Grieving in an Oasis of Friendship

In his living room on Railway Street, retired butcher Cecil Allen stares, without seeing, at a TV game show.

“Two boys gone like that,” he says. “If some good could come of it. . . . But . . .”

On Chapel Street, with a side table laden with cards of condolence from across the island and beyond, the house of garage owner Sean Trainor bursts with heartbreak.

“It’s good you reopened the garage today, or else the bastards have won,” a comforting neighbor murmurs.

Sean Trainor is not focusing. “Here,” he says. “I can’t believe it could happen here.”

Fathers lament dead sons in this weeping village, defenseless victim of outsiders’ hatred. Tragedy in Poyntzpass, population 400, as allegory for Northern Ireland: It captures the vicious sectarianism that blights this divided land--and the swelling resolve among everyday people to conquer it.

Philip Allen, Protestant, and Damien Trainor, Roman Catholic, were lifelong pals. They shared a love of cars and this lovely country village, which, against all odds, is an oasis of social cohesion unfettered by the strife that is the scourge of Northern Ireland.

This is a village where Protestants and Catholics amicably attend each other’s parades, often a source of great friction in most of the province. They cheer each other’s sports teams. For a while, the Catholic school and the state school, where Protestant kids go, sponsored a joint rugby team.

But in four minutes of terror last week, a Protestant and a Catholic died together, killed by masked terrorists who burst into the 125-year-old Railway Bar where Allen and Trainor were sipping soft drinks on an old mahogany church bench.

Allen, 35, was shot four times as he lay at the feet of militant Protestant gunmen who had no idea who their victims were and didn’t care. One shot to the head killed Trainor, 26. Two other patrons were wounded in the March 3 attack, one as he lay sheltering his 13-year-old daughter.

“I will see those two boys before me for all the rest of my days,” says pub owner Bernadette Canavan, gesturing to the place where they died in the tiny tap room. “If they came to shoot Catholics, they got their sums wrong. Six of the eight patrons were Protestant, counting the wee girl and three of the four men they shot.”

Their mourning relatives say the friends were unassuming men with no politics. Their friendship thrived through a mutual fascination with anything mechanical, four wheels or two.

Trainor drove the family’s tow truck in this village among rolling green hills that everybody here calls “the Pass.” Allen drove a truck for a cement company.

Allen was to have married later this year. Trainor was to have been his best man.

“Wherever Damien went, Philip went. Wherever Philip went, Damien would be there too,” says Coleman Trainor, an uncle.

Such nonchalant cross-community friendship is still remarkable enough in Northern Ireland to make the slain friends symbols of a search for a more tolerant society that political peace talks are meant to engender.

“There was nothing unusual here about Damien and Philip. My best mates are both Catholic and Protestant too,” says Helena Trainor, a cousin of the bereaved family. “We’ve been in and out of one another’s houses since we were kids, like our fathers and grandfathers before us. My grandfather recently died--it’s just as well he went before . . . this.”

‘So Safe We Became Unsafe’

Without realizing it, the Pass became an inviting target for extremists gambling that new violence, fresh pain, stoked anger will wreck the stuttering peace process sponsored by the British and Irish governments.

“This is the sort of place that must scare the hard men of violence. They are clawing like cornered animals,” says Father Brian Hackett, the local Catholic priest. “We were so safe that we became unsafe. Yet there are Philips and Damiens, Protestants and Catholics, getting on together all over Northern Ireland today.”

Hackett said the funeral Mass in St. Joseph’s Catholic church for Trainor. The whole village came. Then everybody went to Allen’s funeral at the nearby Presbyterian meeting house. Three Trainor sons helped carry the coffin. Hackett, another priest and the Catholic bishop--the primate of all Ireland--sat on the altar for the Protestant service.

“Whatever larger impact this tragedy may have, in the village it will certainly bring people closer together than ever,” says the Rev. Joseph Nixon, a Presbyterian minister.

“There has been social stability here for a long time. Maybe that’s one reason there is such harmony,” Nixon says. “When we have a death, no family is untouched.”

An overgrown canal and a stockyard for twice-weekly livestock sales are among landmarks of a village of four streets that straddles County Armagh and County Down, 12 miles north of the border with the Irish Republic.

The town of Portadown, to the north, is a stronghold for the Protestant extremists, known as loyalists, who want the province kept under British rule. Newry to the south is mostly Catholic republican. And the writ of the outlawed terrorist Irish Republican Army lies heavy over South Armagh.

Poyntzpass is different.

“Things were so normal we didn’t even realize we were abnormal. Now our secret is out. We feel exposed,” Hackett says in his church sacristy.

Killers ‘Not Fit to Walk the Earth’

The village itself is mostly Catholic, and the surrounding countryside is mostly Protestant--a microcosm of the six-county province whose sectarian violence has claimed 3,200 lives in the past three decades.

All three pubs in the Pass are Catholic-owned, but their clientele is mixed, as are civic groups such as the village Historical Society. Poyntzpass, named after a 17th century British army officer, is on the main rail line between Belfast and Dublin. Few trains stop. Few villagers mind.

“We’ve been trying to figure out why they came to the Pass to kill. Nobody can,” says Thomas Morrow, a Protestant who came home to retire after working 40 years in construction in the United States and Canada.

When the search for the killers began last week, Northern Ireland Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan spoke for many people in Northern Ireland, saying that the Poyntzpass murderers were “not fit to walk the same Earth as the people whose lives they have taken.”

On Wednesday, police charged four Protestant men in their 20s from the nearby town of Banbridge with the killings. Villagers believe that one of the accused might have worked on a road repair crew here a year or two back.

A relative handful of shadowy Protestant terrorists, who have no connection to any party at ongoing peace talks, have killed more than half a dozen Catholics in the province so far this year. Their goal is to provoke retaliation by Catholic terrorists and thus trigger a new cycle of violence.

Maverick Catholic terrorists do the same thing--they fired homemade mortar rounds at a police station in the city of Armagh this week--and no one will be surprised if the violence accelerates as a planned May referendum on new political structures approaches.

“When the Protestant killers go hunting, there is usually not any specific target. Any Catholic will do,” says a senior police officer in Belfast.

‘It’s Like We All Lost Two Sons’

Across Northern Ireland, there are Protestant bars and Catholic bars. Except in places like Poyntzpass, rarely do the lines cross.

The killers did some homework, but not enough. They timed their attack so that their escape would not be blocked by trucks loading livestock from the evening sheep sale, or by the barriers at the rail crossing on the Poyntzpass-Banbridge road. What they did not realize is that, in the Pass, villagers do not choose their friends by religion; they drink with whomever they please.

“Learning they killed a Protestant, they’d shrug and say that it was his own fault--he shouldn’t have been there. They are those sort of people,” the Belfast police officer says.

But that sort of logic fails to convince Northern Ireland today. An overwhelming majority on all sides tell pollsters that they crave peace. Here in the Pass, sadness now powers the same thirst.

“It’s like we all lost two sons,” says Robert Turner, a dairy farmer and local Protestant politician.

“We’ve always tried to support one another here. There is a great neighborly tradition. We like it as such,” says Tom Canavan, a cattle dealer and Catholic politician. “Now we have to try to get on with it.”

Amid the hurt have come extraordinary symbols of healing. Poyntzpass bisects the districts of two of the province’s most senior politicians and old foes, Protestant David Trimble and Catholic Seamus Mallon. They came together to share the Pass’ sorrow, “something that could not have happened even a couple of years ago,” in the judgment of Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary.

Trimble says he was “ashamed to think” that the killers were Protestants. “All they are doing is killing off the hope we are trying to engender,” he says.

Mallon calls the victims “symbols of what is good in Northern Irish life. . . . On the other hand, you have the manifestation of evil in the shape of those who killed them. It is the counterpoint between the good and the evil of what we saw in Poyntzpass which will be the lasting lesson.”

On Chapel Street, mourners gather in the Trainor living room. Sean Trainor, a father missing his son, has come over from the garage to be polite, but he has forgotten to take off his coat and he isn’t really listening.

“This must end. There has to be an end to it,” Trainor murmurs to himself and to a land that has bled too long.