Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
MRS JANET
HUNTER
21 FEBRUARY 2005
Q220 Chairman: What happens if one person
comes?
Mrs Hunter: If one person comes
they are a person but they also bear the family name. We have
147 family names at this time but we are upgrading our database
so there will be a few more.
Q221 Chairman: So there are about 150
groups?
Mrs Hunter: Yes, 150 families.
Q222 Chairman: Are you still communicating
with all of them?
Mrs Hunter: Yes, we are. What
we did a few months back with families who came to us initially
and we have helped them and they have moved on was to divide them
off from families we are working with now. If I counted the families
we have put into our dead zone then I would say about 250 families.
I tend to try and move families on rather than hold on to them,
rather than say, "We are the biggest group in Northern Ireland
because we have got so many members". I tend to gear everybody
to doing what we can for the family and allow them to move away.
If later on they require us again they know they have an open
door to come back to.
Q223 Chairman: Could you tell us a little
bit about your memorial garden project?
Mrs Hunter: I felt that in Lisburn
there was nowhere for families to come together, or even to come
quietly and sit and remember the person who had died or the time
that they were hurt, so I got together with Mr Jeffrey Donaldson
MP and Mr Ernest Knox Architect. Ernest very kindly drew up the
plans for the memorial garden. If I had known I could have brought
the drawings with me. In it I asked that there be no emblems,
no names, that it would just be a memorial garden to our troubled
times. That would mean that anybody in Northern Ireland or in
the Province would be able to walk into the garden and be able
to feel completely at ease because there would be nothing there
except perhaps a piece of scripture, because nobody minds scripture.
That would be the only thing and everybody could go in and sit
in their own time and space. There is a light in the middle of
the water. There is a ring of water and in it a pond and a light
comes out of the pond and it shines up and that is shining a light
to the future. It is trying to draw people into a healthier feeling
about themselves and about their community.
Q224 Chairman: At what stage is that
project?
Mrs Hunter: Lisburn Borough Council
have dug their heels in and they are saying they are not sure
whether they own the land or not that we require to put the garden
onto.
Q225 Chairman: They are not sure whether
they own it?
Mrs Hunter: They are not sure
whether they own it, but I laugh at that because every council
knows every inch of land that they own so with the help of Jeffrey
we are going to keep pushing at them until we get it, although
it is still at the drawing board stage. The plans are there and
the costs we will put together once we get the go-ahead from the
council.
Q226 Reverend Smyth: Were you satisfied
with the services that you received after the events which directly
affected you?
Mrs Hunter: No. That is one of
the reasons why we started the group. I was in quite a few bomb
scares in Lisburn because I was a shop assistant and then I was
in an actual incident. The place was burnt to the ground where
we were working, and we were never as shop assistants or shop
owners ever given any counselling, help, support or advice on
anything whatsoever. When my brother was killed mummy and daddy
would have got some support from the UDR Benevolent Fund but as
siblings, no, we never got a thing. We never even got a "Hello,
how are you?".
Q227 Chairman: He was in the UDR?
Mrs Hunter: The Ulster Defence
Regiment, yes.
Q228 Reverend Smyth: What types of support
services are most important, do you think, to victims and who
should provide them?
Mrs Hunter: Obviously, I am a
bit biased because I think the groups should provide them and
it should be on the befriending end. That is getting close to
people. When people feel they are needed, that they have a worth,
then they can move on. I really feel that in our group we like
to go out and befriend people and we like to go into their homes
and sit and have a cup of tea with them. To stay open as a group
we had to go down the road of EU PEACE 2 training and education
and it really did not please us at all—that was just to
keep our doors open—because we felt that the government
should have given us enough to be able to help people as individuals
and families. One of the things we try to do is keep the family
together so that if the men are going out for a fishing trip,
or just a trip for ten-pin bowling, we try to get the teenage
boys to go with them and in that way it means that the boys are
learning from the fathers and grandfathers of different families
so that in that way they are getting a lot of values and are being
allowed to grow into men rather than keeping them separate all
the time. For my own family, no, we did not get very much support.
Befriending, keeping families together, keeping them nurtured,
keeping them moving forward, is the most important thing to me.
Q229 Reverend Smyth: You do not think
the girls could have gone out with the fathers?
Mrs Hunter: There is no excuse
for girls not to go out. Us girls, we know what we do! We keep
going out.
Q230 Reverend Smyth: Do you think that
funding for victims is fairly distributed?
Mrs Hunter: No.
Q231 Reverend Smyth: Would you like to
expand on that?
Mrs Hunter: There were about seven
or eight groups when we first came out, at the time when the prisoners
were let out of prison. That was the start of the victim sector.
Although WAVE was also going at that time, we never knew anything
about them; we never knew that they existed. We started off and
there were seven or eight groups and we lobbied government for
victims money and at that time they came out and said they were
going to give us three million. That was only between seven and
10 groups we thought at most. Then, when the money hit the ground,
there were something like 67 victims groups. A good lot of those
groups are prisoner groups reconstituted and I do not think it
is right that the prisoners' groups who are reconstituted get
the victims' money simply because as prisoners they got training
when they were in prison, a grant when they came out of prison
and funding whilst they were prisoners in prisoners groups. If
you look down at any grants on the internet you will find that
there are church organisations, Trusts and community groups who
give grants/funding only to prisoners' groups. I do not think
it is evenly distributed or rightly distributed. There should
be more going into the background of where the victims groups
come from.
Q232 Reverend Smyth: Am I right in saying
that your group is primarily around the greater Lisburn area?
Mrs Hunter: Lisburn and Banbridge
but we do not turn anybody away whatsoever from any part. There
have even been ex-paramilitaries who have come to us and, whilst
they cannot join the group, we give them help and advice and give
them the direction where to go to.
Q233 Reverend Smyth: Do you think that
the creation of a victims ombudsman would help to make sure that
any help was evenly distributed?
Mrs Hunter: Yes, as long as the
rules are set for the ombudsman to follow, that they do look into
the background of the groups or where the groups come from.
Q234 Reverend Smyth: Do you think their
voice would be better heard in government than in the work that
you are doing yourselves?
Mrs Hunter: I think that if all
the groups aimed for the ombudsman and that person then liaised
with government it would save an awful lot of money and that money
could then be used for groups. It would mean that there would
be an umbrella organisation that would come out of it and the
ombudsman then would go directly to the government and speak for
us. I do feel that the ombudsperson should come from the ground
of the victims sector.
Q235 Mr Luke: How does the availability
of appropriate support services or the lack of them in your view
affect the ability of victims to deal with the past?
Mrs Hunter: Do you mean social
services support?
Q236 Mr Luke: A variety of support services.
We have heard about the council being involved and the Northern
Ireland Office, things like that.
Mrs Hunter: To me quite a lot
of it seems to be repetition. There was a victims unit, then there
was a liaison unit and they both seemed to be doing the same job
with the same people and I just felt that that should have been
tidied up. In the social services part of it, they were going
to see your doctor and your health visitor and so on. A lot of
people do not trust telling the social services and the doctor
what their background is, so there is a gap there. There is the
Trauma Advisory Panel and I always felt that the Trauma Advisory
Panel would have been like a liaison unit between social services
and the groups so that we could build up trust with the Trauma
Advisory Panel and be able to say, "We have people who are
in need of help". We would like to shortcut them into the
DSSS, say, if somebody needs a limb or counselling, rather than
have them wait on the big long list of the DSSS. That has not
materialised and I am a bit surprised at that. The Trauma Advisory
Panel seem more to be trying to do the work of the groups, whereas
I thought that the Trauma Advisory Panel was simply to support
the workers of the groups as well as helping us to get to know
social services and what benefits are out there for us to be able
to support our people. There is still a bit of a haze on who there
is to support what. There is a lot of doubling up on a lot of
things. Why recreate the wheel when there is already a wheel?
Q237 Mr Luke: Have you got an example
to show us the equivalent of what in the UK is victim support,
the voluntary agency supported by social services, and when you
are traumatised due to a break-in or attacked these are the people
you would go to who would give you medical advice and so on?
Mrs Hunter: Victim support is
where most go along after an incident and get the advice and then
you go to the person or place, you have been advised to go to,
whereas the victims groups are all-inclusive. Once the person
comes to us we take care of them, we work with them and we find
that we fill their needs. I feel that that is where the victims
groups should be working. It is working with individuals and the
families, saying, "What is your need and how can I fulfil
that for you?" rather than people like victim support who
we have been to many times and said, "Anybody that comes
to you that is a victim of the Troubles, please make sure that
they know about us". When you go along to them, and a couple
of families did who we have helped, there is a list that they
hand you. The list of every organisation that can help any situation
and they say to you, "If you need help this is the list.
Choose", so it is quite bewildering for people.
Q238 Mr Luke: Moving on to dealing with
the past, how important do you think it is for victims and victims
groups to be involved in discussions with other groups about the
ways of dealing with Northern Ireland's past and moving on?
Mrs Hunter: It is important that
all the groups come to some sort of consensus as to how we should
deal with the past. When we first started everybody wanted to
tell their story and we got a few of them written down and documented,
but those same people, once they have told their story, do not
want to go through it again. They do not want to go down that
road. They have been to counselling and told their story and they
really do not want that to happen again. They just want to move
on from there. It is a hard thing to come to terms with: do we
as a group say, "This is how we are going to deal with the
past", or do we take them as individuals and help them to
deal with the past themselves? Personally, I feel that we have
to deal with individuals but as groups we have to be able to support
each other. There might be, say, one group that is very good at
counselling for example we would use Nova (Dr Barnardo's), because
we would not have the time to work with counselling, so in that
way we are using another body to work with victims and we are
not doubling up. It is finding where that help is for individuals,
to be able to move them on. I think it would be a good idea to
get all the groups to do something together to help move people
on but I do not believe in the South African style of truth and
reconciliation. I do not think that would work well.
Q239 Mr Beggs: We are aware that you
yourself have suffered as a result of terrorist activity. Do you
feel that your own suffering has been officially recognised?
Mrs Hunter: Gosh! I have never
really thought about it, to be honest with you. At the beginning,
when I first started the group, I would say no, we were just cast
aside; we were not really recognised, but from running the group
the recognition has been there because people would ask me for
my opinion and the Committee is asking me for my opinion, so I
would say yes, that would be recognised now. At the beginning,
no. I think that is part of the healing process. I know it has
helped me by starting the group and being able to work with individuals
and families. It has really given me something else to look at
and get to know rather than my pain. I have been able to turn
round and say, "Okay, my pain is just as bad, but there are
lots of people like me and we can do this together. We can work
together and do really well". I would say that I have recognised
my pain but I have worked through that and I do think there is
recognition now.
Mr Beggs: Is there anything more that
could be done officially to acknowledge the suffering of victims?
Mrs Hunter: I would like our memorial
garden to go ahead. I think that would help our area. I do think
that the RUC was helped by being given the George Cross. I think
that sort of recognition would help, but what do you give the
civilian population? What do you do for them? That would be the
hard part. The services men and women you can give medals to.
The civilian part is the harder part. There is a thing going on
at the minute by Deloitte for the National Memorial Committee,
all about memorials and memories. I said to him that I thought
that maybe one day a year, you know, like the 11 November for
the World Wars, could be set aside for all the people of Northern
Ireland to come together at church and chapel services to grieve,
and maybe it would be the best recognition for the whole problem,
that everybody could go to their own church and their own chapel
and their own synagogue to be able to say, "Okay; this is
our day".
Chairman: That is an interesting thought.
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