Well, I lost my two daughters on the 9th of July this year. It was a very tragic accident, it was a car accident, and all the community gathered together, they all gathered around to support us. It had a very profound effect on them because it's a mixed community here in Sixmilecross and the surrounding district, but they all gathered as one. We had all cross-community within our house, all the different denominations attended, the different ministers from the different denominations came to the house, people that normally wouldn't be in our house or wouldn't be involved with us at all, came.
The day of the funeral - the funeral was held on the 13th of July, the 12th of July (the day before that) which is a very important day to the Orangemen in the north of Ireland, the lodges, the local lodges here in Sixmilecross, didn't parade at all in Sixmilecross as a mark of respect. And they paraded in Beragh only by the beat of a drum - there was no music played in any way.
And the fact that the Orange Order could do that, as a mark of respect for a Roman Catholic, if they could do that in that instance, why couldn't that always be the case? Why couldn't they always have respect for one another? I thought it a very, very great act, a great act of courage on the Orange Lodge's part because it was a big decision and they took it, and I respect it and it's something I'll never forget.
And you had a visit from an Orangeman who came to your house to pay his respects?
I had several of them. There was one in particular came back after the funeral to say how deeply he was moved by the whole, the whole situation, and how it surprised him so much that the Orange Order would actually have called off the whole march. He said it never happened in his experience, it never happened before, but he says it showed the effect that this had on the Orange Order, on the local Orange Lodges.
So I was very moved by that, I thought it was - that something was happening within our community, that the old polarities were, you know, people were breaking out and they were coming forward, and they were meeting somewhere in the middle, under a sort of banner of grief or pain or whatever it was. So there is something that binds us all together, there's something always makes us human beings as opposed to being Catholics or Protestants or loyalists or republicans or whatever. I think it had a very profound effect on everybody, and they forgot exactly where they were, or they forgot about the sectarianism, or they forgot about their different denominations or anything else. We were just all bound together by grief in that particular time.
