WHEN I was young lad of about 10 my father was working nights. On one of those nights I recall sitting with my mother and my siblings around the big, brown radio player we had then.
We sat there for hours as the news unfolded bit by bit and we hoped against hope that our father would get in touch.
For on that night in 1974 so-called representatives of my community had gone in to two Birmingham pubs and leaving bombs there had killed 21 people out having a drink and injured 182 more.
The November 21 Birmingham bombings affected my community for decades to come, affected my whole experience of what it was like to be Irish.
It created a bitterness and tension between us and the local population that took many, many years to go away.
Around that time, in the days that followed, my mother took me to a funeral in our church of one of the people killed in the bombings, the son of Donegal parents.
For a long time too my father had to face hostility at work from people who’d known him for years and my mother had to hope that when she went to the shops that she didn’t have to open her mouth very much and let her accent giver her away as Irish.
The idea that my mother and father and countless other mothers and fathers across the Irish community of that English city should be held responsible or be blamed or even feel the need to apologise for the events of that terrible night is bizarre.
Even, indeed, those who had sympathy with nationalists in the north, who saw the injustices there, who had a romantic attachment through song and story to the old IRA, even they didn’t support that night in Birmingham.
Quite clearly, in fact, one of the collateral victims of the IRA’s actions that night was the Irish community in Britain.
The wrecked interior of the Mulberry Bush pub in Birmingham after the explosion of the bomb Picture: Wesley/Keystone/Getty ImagesThat church where all those years ago we went to the funeral of the young Birmingham Irish lad who, along with his brother, was one of those killed by the pub bombings is now a predominantly Muslim area.
The Irish have moved on and others have come in. That is the nature of inner city areas, of immigrant streets, that a new wave of immigrants is always waiting.
So now do the people of those streets who will have experienced discrimination and brute racism, but who no more support the actions of ISIS than my community supported the IRA, must they all be suspect?
Must they all see bitterness and resentment and tension sour their lives in that city the way it did for the Irish?
The IRA chillingly and accurately coined the phrase after the attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher in Brighton that ‘we only have to be lucky once, you have to be lucky all the time.’
Those words in effect describe how terrorism works and why it is so powerful and damaging.
People attending last year's memorial service at Birmingham Cathedral to mark 40 years since the Birmingham pub bombings where 21 people died and 182 were injured. Picture: Getty ImagesIt may go on to hang over our shared lives for a long, long time and whilst it is almost impossible to see what ISIS actually want to achieve apart from killing and mayhem something needs to be done about disaffected young men and women in western cities so alienated by discrimination and bigotry that they see ISIS as the answer.
But the idea that the average Muslim, working alongside you, living alongside you, travelling to and from work alongside you, and shopping alongside you is in some way responsible for ISIS or applauds what they do is as far off the mark as blaming all of the Irish for the IRA.
To look at the Muslim world and hold it responsible for ISIS and for the actions of ISIS simply makes no sense.
It is liking holding the victims of murder responsible for being murdered.
It is, in fact, like holding the frightened Irish households in Birmingham on that night in 1974 responsible for the carnage, holding that Donegal family responsible for the killing of their two sons.
There will be ways that ISIS can be defeated and ways that justice can be brought to areas like Syria and Iraq just as the intractable violence in the North was slowly, slowly defeated.
Love, peace and tolerance. Liberty, equality, fraternity. That’s how we win.
