Thought for the Week: That of God
Ian Kirk-Smith reflects on a powerful experience
In 2003 I spent over a year and a half making a film, for BBC Northern Ireland, about a working class Loyalist estate in west Belfast – Springmartin – half way up a mountain overlooking the city. The Catholic Ardoyne was a few hundred yards away. A sixteen-foot high wall separated the two communities: the Peace Line. Almost every family in the area had suffered, in some way, in the troubles. During that time thirteen people had been shot on the Springmartin and nearby Highfield estates. It was a heartland of Loyalist paramilitaries.
As a narrative device, I decided to make the film in the months up to and including the twelfth
of July, when a huge bonfire was built in the middle of the estate and, on the eleventh night,
burnt. Sequences were filmed at the local primary school, the community centre, in homes and,
in the editing suite, intercut with sequences that showed stages of the building of the bonfire.
So, there was a narrative spine – the bonfire rising – complemented by a portrait of everyday life.
The bonfire was built by young people, mostly between the ages of eight and fifteen. They
would drag wooden pallets from everywhere, find old furniture and pieces of wood, get
hundreds of tyres and build the bonfire higher and higher and higher. I spent a lot of time with
them and got to know them well. They made little huts with pallets and carpets and slept out in
them. They were protecting their wood from being stolen by kids from nearby estates. It was a
‘rite of passage’. I spent many hours with them in these huts.
One teenager, Danny, was a real problem for us. He would rake around the estate on a small,
noisy, motorbike. It drove the sound recordist mad. We were all fed up with Danny. He was out
of control.
One night I was in a hut with some kids. I had a small digital camera and was experimenting
with it. I was tucked in a corner and filming two of the kids. I realised that they were smoking
marijuana. One of them was Danny. Later, at about two o’clock in the morning, I left the hut
and stood among the pallets.
It was a beautiful, still, night. Frankie, a fifteen-year-old, came out, half asleep. We started
talking. It was strange – the moon was out – the sky full of stars – the Peace Wall one hundred
yards away in one direction – and the lights of Belfast in the valley below.
Danny’s name came up. Frankie said that Danny wasn’t from the estate. He was from Highfield.
This surprised me. Then he told me that three months earlier Danny had come home to his house one evening and had found his father, who he lived with, hanging from a rope in the stairwell.
When I went back into the hut Danny was sleeping. I looked at him and saw a completely
different person, not the ‘hard man’ he acted, but a lonely, hurt, vulnerable fourteen-year-old.
I remember feeling overwhelmed with a wave of compassion – tears welled up. But I felt so
humble, so guilty: why had it taken such a shocking insight to see Danny this way. I remember
thinking, here, in this face, is the spirit of Christ. That spirit is in our neighbour, our friend, our
enemy. It was powerful ‘immediate revelation’. I wasn’t in Meeting. I didn’t need to be. Today,
I am reminded of some words by John Woolman: ‘This love and tenderness increased and my
mind was strongly engaged for the good of my fellow creatures.
This is an extract from a public lecture given at Ireland Yearly Meeting on Friday 25 April 2014: ‘On principle, not consequence. A Quaker life in broadcasting’.
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