The heft of history of course, weighs against Colin and Wendy Parry and their children Dominic, 15, and Abigail, 12. But a recent spate of brutal attacks–10 killed in an IRA bombing in October, seven killed by submachine gun in retaliation a week later–has heightened public outrage in the United Kingdom and Ireland over senseless violence. This month tens of thousands of Protestants and Roman Catholics demonstrated in 11 cities across Northern Ireland. They are urging their leaders to make peace between the Catholic radicals of the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries who now mimic their outrages. On Friday, British Prime Minister John Major is expected to meet with Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds in Dublin, the most hopeful augury in two years that a political settlement might somehow be found. Major has gone out on a limb lately by promising to talk to Sinn Fein, the IRAs political wing, if it credibly renounces violence. Reynolds has hinted that he might drop Ireland’s old constitutional claim to the North, one of the main reasons peace talks last broke down in early 1992. The Parrys, who’ve become a familiar feature in the English media, are cheering them on. They’ve helped found the Warrington Project, an effort to nurture grass-roots contacts across sectarian lines in Britain, Northern Ireland, Ireland and the United States. “It’s high time,” says Colin Parry, “for some big-gesture politics.”
The Parrys keep their gestures on a human scale. Last summer they met the widow and four children of Robert Dalrymple, 58, a Northern Irish carpenter gunned down by Protestant paramilitaries on the day Tim died of his massive head wounds. (The attack on Dalrymple and three fellow workers was viewed as revenge for the IRA bombing that had struck Tim five days before.) With everybody decked out in their careful Sunday best, the Catholic Dalrymples and the Protestant Parrys found they bad a lot in common. Remembers Colin Parry, “Mostly we cried together.” The Parrys are careful to maintain a certain symmetry in dealing with all parties to the conflict. For example, they want both the Catholic and the Anglican churches to deny terrorists a public Christian burial.
The Parrys find their toughest selling job, in some respects, on this side of the Atlantic. Visiting Boston, where roughly a fourth of the population is of Irish descent, they believed that Americans saw the conflict through some romantic fog of misty green meadows and old jigs. “They’ve got this simple-minded notion,” says Cohn. “They think it’s like 1921, with the [British] striding across Ireland with their heel on the throat of freedom.” They met one Irish-American woman who was convinced that Catholics in Northern Ireland didn’t have the right to vote. In fact, support for the IRA has evidently been declining in the United States. But the Parrys still found NORAID, which supports Irish republicanism but denies financing the IRA, remarkably unsympathetic to their tragedy.
Not so back home. The Warrington Project has attracted sponsors from Prince Charles to Mary Robinson, the popular president of Ireland, who both came to launch the crusade formally last month. (It’s the particular brutality of the Warrington bombing that helps explain the project’s appeal so far. The bomb, hidden inside a black metal trash bin in the heart of Warrington, killed Tim Parry, who was shopping for a soccer uniform, and also a 3-year-old boy; 56 people were injured.) As a start, the community aims to raise $750,000 from charities, businesses and the governments of both Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Wait a minute–peace in Northern Ireland? Whom are we kidding? Last week British intelligence and customs officers seized a huge shipment of arms from Poland, on its way to Protestant guerrillas in Belfast. The cache included 300 assault rifles, two tons of explosives, assorted handguns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “There’s a hard core…that will stop at nothing to defend what they think is theirs,” admitted Colin Parry. But the Parry family won’t stop at anything either. The Berlin wall fell, the Israelis and the Palestinians have shaken hands and blacks will soon rule South Africa. “Others with far greater obstacles of culture and religion have made so much more progress,” Parry points out. He has to believe it’s Northern Ireland’s turn next.
