Harold Good’s family had experience with paramilitary guns long before the Methodist preacher ever found himself standing in cold farm sheds in 2005 watching the destruction of IRA weaponry.
His grandfather, Isaac was one of hundreds of Ulster Volunteer Force men who landed arms at Larne on the Antrim coast in 1912 to fight Home Rule: “He was prepared to fight the British to stay British,” writes Good.
In 1922, a fortnight after the start of the Civil War, his uncle and aunt in Dungarvan, Co Waterford, supplied £70-worth of boots, laces, shirts and socks to the anti-Treatyite IRA commander, Pax Whelan. He still has a copy of the invoice.
During the height of the IRA’s 1956/1962 border campaign, his Enniskillen-based father, RJ, who was then president of the Methodist Church in Ireland, argued face-to-face with the IRA leadership in Dublin against the use of violence.
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Now, Good, one of the witnesses to the IRA’s decommissioning in 2005, has written In Good Time, “a sure and true guide” to the challenges of peacemakers, to quote former president Mary McAleese.
Conversation in Good’s home, with his Waterford-born wife, Clodagh, is frequently interrupted by Judy, a 10-year-old Border Terrier still learning to forgive her owners for having gone away on a cruise to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary.
The house played a significant role in ending The Troubles, with people such as Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, unionist Jeffrey Donaldson, loyalist paramilitaries and scores more unnamed getting to know each other around the kitchen table.
“The only rule was ‘talk, truth and trust’,” says the now 87-year-old Good.
The first thought that occurs to a visitor is: how did the conversations stay secret in a house nestled on a lane by the side of the Belfast/Hollywood railway?
We’re on the defensive because deep down we know that it’s a bit like being in the second half of the game. We’re two down and we’re playing against the wind
“There was one occasion when I was nervous. I noticed workmen on a roof. I thought, ‘Those guys, they’re looking to see what’s happening.’ But folks were careful and always made sure to come and go at different times,” he says.
Mostly the meetings – fuelled by pots of tea and Clodagh’s scones – took place at the back of the house around the kitchen table, looking out through patio doors on to a garden that is not overlooked.
Good returned to Northern Ireland after spending several years in the US to take up a post in August 1968 in Agnes Street church on Belfast’s Shankill Road just as the Civil Rights campaign began.
Even now, he wonders if “an open-hearted and generous response” from unionists, backed up by resolute leadership from Protestant churches, could have drowned out the “Not An Inch” rants of Rev Ian Paisley.
[ In Good Time review: Methodist minister casts light on peacebuilding by churchOpens in new window ]
Growing up in Derry, he confesses that he was “ignorant” about Catholics’ “legitimate grievances”, but, equally, he did not fully understand until he went to live on the Shankill Road how the Protestant working class were taken for granted by unionist politicians.
They were “unaware that they were as deprived as any nationalists, or Catholics”, lived in housing that was just as bad, “yet they still spent many laborious hours repainting the red, white and blue railings”.
Remembering the Bombay Street attack in August 1969, he recounts how “an invading loyalist mob” set fire to houses and drove “a whole street of Catholics out” in one of the worst sectarian attacks “in living memory”.
He visited the scene the morning after, accompanied by Fr Des Wilson, and offered help. On the Sunday, he told his Agnes Street congregation of the need for clothes and “baby things” among their Catholic neighbours.
As they left, his congregation, most of whom had little, pressed money into his hand – £70 in all. Soon he had “a full carload of clothing and baby gear” – “a tangible expression of care and concern from a Protestant congregation on the Shankill”.
Throughout, young men from both sides were weaponised by others, including on the Protestant side by Ulster Vanguard leader Bill Craig, who had been Stormont’s minister for home affairs until he was dismissed by Terence O’Neill.
Afterwards, Craig and others drilled young Protestants on the Shankill Road, leaving them with “good reason to believe that they were being enlisted to serve and protect their community in a time of crisis”.
Years later, when he was a chaplain in Crumlin Road Jail, Good sat in a cell with two of the so-called Shankill Butchers, William Moore and Robert Bates, moments after they had been given full life sentences for killings, barbaric even by the standards of the time.
Both men had taken part in the Craig parade: “Behind their balaclavas I would not have recognised [them], but they had remembered me and told me how they wished to God they had listened to me.
“‘We thought we would get medals,’ they said, ‘but instead we’ve got life,’” recounts Good, who later received a beautiful, hand-tooled leather cover for his Bible from the two killers. Bates was released in 1996 and Moore in 1998.
Even today, Good believes that the people of Northern Ireland – both Catholics and Protestants and those from such backgrounds who are no longer practising believers – have not fully faced up “to the history of this place”.
Some Protestants “deny the history of what their part of the community inflicted upon another. We’re not about to acknowledge that from within the Protestant unionist community. There’s always the ‘Ah, but’”, he says.
Meanwhile, some of those from a republican background “are hesitant to say we should not have done what we did. They will sometimes – and this is as close as they get to it – regret the hurt and the pain.
“They’re very reluctant to say, to accept that there was an alternative to violence. They’re very reluctant to say that,” says Good.
Having spent decades working quietly, if not always in the background, Good became internationally known as a witness to the IRA’s decommissioning following a November 2004 telephone approach from McGuinness.
Nearly a year passed. In mid-September 2005, he travelled to Dublin to meet Fr Alec Reid. Left with hours to kill, he went to Christ Church Cathedral, joining worshippers for bread and wine in the daily Eucharist.
Even today he is obliged by confidentiality, but he fills in some of the “colour” surrounding the days that followed, including meeting senior IRA figures in the Redemptorists’ Marianella house in Rathgar in south Dublin.
Though they were not blindfolded, he and Reid travelled in the back of a van without windows to meet the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning head, Canadian General John De Chastelain, “nobody’s fool”.
He shared a bedroom with Fr Reid for the next few days.
Everything had been prepared, including boiler suits, wellingtons, a well-stocked wash bag, along with “a more than ample supply” of spare clothing, including socks and underwear, “all perfectly sized”.
Before lights out on the first night, the two said their nightly prayers, with Good sharing the text of Paul to the Ephesians, 6:10 -18, which speaks of “the sword of the Spirit” being “shod with the good news of peace”.
Thus armed, the two men slept.
In the days ahead, they travelled to multiple locations, with “anxiety” growing at one stage about the amount being destroyed compared to the intelligence about the IRA’s arsenal. By the end, the gap was “significantly narrowed”.
With the destruction of each weapon, Good “thanked God” that it would no longer kill, or maim, but he knew, too, that the forensic evidence that could jail those who used them was being destroyed, too: “We live in a messy world,” he says.
Quite honestly, if I was fixated on a united Ireland, I’d be saying, ‘Let’s build this place to be a happy, contented, successful entity in its own right.’ Then, it would have something to bring to the table
Throughout the week, a young man had been present everywhere they were. So much so, he had become “part of the scenery” by the end, with everyone “indifferent to his presence”.
On the last day, he stepped forward: “His role in this drama became clear. In best military tradition, with his rifle over his shoulder, he walked up to the general, stood smartly to attention, saluted, and handed him his weapon.
“The silence of this moment which descended upon us was broken when Father Alec whispered into my ear, ‘there goes the last gun out of Irish politics’. What a moment!” he says.
Good did not doubt then, or since, the sincerity of those involved or their regret for a “bloody and senseless conflict” … “they did not want their children and their children’s children or anybody’s children to live through what they had lived through”.
Speaking as “a Derry boy with a west Cork father, a mother from Armagh and a Waterford wife”, Good believes that he “inherited a more than usual understanding of the whole of this island and its histories”. And it is Derry, not Londonderry. Growing up, everyone he met, including Protestant family and neighbours, called the place Derry. In his memoir, he adds an apostrophe, ‘Derry “out of respect for those who call it Londonderry to express their British identity”.
With his all-Ireland connections in mind, he believes that it is Protestants, not Catholics, who are today unsure. Looking to inter-faith marriages – known as “mixed marriages” in the past – Good says Catholics accept them “much more easily”.
“Is that because we’re on the defensive? We’re on the defensive because deep down we know that it’s a bit like being in the second half of the game. We’re two down and we’re playing against the wind.”
Many Protestants and unionists were, and “some still are slow learners” about why Catholics felt the way they did about Northern Ireland, given the discrimination that they endured.
“I think the reverse is also true. People in the nationalist Catholic community need to begin to understand the fears and feelings of Protestants and unionists if we’re going to talk about the future of this island.
“Yes, it’s about the fear of a loss of identity, the loss of control, but it’s about an overall sense of anxiety,” he says, urging those who most want a united Ireland to first build a successful, happy Northern Ireland.
“Quite honestly, if I was fixated on a united Ireland, I’d be saying, ‘Let’s build this place to be a happy, contented, successful entity in its own right.’ Then, it would have something to bring to the table.”
Bringing an unsuccessful, unhappy Northern Ireland to unity, however, will achieve little: “If I were in the South, I’d be a bit worried about that. And my Southern relatives would be worried about that. And they would be Protestants by and large.”
In Good Time: A Memoir, is published by Orpen Press
