Entertainment

Tony Doherty: 'I regret the childhood that I should have had'

In his second memoir, The Dead Beside Us, Tony Doherty recounts his journey from his father’s killing on Bloody Sunday to becoming an IRA activist and would-be bomber. Joanne Sweeney asks if, having been instrumental in the campaign to clear the victims’ names, he still has a desire for revenge

Former IRA man and Bloody Sunday justice campaigner Tony Doherty's new memoir is The Dead Beside Us<br />Picture: Margaret McLaughlin
Former IRA man and Bloody Sunday justice campaigner Tony Doherty's new memoir is The Dead Beside Us
Picture: Margaret McLaughlin
Former IRA man and Bloody Sunday justice campaigner Tony Doherty's new memoir is The Dead Beside Us
Picture: Margaret McLaughlin

OUR lives can change in an instant, for the better or for the worse, as Derry writer Tony Doherty, whose new memoir recounts how he evolved from grieving son to IRA activist, knows only too well.

The Dead Beside Us: A Memoir of Growing up in Derry, begins in the cold days of February 1972 just after Doherty’s father Patsy had been shot dead by a British soldier, one of 14 innocent civilians killed on Bloody Sunday.

Even the massive pot of broth his granny habitually kept on the stove could not satisfy the strange physical hunger that the then nine-year-old Doherty experienced in those dark days, missing his father and not knowing why he was dead.

“We grew up never knowing why or how my father was shot, and this was compounded by Lord Widgery branding all those who had been killed on the day as being responsible for their own deaths,” he says now.

“When you grow up with that in your mind, going from having an idyllic family life, even though it was a poor, working-class Catholic, then to everything being changed, it does something to you.

“I’ve always drawn a direct line between my experiences as a young child in losing my father and my decision to join the IRA in 1980. It was the primary cause of me e nding up in prison.”

As Doherty vividly and candidly relates in his straight-to-the-point prose, his hunger for vengeance was great.

Nine years after Bloody Sunday he was sent, as an IRA member, to firebomb a furniture store in his home city; within days, he was arrested.

He spent his first day in prison, at Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail in March 1981, just as Bobby Sands began his hunger strike.

Upon his release four years later, he started a grassroots campaign to call for a public inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which culminated in clearing his father and all those who died as innocent victims, and an apology from the then British prime minister, David Cameron.

It was a long journey, with many twists and turns.

“In my second book, I’ve written about the hatred I had. I remember on the day of my father’s funeral going back to my granny’s house having distinct thoughts that this is totally wrong, and I would do something about it when I came of age,” says Doherty.

“That thought remained with me throughout my teenage years and young adult life, so I definitely had hatred in my heart for the soldier who killed my father and for the rest of the soldiers who committed the atrocity on Bloody Sunday.

“That only goes to show that violence begets violence.”

Yet, there’s more to The Dead Beside Us than a gritty account of coming of age in a conflict; Doherty shows us Derry in the 1970s against the background of normal adolescent fun: watching Scooby-Doo cartoon s and listening to David Bowie and the Bay City Rollers.

And even in the most dismal of times, there is life, love and the craic that only a teenager can have in the Brandywell where he grew up.

Doherty says that he does not regret joining the IRA but is relieved that he was arrested after his first operation and was in jail during the height of the IRA campaign in the 1980s.

“For me, I think my history was predetermined by my experiences as a nine-year-old, so if there’s regret, I do regret having a different childhood to what I should have had.

“The loss of a father is a massive event in anybody’s life but when the loss is accompanied by a vacuum in terms of truth and justice, those twin negatives have a profound effect on someone, particularly on a young man like myself.”

The writer says that, just as he rediscovered his relationship with his father from writing his first book This Man’s Wee Boy, this latest book helped him to reconnect with his formative years as an adolescent growing up in an abnormal existence where bombings and gun battles were part of the norm.

“I’ve written it in the first instance as a way of understanding my own path, which is essentially what memoir is about,” he says.

“But also to provide people with an insight into what my life was like both in a typical form and atypical form.

“I don’t write my books out of a sense of recrimination and it’s not indulgent or polemic either. I write from a purely observational stance, as a participant.

“I don’t add in stuff to make the reader feel better or worse. In terms of loss, I quite readily identify with all those who have been killed, regardless of who they were, as all grief is equal.”

Now in his 50s, Doherty says he no longer has hatred in his heart, but he knows his book will be an uncomfortable read for many victims and survivors of the conflict.

“When I began to mature, I recognised that hatred is something that eats at yourself and not the subject matter of what you hate.

“I don’t really have any feelings towards him [the soldier who killed his father] at all. Now, at 54, if I had an opportunity to kill him, would I?

“I wouldn’t spare a second thought on it and I would walk away.”

Doherty is tentatively working on a third book, which he says will focus on his campaign to get justice for his father and the 13 other victims of Bloody Sunday.

:: The Dead Beside Us is published by Mercier Press, priced £10.30 / €14.99.