Alistair Little
THERE is more than one map of the city of Belfast. As Alistair Little drives, he's reading from one which is invisible but lies just beneath the surface, imprinted collectively on minds and memories. Here: a pub where a bomb killed seven. There: a bookmakers where five men were shot.
Little also has his personal map. Streets where he fought in riots in his home town of Lurgan, 20 miles from here. Garages where he helped make homespun explosives. And the house where, one night in October 1975, he fired five shots through a window, killing the man silhouetted inside.
Little was 17, and a member of the UVF. He'd been involved in the conflict since he was 12, stealing milk bottles to use as petrol bombs. Shortly after the shooting, he was caught and spent the next 12 years in jail, most of it in the infamous Maze Prison.
I know all this, but it's hard to square it with the mild-mannered man in the driving seat who has a kindly voice, watchful grey-green eyes and thinks carefully before answering a question.
Today, Little works in conflict transformation, working with individuals and groups in South Africa, Kosovo, Israel as well as in Northern Ireland. His story has been told in an award-winning film, Five Minutes of Heaven, starring Liam Neeson, and in his book, Give A Boy A Gun. He has exchanged his commitment to violence for a commitment to peace.
We drive slowly up the Shankill Road where red, white and blue bunting is fluttering, a remnant of the marching season. Every second shop has a Union Jack, a sectarian slogan. Murals pledge loyalty to the Queen, commemorate the dead. "Imagine growing up with that in your face every day," Little says, quietly. "How do you grow up normal when that's all around you?"
A few minutes later, when we pull into a housing estate, the tenor subtly changes. Little is immediately watchful, uncertain. We've crossed an invisible threshold into Republican territory.
We're here to pick up his friend Gerry, a boisterous coiled spring of a man who talks constantly. A former paramilitary with the INLA, the radicals to the Left of the IRA, he was jailed when he was 19 for his part in planting a bomb in Belfast city centre. This is where he grew up. He points out the row of houses facing the main road where "we shot at the British".
The friendship between the former UVF man and the former INLA man says everything about the journey both men have taken. Had they met 20 years ago, neither would have hesitated in killing the other. Now they work together in the cause of peace, as well as being drinking buddies and teasing each other mercilessly.
"You're driving like a woman!" protests Gerry (who is also a taxi driver) as Little picks his way through the narrow streets of the estate. "If I'd known you were going to drive like this I'd have taken my taxi, even if it meant we couldn't talk." "If I'd thought it would shut you up," counters Little, quietly, "I would have brought the taxi!"
Gerry met Little at a workshop at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the Wicklow mountains. "And I had a few things to say to him, f***** murderin' bastard." And he said them, and Little respected his honesty. Though he didn't know it at the time, Gerry was taking the first steps towards conflict resolution. Not everyone accepts their friendship. This is still a city of divisions where everything, from the newspaper you read to the place you live, identifies which side you're on. "Some people would say that it's fine to have a working relationship," says Little. "But friendship in some people's minds is a step too far."
What makes a young man turn to violence? Little believes this is a key question for our times, it's one of the reasons he wrote his book. And it's complex. Little talks about belonging to a group, the sense of shared purpose, the suspicion of the other which is fed by political leaders.
Often there is a story that tips the balance – when Little was 12 he attended the funeral of a friend's father who was shot by the IRA. "But it doesn't have to be personal. If a Protestant was killed in Belfast, we still felt that they were our people. That would be the same for a young Muslim, whether it's people dying in Iraq or Afghanistan, or people being disrespected in another part of the world, wanting to do something about it." Now we're on Gerry's map of Belfast: the mural he helped to paint to commemorate the INLA hunger strikers; Milltown Cemetery with its well-kept IRA plot; the Bobby Sands mural on the Falls Road where tourists are taking photos. "People from other countries want to see things like that," says Little. "But it's really about people being killed and maimed and families destroyed." He has very few landmarks he wants to show me.
But both want to show me the "peace lines", towering metal walls which mark the invisible dividing lines between Protestant and Catholic areas, with immense gates which are closed at night. It's not that they're needed to stop people killing each other on a nightly basis, Little explains. But there is a rogue element. It only takes a spark to start a forest fire.
Residents of the affected areas have voted to keep the walls. It's a reminder that decades of hurt and suspicion won't be erased overnight. Politicians speak only of the future, but the past lurks just beneath the surface like an angry ghost.
"For me, the problem is not the wall," says Little. "It's like the Berlin Wall, it could come down overnight, the problem is the wall that's in people's minds. The violence has ceased but the reasons and causes of the conflict still exist. There are people and causes that don't want change. I don't believe in that term 'closure'. There can be a degree of healing, but there can never be complete healing. How can there be? But I do think mechanisms can be set in place that can help to recover the truth to some degree. You don't understand a conflict, you don't understand human cost and consequences by burying it. On a very personal level, it will take a lifetime for me to come to terms with and understand my involvement, the consequences. It can't be a superficial thing or it won't be sustainable."
Conflict transformation is messy. It has to do with coming face to face with your enemies, seeing the human in them, realising afresh the human in yourself, deeply, viscerally understanding what you have done to one another. Little is slow to use words like "reconciliation" or "forgiveness", they are too easy to say.
Five Minutes of Heaven, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the Oscar-nominated film Downfall about the last days of Hitler, imagined a meeting between Little and Joe Griffin, the brother of the man he killed. Based on extensive interviews with both men, the fictional meeting was difficult and violent. Asked what would happen if they were to meet, Griffin had replied: "Well, I'd take a knife and have my five minutes of heaven."
Little is not surprised. "It wasn't pleasant but it was valuable in that I was able for the first time to get an understanding at depth of the consequences of my actions, on a whole family not just an individual. Some people are disappointed that there's no forgiveness or reconciliation, but there was a change in each of us (as a result of making the film), a positive change."
When he first became a peace-maker, Little was looking for peace in himself. He has gradually reached the view that he'll never find it. He will live all his life with what he has done. Yet, paradoxically, this is also what gives him a platform for the work that he does. As Griffin put it in Five Minutes of Heaven: "He swans around the world telling people what it feels like to kill a man."
"That comment is a reality for Joe and his family. For me, I came to the decision that I had a choice, to use the experiences that I have had and what I've learned from that to do something positive, or to forget about it and just disappear and get on with life. I felt that it was something that I had to do."
Now, we are in Short Strand, a little Republican enclave in a Loyalist part of town. The towering peacelines cast shadows on people's gardens; above them a Union Jack flutters, like a taunt. "Can you imagine what it's like to live with that in your face?" asks Gerry.
By now, the pair have been talking to me – at me – for three hours. "See how intense we are about it?" says Little. "It consumes you." He sometimes wonders about moving away from Ireland for a year "to a country cottage, within walking distance of a village pub, in a place of peace... to see if there's an Alistair that can live outside the context of extreme conflict, and to discover what he thinks and feels."
Does he have hope for Northern Ireland? "I'm optimistic and hopeful that we will eventually find a place where we can live with with our differences, and value those differences and respect them. But it's a long-term thing, it will take generations."
Driving back into the centre of Belfast, an argument breaks out about navigation. "Where the f*** are you going? How long have you lived in this city and you still don't know where you are?" I leave them bickering and laughing, the two men who once wanted to kill each other, and now hold between them a fragile thing one might dare to call peace.
• Alistair Little is at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Monday 31 August at 6.45pm. Give A Boy A Gun, by Alistair Little with Ruth Scott, is published by Darton, Longman & Todd.
