of Aberdeen? I’ve never been myself, so.

Yeah, yeah, okay, it’s, it’s cold and grey, and they, they speak funny, but again, got into, I spent the first few months in halls cos that was an easy way just to get into a bit of accommodation, meet some people, so really nice to meet a whole bunch of interesting new people. My course was only fifteen people, so it was really good to get to know some of those and, you know, even on the course a bit of Ireland came because there were two of us from Northern Ireland, who were Protestants, and there were a couple of people, three people from Southern Ireland, who were obviously Catholics, not obviously, but were Catholics, so again, just, again, meeting those people who’ve got a different mindset, a different experience of growing up. They even favoured different colours when colouring in maps, you know, they were using orange and green and we were using blue and red, I mean, who knew, and just exploring that with them and just being, I think just being open to, to being friendly and actually learning from them was really, really useful.

And presumably you met a lot of Scottish people as well, and just people–

Scottish people.

Yeah, people from different backgrounds, yeah.

Yeah, just people from lots of different backgrounds, yeah, and that was, well, that was good, yeah.

And how did Aberdeen compare to Belfast at that time in terms of, just as a city? I mean, obviously it didn’t have the, the security context.

Didn’t have the security architecture. I did, I did make the mistake a few times of walking, in the early days, walking into Marks and Spencers and lifting my arms up, but yeah, I, it was a, I really enjoyed the city, it was quite a, yeah, it was a small, it’s a small city, it’s, it’s quite interesting, it’s got a beach, it’s, yeah, probably compared fairly favourably with Belfast in fact, there was probably more stuff to do, there’s more interest-, interesting things to do. Belfast was probably a bit dead.

And you st-, you stayed in Aberdeen, didn’t you, after you graduated from your masters?

I did, yeah, I, I got a, I got a job in Aberdeen working for an oil service company, so I stayed there. I met my wife in Aberdeen, although she’s a Londoner.

Okay.

And again, that was a, you know, she was a left-wing, feminist, socialist Londoner and, you know, that was a, that was an interesting mixture from a small, small-town conservative village boy.

That is an interesting mixture, when–

So it is and, and it was good cos she challenged me a lot on some of the stuff that I, I thought, particularly politically, you know, why do you think that way, what’s, what’s the reasoning behind that, and so it got under my skin a bit, in quite a good way, and actually made me rethink quite a lot.

When did you meet your wife?

Think we met in, in ’84.

Right, okay, so not long after you finished the masters.

Got married, got married in ’86, yeah.

Okay, where did you get married?

Got married in Aberdeen.

In Aberdeen, yeah, so did, did the, did her family from London and your family from Northern Ireland both travel to Aberdeen then for the wedding?

Yeah, we, we had a really small wedding. There were only, you know, we’d invited all our friends to the ceremony bit and then it was just literally close family who went for a meal and that was it, it was, the whole thing cost us a few hundred quid.

And were your family okay with you sort of marrying someone who wasn’t from a, an Ulster Protestant background as it were, yeah?

Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, they really liked her.

Oh great.

I think they, I think they got on really well, you know, first impressions were really, really favourable and my mum particularly liked her a lot.

Did you meet her through work or was it somewhere–?

It was through church actually.

Oh right, okay.

So we’d, we were actually going to, attending the same church, leading the same youth group, and we just got to be really good friends and then a few months later decided actually we liked each other a bit more than friends.

Sure, and it’s interesting you say she, she challenged a lot of your views, so was that on things like social issues and stuff like that, or just general?

Yeah, pretty much entire world, entire worldview, yeah.

Right.

Again, just coming up, coming up against someone who thought radically different from the way I’d grown up to think, and was willing to question me on it, which was really interesting.

And so you mentioned your job there. Was that quite easy for you to get after you graduated, or, or did you have to look around for a while?

Didn’t have to look around for a while, but I, I did a lot of applications and had a lot of interviews,. The oil industry was going through another periodic slump, but, except I didn’t get the ideal job I wanted, which was geologist in an oil company, I ended up as a geologist in a, in a service company which is, like, a lower tier, but that was a really, it was a, it was a good foundation.

And you enjoyed it, did you?

I did, yeah, and that’s where, actually where I started to get into computing cos I, I ended up doing, moving from a, you know, one job into a data processing job and started to, to really get into the use of computers in, in doing geology.

And I’m wondering, sort of around this time how people, I mean, obviously this is sort of the middle of the Troubles, so I’m wondering how people reacted to you as a Northern Irish person, like, when they heard your accent, or, yeah, anything like that, was, d’you ever get any sort of questions or anything?

Travel was interesting, particularly travel back and forward to Northern Ireland because there was always that security layer, you know, on the, on the boat or on the, on the plane, yeah. I, I remember once, yeah, it was at the time where to go from Heathrow to Belfast you had to go to this completely separate area of terminal one in Heathrow where it was purely the Belfast terminal and you were always corralled into one place and, and so on, when you arrived in, when you flew into Heathrow or Glasgow or somewhere like that, there was a completely separate channel where you had to walk past a policeman, yeah, there was a lot of that security infrastructure which you didn’t get on, say, Aberdeen-Glasgow flight, Aberdeen-London flights, and, and there was also that suspic-, yeah, I think Irish people generally, anybody with an accent like mine was probably, people would look at you twice if you said something in a shop, you know, there’d be that general suspicion of Irish people, Ulster people particularly, yeah, it never turned into anything, you know, super negative, but there was always that double look.

I’m wondering as well, how that felt for you, being kind of almost branded as Irish when, like, growing up presumably you were told to identify as British and then now you’ve moved to Britain you’re suddenly Irish, yeah, I’m wondering how that felt?

It, it didn’t, I don’t think it took long to change my, my viewpoint on that. I was, you know, I was one of the people who would have gone, you know, Ulster is British and all that sort of stuff [01:00:00] as a, as a teenager. I think, I think it was after my M.Sc I, I sort of came up with the, you know, if I ruled the world I would make every Irish person leave Ireland for five years and experience the world as it seemed through other people’s eyes because people did say ah you’re Irish and I’m going no, I’m not Irish, I’m British. You have that conversation about three or four times and, you know, it suddenly gets through to you, hold on a minute, I am actually Irish, I’m perceived as Irish, I’m, I’ve got an identity here, you know, it, it, it changed the way I look at myself, by being exposed to the views of other people.

And did you come across many other Irish people in Aberdeen?

Yeah, I did, quite a few, you know, as I say, there were, there were five of us on our course, you know, somebody from Limerick, somebody from Galway, somebody from Dublin, somebody from Derry and me, so, you know, the four corners of Ireland, and, and again, just listening and learning, you know, just talking with them about their different experiences, it was really interesting.

And you mentioned sort of getting the boat or plane over. Did you, you went back to Northern Ireland pretty regularly, then?

Yeah, probably, yeah, probably about once or twice a year during that time, you know, we were, we were doing that stupid early married thing of trying to do Christmas with one family and New Year with another one.

Sure.

Which we soon gave up once, my wife’s a doctor, so, and being on call over Christmas is a good excuse not to visit family, so, but yeah, we’d, we’d go over and spend a, you know, a few days in the summer and, Ireland’s better in the summer, London’s better in the winter, generally.

Yeah, I can see that.

And, so I really, you know, I quite enjoyed being in Ireland in the summer, but again, tended to avoid the marching season, so tended to go a bit later in the summer, you know, around the end of July and August.

Oh really?

Because by that time I’d, I’d sort of had enough of the, you know, it was around the time of things like Drumcree and all the aggro around, around the marching season and I thought well, I don’t really want to be associated with that anymore.

So your perspective had kind of evolved from when you were in the bands and stuff like that, yeah?

Yeah.

That’s interesting, and what did your wife make of Northern Ireland when she first visited? I mean, it must have been a shock at the time from being, from someone from London to suddenly experience that.

Yeah, yeah, all the, you know, the green policemen and the, you know, the roadblocks and the security stuff and, you know, but, but then, you know, the bakeries, the, the wee buns, the Tayto crisps, you know, there’s good sides and bad sides, the countryside.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think, yeah, I think there’s a bit of a culture shock, but I think you get over the security stuff pretty quickly and get used to it and then it’s, it’s about the people and the relationships.

Yeah, that makes sense, so did she, did she like visiting then, did–?

Yes, she did.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, short bur-, short bursts as you do with family, but she did enjoy visiting.

And so, you’re in Aberdeen for, for quite a long time, until the nineties, that’s ri-, did you stay in the same job or did you move around a bit?

Do you know, I stayed with one company for nine years and then myself and a group of three friends formed our own company. We’d, we’d spotted a gap in the market that we could fill, we, we all quit on the same day, we all formed our new company and we then ran that in Aberdeen for another nine years. In the middle of that I then moved to Glasgow, but still kept working week on week, week about in, in Aberdeen.

Okay.

And, you know, and we sold the company in, I think it was 1998, ’99.

And you moved to Glasgow in, what, what year was that?

Ninety-, Glasgow was ’95, so I was following my wife around, she, she was doing cardiology training, so she had a, she got a job in Glasgow which involved spending, the first year of that job was working in the district hospital in Ayr, so we moved to Ayr for a year and I, I commuted back and forward to Aberdeen, and we then moved to Glasgow the following summer, ’95, so been here ever since.

What area of Glasgow did you move to?

We went to the West End, so off Queen Margaret Drive, so not far from the Botanics, overlooking the BBC. We were in a nice flat.

Nice, yeah.

Stayed there for five or six years and then we’ve been in the Southside since the year 2000.

Oh okay, and I’m wondering how you felt about moving to Glasgow cos it’s obviously a city that, that has some of those issues that Northern Ireland also has that you’d kind of got away from, I wonder if there, if you had any apprehension about that?

I did, I did actually, I was, I remember having some conversations with people about, you know, cos Aberdeen’s, Aberdeen doesn’t have that level of sectarianism, you know, nobody cares in Aberdeen whether you’re Protestant or Catholic, they probably more care if you’re Aberdonian or American, it’s that sort of, there, there were, there were splits in Aberdeen, there was incomers and locals more than anything else, but I remember thinking moving to Glasgow, you know, you’d see TV programmes and stuff about sectarianism in Glasgow, you knew it existed and I was, I was a bit apprehensive about moving back to somewhere where that Orange and Green culture was very evident, particularly in football, and yeah, I, I would, I was apprehensive, yeah.

And what about when you did move then? Did, did you kind of get a sense of, of the extent to which that sectarianism was there or wasn’t there?

Again, you know, it’s a bit like, it’s a bit like being in Belfast and living in Malone Road. Living in the West End means that you’re nowhere near Ibrox or Celtic Park, you don’t tend to see that level of, you, you don’t, you don’t see it in those areas. It, it seemed to be much more an issue for, say, Govan or Baillieston than it does for the West End, so actually quite relieved that it, it wasn’t a front and centre thing in Glasgow, yeah, the football was there, the Old Firm was there, but it wasn’t something I encountered in, in what I did.

What about the, the parades and that sort of thing, did you encounter any of that?

Again, I didn’t encounter many of those in the West End. There’s a few more on the Southside, certainly, you know, you can hear, during the summer you can hear bands from, in, in sort of Shawlands, Pollokshaws, Pollok-, Pollokshaws, that sort of area, quite regularly during the summer, or if you’re in the city centre, you tend avoid the city centre on the days that you know there’s parades, you know, so you just, it’s very easy to ignore it completely, but then it, it’s, there’s still an undercurrent of some of it in the football because, you know, you go to work in, I work in East Kilbride, and there are people who are, you know, there’re Celtic supporters, there’re Rangers supporters, there are, you know, I’ve made some silly social mistakes with some of them, over the years, just sort of, I remember saying to someone who was a Rangers supporter about, you know, Celtic had done really well in the European Cup and I was sort of going now that’s really good, and he went worst day of my life mate [laughs]. You’re sort of thinking okay, maybe I shouldn’t have said that remark to the, the only, the only Rangers supporter in the, that I knew, but I think in offices people, people again, tend to, you know, there was this silly idea a few years ago where people would say yeah, wear your football colours to work one day and you’re going hey mate, don’t do that in Glasgow.

Yeah, probably not the best idea.

Not the best idea, so, you know, you just learn to, to navigate some of the signs and stay away from it, and people don’t quite know what I am, because they, you know, I don’t wear, I don’t wear any particular allegiance, I don’t support Rangers and I don’t support Celtic, I speak with an Ulster accent, but, and I’ve got a, I’ve probably got a Protestant name, but equally Gerry Adams has [01:10:00] got the same surname as I have, so people are sometimes not quite sure what I am, which actually makes it quite interesting to, to sort of see where, see what assumptions they make of me before they get to know me.

And what, what assumptions do they tend to make, is it, is it mixed, or–?

I think they tend to keep their assumptions to themsel-, I th-, I, you know, I suppose when I get to, when they get to know people they know I’m dual, a dual passport holder, I, and therefore, you know, I’m, I’m not in one, in, in, I’m not a traditional unionist in a unionist camp, I’m not a traditional nationalist in a national camp. I sit somewhere in between and people get to know that pretty quickly, so I’m taking advantage of both identities. I am quite happy to support both, you know, St Patrick’s Day and, and other stuff that, there is still a bit of a tension even in Glasgow on, you know, well, it’s only one community that actually celebrates St Patrick’s Day, whereas I’m going hey, well, hold on a minute, it’s my island too, and, you know, there’s, so I don’t think people make much assumptions about me other than I’ve got a strange accent and yeah, there’s a few people in the know who actually know about the cultural background, but a lot of people are completely unaware of it.

Yeah, I was going to ask the extent to which you think people in Glasgow have an awareness or a knowledge of the Northern Ireland conflict, cos obviously they use a lot of the, the symbolism and stuff, but I was, I wonder if you think they actually have much of a knowledge of the reasons behind the conflict and the, the issues that underpin it?

I think there’s a, there’s a superficial knowledge that most Glaswegians have, you know, but as with most superficial knowledge when you delve into it there’s actually quite a lot of myths and, you know, it’s just interesting having some conversations with people about actually, well, you know, this is what really happened, or, you know, have you looked at the facts around this historical event, then they, you know, they’re, they’re quite unaware of some of that nuance. I read a lot of history, I’m a, I’m a bit of a, bit of a geek when it comes to that, so, you know, being able to, to have a conversation with someone where yous open their eyes to, maybe there’s a different interpretation or a different possibility on that thing, is quite enlightening.

And have you ever experienced, like, on a personal level, any sectarianism or discrimination for your accent, or anything like that?

No, no, I’m not, which I’m quite relieved about.

Yeah, absolutely, and have you ever tried to, like, I don’t know, seek out any, any other people from Ireland or Northern Ireland, like joined any community groups or anything, anything like that?

No, although it’s interesting that our, the church that I currently am a member in attracts quite a lot of Northern Irish students.

Oh okay.

So there’s not that many, there’s a couple of Northern, people I’m friendly with, they’re Northern Irish from sort of my generation, but it’s really interesting to speak to the eighteen, nineteen-year-olds, not ninety-year-olds, who come from, you know, sort of Cullybackey or Bangor or somewhere like that, and their, their mindset and their viewpoint is so completely post-Troubles, it’s fabulous to see.

So what do you mean by post-Troubles, as in they don’t, they just don’t have that baggage or knowledge, yeah?

They don’t have the baggage, they think it’s all history, they, they’ve grown up in an environment where cross-cultural engagement is the norm, they’ve got Catholic friends, Protestant friends, they, they play sport together, you know. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that when I was growing up was quite segregated, but now is, is being a lot more integrated. They don’t have the same sort of fear of public transport or being blown up in the shops, or, you know, it’s, all of that element of risk and stuff seems to be, is not there, is not in their experience at all, it might be in their parents’ experience, but not theirs, and so it’s really refreshing and, and quite, you know, hopeful really.

And I’m wondering, so you’ve obviously been away from Northern Ireland for a long time now, how clo-, how closely did you follow the news of the Troubles and things whilst you were in Scotland, did you follow it closely or were you kind of trying to detach yourself from it?

I, I followed it really closely. It was, you know, it was almost that sort of sense of, I doubt it was something, it’s something with dealing with my anxiety by listening to news reports, if you know what I mean, you know, so my anxiety was, is my dad going to get shot.

Yeah.

And therefore having an up-to-the-minute sort of refresh of the news reports on the radio several times a day was quite important to me. It wouldn’t have done anything in, in the case if he had been shot, you know, it’s not, it would have, it would have had no material effect, but it maybe helped to dumb my anxiety down a bit.

Sure, how long did your dad stay in the UDR for?

So he retired from it in about 1990.

Okay.

So he’d been in for nearly twenty years.

And was that kind of a relief when he stopped or not? Did you think about it much?

I think it was a, it was a particular relief for my mum. I think she was quite keen not to have him going out several nights a week and, and things like that. He still kept engaged and at, like, the alumni associations and things like that, he was, he didn’t go away from it completely, and he spent a bit more time gardening, but, you know, he still, he still kept working till his early sixties in doing teaching as well, he didn’t retire from that until, until he was over sixty.

And I’m wondering if you have any memories of the sort of events of the Troubles that happened in, in mainland Britain? So obviously there was nothing directly, there were no bombings in Scotland, but there was stuff happening over in England at that time and I’m wondering if, if you have any memories of that, or if people talked about that a lot when you were in Scotland?

So again, you know, I suppose with my wife being a Londoner, you know, some of the, the effect, the impacts in London were, were quite felt, you know, things like the, the one that was in the City, you know, that big bomb that basically redeveloped the whole of the, the whole of the City of London.

Yeah, in Canary Wharf and–

Canary Wh-, the Manchester, the Manchester bombing, we were in Manchester about four days before that, on holiday, things like the Hyde Park bombings, so there, there’s quite a lot of stuff that was just, oh goodness sake, and yeah, you’d, you’d probably tense for a bit of a, you know, would be a bit of a, not quite a backlash, but there would be, would’ve been some kickback on my accent or anything, you know, travelling, doing things like travelling into London on business, you know, would people hear your accent and go don’t trust you mate, move on. Nothing specific actually happened, but there was a, there was a level of anxiety there.

But you didn’t witness anything personally, no?

I didn’t witness anything, no.

Okay, and how do you think the, the British media in general kind of portrayed the Troubles? Do you think that it was sort of a balanced coverage, or, or was there misunderstanding there?

[laughs] That’s a bit of a leading question.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, exactly, it’s the British media, what can you say [pauses]. I think there was more balance in the British media than there was in the Northern Irish media, which was quite polarised, you know, there was the Newsletter versus the Irish News, you know, and they’d two diametrically opposed viewpoints, but if you look at some of the serious stuff in the Guardian or, you know, some of the other broadsheets I’d think there was a much more mature analysis and much more perspective in the British media. Ignore the redtops, they’re just redtops, but I think in the, in the more thinking papers I think there was a bit more nuance, bit more trying to grapple with what is really going on here, a bit more trying to find out what are the perspectives and the viewpoints that we need to have, that shed light on this situation, you know. I confess I’m a Guardian reader, so [01:20:00] that probably gives me a bit of a, there’s a bit of a [indecipherable] in there, but again, there’s some, and there’s some pieces that still, the Guardian’s good at publishing things that actually will challenge people’s perceived thinking, certainly challen-, kept challenging mine, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got particular journalists who, you know, Polly Toynbee and people like that who are, who are going, actually, we’ve got, I’ve got a completely different viewpoint to the one you grew up with, let me try and expose that viewpoint to you, and I actually have, personally I va-, I value that level of challenge because it really helps you evolve and crystallise your thinking.

And so you, do you take quite a keen interest in British politics and Scottish politics as well?

I do, yeah, yeah, and again, not involved in any political movements or anything like that, but I’m really interested in politics. I suppose as a civil servant I’m actually banned from being a member of a political party, but I’m, I’m pretty, I’m pretty left-leaning. In a Scottish context, I’m mildly pro-Union.

Yeah, I was going to ask if you still considered yourself a unionist?

In, in a Scottish context yes, in an Irish context no.

Okay, so would you consider yourself a nationalist in an Irish context then, or, or are you beyond labels?

Oh yeah, well, I would be open to the idea of a, of a, an all-Ireland Ireland if it was done in a way that, I think Seamus Mallon wrote a really good, good, his last book was, was really good on this, which is, if you end up with a settlement which is won by fifty point, fifty per cent of the population plus one and it’s then that fifty per cent rules the other forty-nine per cent, then you’ve failed because you’re not, you’re not providing equity, you’re not providing a recognition that there’s difference, that there are people who’ve got a diverging viewpoint, so, you know, you look at stuff like Brexit, like the Scottish independence, like, maybe an Irish border poll, if that’s a fifty-fifty choice then you’re effectively sidelining fifty per cent of the population, so how do you do something that’s participated, that says to, in an Irish context, there’s a, there’s a million people there who’ve maybe got a different identity, how do you make sure that that identity is recognised and rewarded and valued as part of a whole island context, so that you’re building a genuinely new society, an organisation that values that diversity, and I think that’s the challenge for, you know, European politics basically, you know, the, we’ve seen it with Brexit, we’ve seen it with the Scottish independence vote, there, there’s got to be something that brings people together rather than puts them into binary buckets.

That’s interesting.

And I think, and, and I suppose in, in many ways that’s my, my heritage is, is to be suspicious of nationalism, whether it’s Ulster nationalism, British nationalism, Scottish nationalism, Irish nationalism, nationalism as a concept is toxic to me because it tends to divide people. I, I suppose that’s my current settled position and I understand that Scottish nationalism is, is a civic nationalism and it’s not ethnic and it’s, but I, I’m always suspicious of that sort of thing.

Yeah, sure.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, abso-, absolutely, no, it’s a really interesting perspective, especially sort of given, given your background and I think it’s a really nuanced perspective as well, you know, it’s, it’s not just binary, I’m this or I’m that, which is, is interesting to hear.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think there is a, there is a bit of a culture of Northern Irish people like me who go I’m British and I’m Irish, and actually I’m probably partly Scottish and I’m probably partly Londoner, you know, there’s, there’s, we’re all a complex bit of, I’m a European, I’m definitely European, you know, there’s a real, you know, we can be all of these and one of them doesn’t push out all of the others.

Yeah.

It’s, it’s a proper mult-, you can hold multiple identities in tension.

Sure, absolutely. So I’ve, I’ve kind of got a few more questions just to kind of fill in the gaps as it, as it were. So you moved to, when you moved to Glasgow you carried on working in Aberdeen for a little while, with the, with the company that you started.

Yeah.

And then when did you get into the civil service?

So I, we sold our company to an, an American multinational in the late nineties, I had a three year lock-in employment deal with them, but I managed to get a leave of absence for the final year of that and I treated myself to a year at university studying programming, which is phenomenal. I really loved it, Glasgow uni, really good, you know, masters course in, in software development, and then out of a couple of job offers I ended up with a job offer from DFID, the Department for International Development, and I think at the time I was looking for something, you know, I’d, I’d done my time in the oil industry. I’d taken things out of the planet, is it time to begin to put something back and there’s something about the values-based job of working in international development that really appealed to me, I think it’s a really good opportunity. I’ve been there for eighteen years and I, yeah, it’s challenging and it’s, it’s, it’s got its ups and downs, but there’s something about being able to work for a global organisation that’s doing good is, is actually quite rewarding.

And do you, do you have any kids?

No, we don’t.

Okay.

Deliberate choice, we’re, we’re intentionally childfree.

Okay, yeah, absolutely, cos one of the questions that I usually ask is about whether people want to keep their kids in touch with Irish culture and stuff, but that, clearly not, not relevant for this particular interview.

Yeah, my, yeah, my, my nieces, I’ve got several, I’ve got two nieces in Ireland and two in England, my brothers’ kids, and the English ones have really, have quite kept in touch with their, their Irishness. They’ve both got Irish passports, they’ve, you know, they, they went to Irish dance classes as kids and things like that, so, you know, there is something about the, the diaspora, wanting to hold onto some of that heritage.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure, cos I’ve spoken to, to different people and some of them say they’re really keen for their kids to be, you know, visiting Ireland all the time and others kind of want to, especially with the context of sectarianism, they kind of want to keep the away from it, which is, is kind of interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

So we’ve, we’ve kind of touched on this already, but I’m wondering what your memories are of, of the peace process and the evolution, the evolution of that and things like the Good Friday Agreement and, and how you felt about that?

Yeah, so I was watching it from afar. I think I must have been in, I was probably in Glasgow at the time, remember, my, my dad was still alive then, so I remember having a few conversations with him and he was welcoming it, he was really looking, he, he was a bit, a bit wary, but he was, you know, he knew something had to, something had to happen and something had to improve, and he was willing to engage with it. I think both my parents voted for the Good Friday Agreement, unlike quite a lot of, you know, hardline unionists, so I think, I think that indicates their, their moderateness. I think one thing that really did it for my dad particularly was the Drumcree process back in the early nine-, I think they were early nineties, somewhere around then and the idea of the Portadown Orangemen insisting on their God-given right to walk down this particular street past Catholic houses and all the protests and stuff that, that were going on around that, I know some of the members of our local band went along and supported that protest and my dad was absolutely, adamantly against doing that. I think he’d had enough, I think he’d seen enough and was just, look, there’s got to be something more here, so I think there was some interesting conversations around those sort of things in the, in the early to mid-nineties.

And how do you feel now? Well, I mean, it’s kind of, it’s very topical cos we’re at that time of year right now. I’m wondering how you feel when you look back or, or look at events like the Twelfth now and, and things like Orange culture, what your perspective is on it now as someone who used to be involved with it quite heavily, but obviously hasn’t been for many decades? [01:30:00]

Yeah, I, I’ve got a really difficult relationship with it to be honest, because I, I just don’t, I don’t agree with the politics, I don’t agree with the, the stance of the Orange Order in terms of their Ulster nationalism effect, in effect their, you know, we’re special people, all that sort of thing. I don’t, I don’t get the, the sort of triumphalness of the whole thing, but I, there’s a, I’ve got a secret love of a country Twelfth and there’s something, and I keep, I actually keep it secret from my, you know, nearest and dearest really because it’s a bit embarrassing, you know, I like, I like a band, I like a silver band, I like a pipe band, you know, I like stuff where there’s a bit of, bit of music and, you know, I don’t know, pomp or whatever you call it, yeah, it’s, there’s that sort of, I quite like that aspect of it, but I don’t like some of the negative aspects of it and therefore it’s a bit embarrassing.

Yeah, I think that makes complete sense cos I mean, I’m not from Northern Ireland, but I’ve lived here a good few years and I’ve sort of, would also not necessarily agree with the politics and stuff, but I’ve, I’ve spectated on, you know, out of curiosity and, and I can sort of see the camaraderie and stuff, how that, how that would be appealing, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, you know, particularly, and particularly I think, you know, the country, it’s the, it’s the country Twelfth that is really my, my formative experience which is quite relaxed, quite, you know, local village fair-type atmosphere, you know, you’ve got, as a kid it was really exciting. I think, I think urban parades are, are a lot more, they’re harsher, you know, even as a kid growing up you think Belfast doesn’t represent what we do, Glasgow certainly doesn’t, so, yeah, it’s just.

Do you think, do you think the parades in Glasgow have a different character to the ones in Northern Ireland then?

Very much so, I think they’re, they’re delib-, no, I’m not going to say deliberately, I think they are much, there’s much more aggro, it’s much more about two fingers up at you lot, we’re going to do this cos, cos we can, that, that sort of, that’s the feeling that most Glaswegians get from it is, why are you doing this, you bigots, I’ve had a few conversations with people where I’ve said, you know, in the country, folks, it’s, it’s a wee bit different and, and you sort of get, nobody understands that sort of, that there could be something that is, is, is quite different, because it is seriously bigoted here.

I suppose in Glasgow that’s, that’s kind of the similar culture and the similar mindset that you’d get around things like the Old Firm as well and, and stuff, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, you know, whereas, yeah, and I’m not, I’m not saying there’s no bigotry in a country Twelfth, that’s, there is and it’s, you know, there’s, there’s subtext bigotry as well as open bigotry, but it’s, there’s a sort of different flavour to it. Put it this way, Brian O’Driscoll turned up at the last one, and, and was welcomed and included, I think that, it’s that sort of, he got a lot of flack for that as well, but there’s something about that, there is a bit more openness maybe.

And do you still go back to Northern Ireland a lot?

Not very often, I’ve not been back for a couple of years, I’ve got my, my youngest brother lives in Ballymoney and I do keep intending to go, I was intending to go back this summer, but Covid sort of has put paid to that so far. I would like to go back and spend a few days with him just to see my nieces grow up.

Sure.

Otherwise, it’s, it’s purely, it’s purely family.

Yeah, I kind of ask because I’m wondering if you’ve got a, have a sense of how Northern Ireland has changed in the, the years since you’ve left, like, the ways in which it’s different?

Yeah, I think, I think it’s, in, certainly in my experiences, you know, on short visits, yeah, and particularly places like north Antrim are, are actually quite normal, you know, I think places like Armagh have still got a, a sen-, there’s a sense of tension still in somewhere like Armagh because it is quite a mixed, you know, sort of bimodal community, I think in north Antrim it’s a bit more relaxed and it’s much more, you know, everybody cares about the Giant’s Causeway and the, and the beach at Portrush rather than, you know, trying to, trying to fight their territory, things like restaurants, cafés, that sort of thing, it feels a lot more, you know, it’s a lot more like Ayrshire, for example.

Do you think there’s ever any chance you might move back there?

Pretty much zero.

Okay.

I, I’ve never, I’ve never intended to move back, I, yeah, I wouldn’t, my, my next move is probably going to be to somewhere like Bristol.

Oh really, would that be a work move or just for something different?

It, probably closer to family, my, my wife’s family live in Hampshire and my brother lives in Devon.

Okay.

Bristol’s a really lovely place and I quite like it.

And kind of the final question that I ask people is, is where, where you consider home, now?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a really good question. Home is probably where my wife is, to be honest.

Right.

We’re the, we are the sort of the, the family unit. I don’t really have a, a sense of home home, as many Irish people do. I’m, I’m definitely Irish, I’ve got a strong sense of identity coming from, as we talked about in this, in this, this conversation, but it’s not a, it’s not particularly, yeah, I don’t have a big, big sense of home.

Yeah, well, that’s, that’s really interesting.

I feel, I feel like a migrant and I think I’m going to feel like a migrant wherever I am, because, you know, I’ve, I’ve got lots of friends, Glaswegians who are, they’ve got their families all around them. I’ve not had my family around me for the past forty years, my wife’s not had her family around her for the past forty years, yeah, I think moving, moving south to be a bit nearer family is a bit more trying to get back some of that, but again, I’ll still be a bit of an alien in somewhere I’m not, I’m not part of as such, and I think that’s just, that’s just, that’s just part of who, who I am and who I’m going to be.

Yeah, well, it’s just, just a consequence of, of people moving around, isn’t it.

Yeah, yeah, welcome to the twenty-first century.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I think that’s, that’s pretty much everything that I wanted to ask. I just wondered if there was anything else that you thought was important that you wanted to talk about, or that you thought we were going to talk about, that you wanted to add, it’s fine if there isn’t as well, I just, I just wondered.

No, I think, I think, part of the reason for me participating in this was I, I think, you know, I, I don’t know your other participants obviously, but I think something of, you know, I, I wanted there to be in this project a perspective from someone whose parent was part of the security forces, in a challenging part of the country as well, where it was actually, you know, there’s lots of murders and things like that, and just to make sure that that perspective was included in the, in the migration conversation, because I think that was a, as we said, there was a bit of a push factor of me getting out of that environment, but there’s also something about reflecting, me ref-, as we talked about, me reflecting back on how my identity has, my, my perception of my identity has changed by having an external perspective shine on, so I think that it’s, it’s, I just, I hope I’ve been able to contribute to this project by providing that perspective, you know. I’ve, I’ve come through a journey on this from little unionist kid to someone, hopefully I’ve got a bit more of a global perspective on this, but there was something formative about, I’m very proud of my dad being part of the security forces and proud of the work that he did, but there’s also something about me. There was a lot of stuff [01:40:00] going on that was very dark at that time as well, the security forces were not, they were not beacons of light, they weren’t paragons of justice, there were, there were people who were doing really bad, evil things in and members of the security forces at the time, so I think there’s a bit of tension in me which recognises my, my pride for my dad doing stuff, but also recognising that that’s not the, that might not be the full picture. There may be stuff that’s gone on that I don’t know about, there may be stuff that he never made me aware of and there’s certainly another story from people who come from a different background to mine that is really important to, to listen to and be aware of. I think that’s, there’s a, there’s something about, you know, having, trying to have a mature analysis of, of, of things from a distance is quite helpful, I, I was really struck last year, I read Seamus Mallon’s book, his, his last book where he outlines a lot of the, Seamus Mallon was a SDLP politician who my mum and dad both knew, he was a tea-, a, a primary schoolteacher from, he was Catholic, a Catholic primary schoolteacher in a, a hamlet about two miles away from where, where my mum and dad live, he was a contemporary of theirs in teacher training. They, they didn’t regard him as a friend, they regarded him as an opponent as such, not necessarily an enemy, but someone to be wary of, but you then read his book and you look at his book and his experiences, but look at it through the light of my mum and dad, they had almost identical growing-up experiences, but they’re from a completely different background, and to almost converge then on, hold on a minute, you know, these, there’s a coming together of these ideas, I think that’s really rich.

Yeah, yeah, that’s really interesting, and I think one of things sort of from our perspective that we’ve been really interested to find out from all the interviews is, is just how the migration journey has, has changed people and, and affected people’s perspective and that’s something that, that’s really come through in this conversation for sure, so thank you so much for, for taking part and it’s been, it’s been really great.

No, that’s been great, Jack, thank you, thank you for letting me ramble on a bit.

No, no, not at all.

I hope you, you get good material out of it.

Sure.