Sr. Maura Twohig:

I would also like to thank the committee for the invitation to attend today's meeting and to be part of this important discussion. The Tara Centre is just down the street from WAVE and we are well aware of the tremendous work that WAVE has been doing. While Ms Peake and I did not prepare together in advance of this meeting, having listened to her I can see that my approach will complement hers. I grew up in Youghal in County Cork, far away from the Troubles of Northern Ireland. I had no intention of ever being in Northern Ireland but circumstances brought me there. I am now 21 years living there and I was invited at a very early stage to become part of the implementation of the peace process in Northern Ireland. This was just before the Good Friday Agreement was signed. My response to this was to be a co-founder, with Mary Daly who is in the Gallery, of the Tara Centre, which was set up in the interests of healing, peace and holistic well-being on a cross-community, cross-Border basis. The centre is now in its 20th year of operation. I want to gratefully acknowledge the funding we have received from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and from the Northern Ireland Office and also the part played by this committee in approving that funding which has helped us enormously. Over the years, as a stand-alone organisation, we have had to find and dispense £12 million in the development of our centre and in the provision of services across the community. We very much appreciate the help we have received, including from Members of this House.

As an educationalist and a qualified and practising psychotherapist, I wish to take an in-depth look at areas to which Ms Peake referred with facts and figures which we have recorded and published. One of the issues that struck me in the early days of setting up and developing the centre and while working there as a practitioner over the years is the need to take a very broad perspective in dealing with emotive issues. We talk about the Troubles, and in the North it is the immediate Troubles, but as someone who has lived there for just 21 years - I will not say for how many decades in the rest of the country and abroad - I see that the roots of the Troubles are very deep. They go back many, many centuries and we need to keep that in mind. That colours everything we do. It does not take from the immediacy but it gives a depth and lets us know that we must be there for the long haul.

The name of the centre is the Tara Centre. Michael Slevin, who is an authority on Tara, County Meath, tells us that "Tara" means a place from which there is a broad perspective.

Interestingly, we took that title and as we got into it a little more we discovered that Tara has many connotations and associations spanning many countries, cultures and continents, including the Buddhist Green Tara, the goddess of healing and compassion, with the same connotation applying in Ethiopia. I am not avoiding anything. As a psychotherapist and human being, I know that the healing of the emotions, the psyche and the soul is necessary if we are to endure. It is what will bring us together as a people. When we are trying to set up organisations, we need funding and support but more than anything else, we need to respect each others perspective and to acknowledge that the core truth of all of us as human beings is that we come from the same source. Until we reach a deep awareness of this, in terms of how we live, the bickering, fighting and contesting about not having enough will continue. The dispensation of creation is that there is more than enough for everyone. Its the psyche, the mindset, that sets us off our target. This is what I mean by "a broad perspective".

It is most interesting that in concrete terms, the Good Friday Agreement and subsequent agreements, such as the St. Andrews Agreement, the Hillsborough Agreement and, the more recent, Stormont House Agreement, take broad perspectives in their approach to this healing. They quantify it as cultural, political and social. Currently, there is much focus on the decade of commemorations across the island of Ireland. That is the breadth we need. I love it. It gives me energy.

Looking concretely at this issue in the Tara Centre, we developed a multidisciplinary package of initiatives which could be offered for the purpose of healing the effects of the legacy of the Troubles. None of us dares to believe we can heal or help another. We cannot heal or fix another person but we can support, help and encourage. However, if we dare to cross the threshold and think we can do it for them, we have lost it. Everyone can do that for themselves. All they need to do so is respect, recognition and support. The package we put together includes counselling psychotherapy and art therapy, a range of complementary therapies, training programmes, workshops, residentials, field trips and support groups. Those affected by suicide and bereavement of other types and the injured will participate but they will select a particular point of entry. They may start with psychotherapy and then move to a training programme. We also refer them outside as well as inside. In other words, we support them in taking responsibility for their own lives and healing but we are there for them.

What has emerged over time is experiential evidence of a widely proclaimed theory that there is a profound transgenerational dimension to be reckoned with in the lasting healing of all deep trauma at the personal, family, community and broader societal levels. In terms of my personal awareness, I grew up in Cork and I am of the generation post the 1916 Rising, the subsequent Civil War, the setting up of the Border, development of the Free State and the evolvement of the Republic of Ireland. Although I was born in Youghal, my parents came from west Cork, Michael Collins country. As parents, they made the responsible decision to try to protect their family from the trauma. I see parents in the North trying to do that now. It is an interesting echo. My parents tried to protect us. I was educated and I travelled abroad and trained as a educationalist. I went to the USA and Europe and had a lot of opportunities. What I found was that all of the efforts of the previous generation to protect my generation from the effects of the trauma of that appalling violence were in vain. I then realised that the Swiss psychotherapist C. G. Jung knew what he was saying when he said: “What one generation seeks to forget, another generation is forced to remember." There is immediacy in the North at the moment. There is immediacy across the Border and in the work of these islands in coming together but we must keep the broad perspective and the depth in mind if we are going to be effective in the long term.

When in the United States, I trained in psychotherapy at university level at the Presbyterian-run counselling centre in downtown Chicago. I worked hard. I had to do personal counselling and to do so rigorously week on week, following which I thought I had all my demons surfaced and was ready to be a counsellor. I was posted to Portadown, Northern Ireland, from where I commuted up and down to Belfast. I realised then that all of the transgenerational effects of trauma that my good parents and their generation tried to protect me from were alive and well and living in me and along the streets of Belfast. I had to take time to do further work to heal. I knew that if I could not heal myself, I could not dare to stay in the north of Ireland and attempt to try to be part of the peace building. I did the work and I thought I was very smart. I then moved from Portadown to Omagh which seemed to be a quiet place where I could do some work and not be ruffled too much.

We opened our centre in 1996. We were doing nicely. We were overwhelmed straight away with applications from all sectors of society. In August 1998, barely five months after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the worst atrocity of Northern Ireland happened a few hundreds up the street from our centre. It was the Omagh bombing. I was so frightened I did not want to visit the site of the tragedy that night but I was reminded by the people around me that it was my duty to do so and so I did. I could not believe it. The mother of one of the young victims blown to bits called me across the hall and asked me to accompany her and her family to identify her son in the morgue. I went with her and identified the young man. I saw that woman put her hand under the blankets and take it out again covered with blood. That taught me the appallingness of the depth of the pain that people have to suffer. There is no such thing as a backdrop in the Northern Ireland situation. Sometimes I find - I do not begrudge anything to anyone - that there are awful hot-spots in Belfast, Derry and other Border regions. It is everywhere. In my practice as a practising psychotherapist I meet it daily in the lives of the clients who come to the centre. What is most interesting is that most of the time, they do not know why they have come to the centre. We provide long-term counselling. We will treat people for as long as it takes, as long as real work is being done. Once trust and confidence has been built up between the client and therapist the deeper layers, similar to the ones I thought I had buried, begin to surface, following which the real healing happens. It is long-term work that requires patience and respect, the best of which cannot be shared.

I would like to tell the committee about a lady who came to see me after the Omagh bombing. She had been caught up in the incident and as she was a nurse, she had helped people at the scene. I was ready to deal with her trauma but what surfaced was that when a student nurse in Belfast many years earlier and on duty in the Royal Victoria Hospital, masked men came to the hospital and asked her at gunpoint to bring them to the bed of a particular named patient. She could not do it.

They frog-marched her and shot him dead in front of her. She was only ready to deal with what had happened on that day 18 years later. That is what I mean by "the depth". In the relative tranquillity of these days - it is funny because these days it is anything but stable - these matters come gradually, namely, two steps forward, one step back. There is a relative tranquillity in society and that is the environment in which people can begin to feel secure and safe enough and in which the deeply buried trauma will surface from the subconscious. I am talking about the micro level on the ground. All the organisations must remain for them. We must be very supportive, even if we have to be critical for integrity, of the genuine efforts being made at the political level every day on this issue. Essentially, there must be a broad perspective. The approach must be in-depth, transgenerational and for the long haul. The macro and the micro must be let support each other, as we have been trying to do. We need to be hugely appreciative of everything people are doing. When we have to be critical, we must be. We have to stand up and be counted. I will never be found wanting in that regard. It is important not to go down the negative road.

I am most grateful to the committee for giving me the opportunity to put my story across. My story is just a tiny piece in the midst of all of the others told.