Fighting Halted, Irish Take Time to Grieve : Belfast: Cease-fire revives sorrow for loved ones killed or maimed during 25 years of sectarian strife.

Twenty years ago, Mina Wardle saw a youth digging people out of the rubble from an IRA bombing on the mainly Protestant Shankill Road.

On Oct. 23, 1993, she spotted him again in the same road, digging victims from a fish shop wrecked by an IRA bomb that killed 10 people.

“He must be 37 now, and he’s never got over the first bombing,” said Wardle, a psychologist who today helps counsel the young man. “Now, with peace, he is asking why it all had to happen. He’s agitated, and he can’t sit still.”

As Northern Ireland’s politicians haggle over Anglo-Irish peace plans, many in the province are battling the memories of 25 years of sectarian fighting--and adjusting to a cease-fire that came too late for them.

For many, peace simply tore open the wounds.

“In 25 years, some people have never received counseling, and the cease-fire reminds them of their loss,” said Wardle, who runs the Shankill Stress Group, a charity that offers free therapy.

Recent developments set many people, including the man on the Shankill Road, “off on a re-grieving process”--asking why peace did not come soon enough to save their loved ones, Wardle said. “We are seeing many of these people now.”

In all, her group has had 30% more calls for help since the Irish Republican Army began a cease-fire Sept. 1, she says. Protestant gunmen who support keeping Northern Ireland part of Britain started a truce of their own in mid-October.

The cease-fires ended the bombings and shootings that have killed 3,200 people and injured and traumatized many more.

The thousands of living victims include toddlers who saw their fathers mowed down by bullets, young men who have dug friends from bomb wreckage and taxi drivers hijacked by gunmen.

Many will bear physical--and emotional--scars until they die.

“For some people, it takes years . . . to sort things out. Our work will be going on for a long time,” said Oonagh Marron, project coordinator of the Falls Women Center in the predominantly Roman Catholic Falls Road area.

Geraldine Walford, a psychologist at the Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children, said a person’s initial reaction to violence is numbness and shock, then disbelief. “Then come the severe symptoms of stress, nightmares, anxiety, withdrawal, jumpiness and poor concentration.”

People have to accept that they cannot turn back the clock, said a social worker, Ann McCann.

“We don’t try to get them back to their old selves, but to help them adapt to what they now have,” she said.

McCann, trained in psychiatric social work, is part of a team of health and social workers who help violence victims of all persuasions in north and west Belfast. They joined to help relatives of the 46 people who died in January, 1989, when a jet bound for Belfast crashed in England.

Mary Wallace, who was working in her brother’s grocery store when that October, 1993, bomb wrecked the fish shop next door, approached McCann’s group for help with the anger that flared when she saw rescuers carry several of her friends, dead, from the rubble.

“Oh, yes, I had to have counseling, and that helped me cope with my anger,” she said as she weighed turnips and potatoes for customers.

“But the memory never leaves you,” Wallace said, her eyes blurred with tears.

Although welcome, peace has rekindled regrets.

“They died--but what for?” she asked.

Like many in the Protestant majority, she says the peace plan, with its talk of joint bodies with the mainly Catholic Irish Republic, offers Protestants little in return for the years of suffering.

“It’s all in favor of the republicans,” she said, referring to those who want to unite Northern Ireland with the republic. “We can’t let them have their way, no matter what.”

Wardle, known throughout the Shankill area for her single-minded campaign against suffering, set up the Shankill Stress Group in 1989 after bombers attacked her family home and business and gunmen shot a friend to death outside her front door.

Within three months of setting up a telephone help line, “we were getting 130 calls a night,” she said.

The team now holds group counseling sessions in a comfortably furnished office just off Shankill Road.

In a typical week recently, the team’s 11 volunteers and one paid coordinator organized counseling for about 130 people, made 89 home visits and took 104 calls on the 24-hour help line.

Amid the couches and potted plants, troubled people pour out their fears.

Wardle cites a 45-year-old widow still mourning a beloved husband killed in a butcher’s shop 18 years ago.

“She has been raising three children alone in difficult circumstances, and she has not had time to grieve,” she said. “Since the cease-fire, she has mourned. She’s all right for a while, then she breaks down in tears.”

Peace also has made it necessary to re-educate children accustomed only to violence “to respect each others’ cultures,” Wardle said.