Robbed of his childhood by act of terrorism

Ordered by his father to run after he discovered he and his son were sitting on the bonnet of the second car bomb, while his sister waited for medical treatment, Mark admitted that he had held onto his pain until five years ago when he broke down and cried over his loss for the very first time - as a 45-year-old adult.

MARK Eakin was just 12 years oldwhen he walked past his eight-year-old sister Kathryn, splashed window cleaner on the window of their parents' shop - which Kathryn had been cleaning - and walked on. A playful big brother teasing his younger sister.

Seconds later the first of three bombs exploded on Claudy Main Street, and as he turned round he was confronted with his only sibling, mortally wounded. The family had no idea just how badly injured she was.

The little girl was the first of nine people - five Catholics and four Protestants - to lose their lives that day. It is now 38 years later and relatives of those killed and injured were earlier this week bracing themselves for 'The Report' into the bombing which has been long in coming.

Mark, however, was not holding out much hope of deriving any comfort from its findings. For him July 31 1972 altered his life, present and future, for the worse. It impacted on the remainder of his childhood: there was no Christmas at home any more, he became a disruptive teenager, and even today when he comes 'home' to visit the graves of his late sister and parents, tears are never far away. Words on a page from an Ombudsman are too little, way too late for him.

Terrible day

Recalling the events of that terrible day, Mark draws deeply on a cigarette and exhales, gathering his thoughts: "I was sitting on the bonnet of a car with my father. We didn't know it but we were sitting on top of the bomb that went off outside the Post Office. We were sitting on the bonnet of the car. At that stage I had cleared away out of the way altogether after the first bomb. I had been told to get out to get away out of here, so..." his voice trails off.

"There was no real street clearing operation in Claudy. It was more just 'Everybody get out of here'. We were sitting on the bonnet of that car, right, and there was a guy working at our house and he came out of the house and he shouted something to my father, and I remember my father looking down between his legs and then he went 'Jesus Christ', and he says 'Get up and run'. As we ran away I saw that in the back of the car the seats were down and there were two creamery cans, but you couldn't see them properly because there was a Tartan rug over the top of them," he said, adding: "I saw the bomb. We were sitting on top of it."

At that stage Mark's sister had already been injured in the first bomb to detonate outside Mark's parents' shop and folk were, as yet, unaware of just how serious her injuries were. In fact Kathryn was the youngest and first victim of the triple car bomb attack that day in the village.

"She was inside the shop with my grandfather and they were waiting for medical care coming and my father was attending to other people out on the street. He had been in with them but I don't think at that stage and with shock and that, that I don't think he realised just how bad Kathryn was. None of us thought she was that bad.

"She had been outside the shop on top of a set of steps cleaning the windows and she had her back or her side to the bomb. She would not have been that far away from it. I was just past her and no more..."

His voice falters and for a moment Mark is silent. He lights a cigarette and I ask him how it effected him as a young boy growing up at such a formative time in his life.

Tomfoolery Day

"Horrendously. It still effects me to a degree...there was just a whole lot of things that happened that day. It was the usual 'Tomfoolery Day' with us and she was cleaning the windows and as I passed her I actually lifted the bottle of Windowlene and shook a bit of it onto the window, and walked off. Just as I walked off, boof...the whole thing went...and that was it."

"The thing about Claudy was there were more Catholic people in Claudy lost their lives than there was Protestant people, which is even worse. I feel really sorry for them," he says magnanimously: "With this thing coming out about Fr Chesney it would be like someone turning round to me and saying Bishop Eames was a murderer. You would think 'Holy God of Almighty, that's not someone from my church...' you know? Where do you go next? You go and confess your sins to him, or whatever, and he goes do this or do that, and those people are now thinking 'Holy God, what did I go to him for?' I have talked this over in the past couple of weeks with a lot of my friends who are Catholics and they are just mortified. They cannot believe it," he says, adding: "That said, most of the people that were immediately effected are dead. Annie Miller, who lost her husband David, she's dead. She never got an answer, and I don't know who else...there are so many who are gone now. The hurt has never left Claudy.

Nightmare

"I was in Claudy recently, and you can walk in Claudy and I still see things sometimes because it was a nightmare. I can see a whole lot of stuff in my head. The one thing that has never left my mind was Artie Hone at McElhinney's with his head hanging over the edge of the kerb, well, what was left of his head would be better words for it," he said: "His son Paul and I would be right and friendly and he was with his father whenever that happened. It is just a living nightmare."

It is hard to fathom that a 12-year-old boy saw such sights.

Mark continues: "Paul was even younger than I was and he had to see his father with his head blew off. It was unbelievable".

Although today there is a greater expectation among the public of the right to inquiries and reviews, this was not the case for Claudy, and from the time of the bombing until now, Mark believes the atrocity has simply been "brushed under the carpet". There was no official recognition for him, her parents, the wider family - or anyone touched by the bombings in the village for that matter.

"From I can see, judging how things lie at the minute, Claudy was brushed underneath the carpet. Nobody wanted to remember about it, especially the people involved in trying to sort all this lot out. you know? They didn't want it to raise its ugly head because there was too much skulduggery going on about it between the government and the cover up by Fr Chesney and one thing and another. We knew about that before the report. We didn't need to wait for any report."

His anger is palpable: "My parents knew that there had been letters passed between certain people and that for whatever reason he was moved out of Northern Ireland, supposedly so that he would not be a danger any more...but now I don't think somebody going to Donegal would constitute no longer being a risk to Northern Ireland.

Joke

"They stuck him in a wee parish in the back of Donegal, dear God of Almighty, sure 90 per cent of what happened in Northern Ireland was organised by people who were living over the Border. It was just a joke. How could anybody say that was making things safer?

"It did nothing to help relieve the pain and suffering in Claudy and in those days there was no such thing as counselling. Now if something happens you have trauma counsellors and this that and the other. To quote words from one boy who came out from the Northern Ireland Office to me father about rebuilding the place, he said 'When are we going to get this lot sorted out Billy?' At that stage, four years on, they hadn't give any money to sort anything out.

"We had to build a temporary shop in the yard at that stage, and this boy came out...and my father's exact words to him were 'When you get the suede coat off you - and those kid gloves, then we'll get something done'. He was there standing dressed to the nines and my father was up to his eyes in muck! And him, dictating or saying to him three or four years later about when my father was going to get the mess cleaned up on Main Street? At the end of it all what they did pay was of no use by the time it came round. It was a complete waste of time."

Mark's parents, Merle and Billy, waited the rest of their lives to get some kind of official comment, but died before they could see any kind of recognition or justice for the family. Billy passed away in February 2009 while Merle passed on six months earlier, in August 2008. It leaves Mark on his own with the memories.

"I'm just glad my parents are not here to read it," he said when asked what his parents might have thought of the report coming out now.

"Obviously I can't say too much about it at the moment. Anybody that was involved in the dealings that they did do are all dead, so they can't go back and say anything to them. It's all too late. It is all far too late. It's 38 years later we are talking about this. Like...Omagh and I've a lot of respect for the people in Omagh, because I know a lot of them personally, but they were in a different phase to us.

Help

"It happened so many years later and they had all this counselling and 'get this done' and 'get that done'. They got help, but what happened in Claudy happened on the back of Operation Motorman and all of that in Derry, and that overtook us. Plus you had two or three other things happen as well, and Claudy got brushed to the side. The next day something equally as bad happened, you know, where as Omagh got more publicity and help because it was a one-off...at that time there were so many things happening in 1972, everything was getting blown up, basically," Mark says reflectively.

Asked what it was like to grow up without his sister and go through the difficult teen years having suffered such a loss and witnessed such carnage, Mark hesitates slightly before continuing: "It didn't feel great let me tell you. I never was a bright spark at school, but it definitely didn't do me any favours in that department. I became very disruptive and very anti-everything. I didn't want to do anything. I suppose I was lashing out and didn't realise that's what I was doing. With time you get your own way of dealing with it."

A construction worker in Belfast, Mark recalled how, after the atrocity and when the shop did not work out, his parents took the decision to move to Coleraine, but that didn't exactly go too smoothly either.

"They had no heart in Claudy to be honest after that. Their heart went out of it and they didn't have the same drive for anything they were doing. There wasn't the same push. There wasn't even such a thing as Christmas in our house after that - it was half a Christmas because to my mother, especially, she took it so bad it was unbelievable. My father bottled it all up and he never talked to anyone about it. He tried to avoid talking about it quite a lot. He bottled it all up right to the day he died."

Although Mark talks openly about that dreadful day, there is a palpable aching sadness when it comes to his robbed childhood and the pain inside the family that he witnessed because of the actions of bombers: "My mother just got to the point where she just didn't even want to be here, to be honest. I know she was in a lot of pain, particularly in the last few years, but many's the time she said 'I just wish I wasn't here'."

As the only child left behind, Kathryn's loss impacted heavily on Mark's life, and still does: "It destroyed a lot. It took away a lot of my younger teenage years. I would say by the time I was 16 or that, I had come round to it a bit. But the first three or four years it took its toll, particularly in respect of the whole family thing."

The atrocity has also robbed Mark of his chance to be an uncle, although he is thankful of the fact that he has two daughters, now grown up and living in Scotland.

"I am working in Scotland at the minute, which is great, because they are not that far away from me," he says, before adding: "You don't know what could be a part of what happened. Certainly you be very wary of getting very close to things, or people. You are thinking the worst all the time. I would still have a lot of good friends, but it leaves you always weighing things up, and I'd be thinking of the unthinkable, but others would be saying you don't know what's going to happen."

Prosecuted

Commenting that the people from Claudy that he had spoken to wanted two things - closure and someone prosecuted for the atrocity, Mark adds: "More than anything, that's what people want most".

Asked if he ever stopped and thought about how life might have been if the triple bombing had not taken place, Mark replies: "I know that my mother and father took that business over in 1969 from my grandfather, William, and there was debt there. Not a lot, but it was a good bit for them days. By 1972 on the morning of the bomb they had that debt down to a 500 overdraft and they were on about extending the shop and doing this and doing that. They were planning, business had picked up and things was good again and then that happened, and that killed it. By the time they did get things fixed up again the big supermarket thing was kicking in and it was too late. It never was the same again."

Noting that Claudy is now changed, he says when he returns and stands there and looks around, it gets to him.

"If you are just standing talking to someone it is not too bad, you know? But if you just stand there and look, it gets to you. I know exactly where Kathryn was killed and manys the time I just go there, but...it is still hard to live with at times. Most of the time I wouldn't be too bad, but there are times when, maybe something else happens, and...you know?"

I ask Mark if he still cries. I am shocked at his honesty: "Believe it or not I don't think I ever did cry about it properly until about maybe five years ago and then the whole thing just got to me one day, and ever since that it has been easier to live with and I would maybe have an odd cry to myself especially if I was up at the grave."