ON SUNDAY my 12-year-old son ventured off with his football team to watch the Republic of Ireland match in Dublin. The boys were so excited to be travelling to see their heroes and for many of them, it was their first foray into the football stadium environment.
I knew it would be something my boy would remember forever but the horrific London attacks had happened just the night before and the suicide attack at the Ariana Grande concert just two weeks before that, and I was nervous, despite the fact that security was heightened and the chance of an attack was small.
When we were growing up we lived with an obviously increased and heightened understanding of violence. Like many people, I don't remember the 'heightened' part: we were born into the violence and it was our normal. Our mothers and fathers knew peace before the Troubles and knew that by even sending us out to school, or allowing us to go into town with our friends could end in tragedy. It was the way it was.
I remember when I was a teenager, telling my mum that I was going over to my friend's house. She asked me not to go, because there was terrible rioting near where my friend lived. I think I told her that I'd 'be grand' as I swung the door behind me, because when you're a teenager you're invincible. There was a riot. There were hundreds of people throwing bricks outside my friend's house. There were soldiers everywhere and riot police, and flaming barricades and shots fired. But we sat in her room listening to – don't judge me, now – Bros tapes and singing into her hairbrush like we were on Top of the Pops, eating cheese toasties.
I vividly remember my mother and father being worried about us in our late teens as we frequented the bars that could have been the target of indiscriminate loyalist gun attack. But they never told us not to go out and celebrate birthdays, toast successes and enjoy life as normal. They just hoped and prayed that their children wouldn't be caught up in the carnage that visited many places and many families every week.
I thought of my mother and father as I waved my child off on the bus to Dublin. And I thought of the tragic young faces of those who lost their lives at the Ariana Grande concert. And I thought of their devastated mothers and fathers paying tearful tribute to them on the news all week. And I thought of the people who went out to enjoy themselves in London on Saturday night who will never go home.
As parents we want to wrap our kids up in cotton wool to protect them. We want to hold them in our arms and keep them safe always. If I turned up the mammy neurosis meter just a notch I would have taken my child off that bus and never allowed him out of the house again, to protect him from the big, increasingly bad world. But that's not how I want me or my kids to live.
There are bad people out there, intent on hurting others and causing death and destruction all over the world to further their cause. There are world powers who rain down bombs on innocent children in cities none of us have ever heard of to further their cause. The world is broken and we have to get used to this new normal.
Unfortunately in some ways growing up under severe and constant threat, like most of us did here, has prepared us well for this modern age of violence, when death and destruction can visit us without a moment's notice.
Our normal is now the constant threat of terror, of wondering how to stay safe, if we are going home tonight, if our children are going to be OK. This is unfortunately the normal we are handing down to our children. Our job as parents is to raise children who understand that violence and hatred, killing and bombing, no matter what the cause, never ever works.
Hopefully you'll join me in instilling empathy, understanding, courage and love in our children, so that perhaps the future might not be as dark as the days we have ahead.
