Northern Irish teenager John left home one evening knowing he would be shot, so he changed into his tracksuit bottoms first. “Me mummy was, like: ‘Where are you going?’ and I said just to a bar for a pint.” He had been summoned by the local paramilitary group for “punishment” for his antisocial behaviour in the local area – otherwise known as a kneecapping. “I hope you’re not going to pull a dirty one and shoot me with a bigger gun,” he said to the man who was about to shoot him. “I’ll look after you,” the man assured him, and pulled the trigger. “Did it hurt?” he asked. “Of course it did,” said John. “Just get on with the other one.” So he did.
John is not his real name and he was voiced by an actor, but everything else about his story as it was told in Tuesday night’s Stacey Dooley Investigates: Shot By My Neighbour (BBC One), was real, and her documentary made manifest the details you might have – gladly – skipped over in a news report. You may know that such punishment attacks still abound in parts of Northern Ireland, for example. But you probably didn’t know that they are most often carried out on boys old enough to cause trouble, but still young enough to say “mummy”.
It is a decades-old practice – the legacy, Dooley explains, of “a conflict known as the Troubles”. This may seem a risibly Ladybird explanation to some, but you need to remember that a) BBC Three and Dooley’s programmes, in particular, are aimed at a relatively young demographic and b) we have a 48-year-old secretary of state for Northern Ireland who blithely admitted this month that when she took up her exceptionally politically sensitive role at an exceptionally politically sensitive time, it came as huge news to her that Over There “people who are nationalists don’t vote for unionist parties and vice versa”. Next to that, Dooley is the Encyclopedia Britannica.
But it was not part of Dooley’s remit to give us a detailed breakdown of the whys and wherefores, but to capture the situation as it stands now. This she did with the honesty, empathy and guilelessness that has been her trademark ever since she started out as a presenter almost 10 years ago with a brace of documentaries about child labour in developing countries.
Her benign presence emboldens the vulnerable. One young man – a boy, really, if he were sitting next to anyone older than 31-year-old Dooley – says that he can’t count the number of his friends who have already been “punished” and that the rest of them all know that “it’s coming one day”. As ever, Dooley responds with what we are all thinking – how do you get through a day, through life, with that kind of shadow hanging over you? “We’re all just whacking tablets down us because we know we’re getting shot,” he says. “Walking about out of our heads so we can’t feel it.” Has he taken anything today, asks Dooley, although the answer is in his affectless face and tone. “Just in case, yes. I’m not getting shot sober as a judge. That’ll put me into all kinds of shock.”
Equally, her unthreatening demeanour enables her to challenge the far from vulnerable. At an eventual meeting with a group of gunmen, she asks them if they feel guilty (“When you go home,” she persists. “When you’re in bed”); whether they appreciate that they are ruining victims’ lives; whether they accept that some people could be using their group as a cover for their desire to be “a thug, a gangster, a lunatic?” Their replies are as bleak and brutal as you would expect.
Their activities (Dooley unconsciously, but arrestingly refers to it as “shooting the kids” throughout) are now part of an entire ecosystem. Lack of faith in (and lack of interest from) the police in local communities and peacetime hanging heavy on the hands of former paramilitaries gave rise to the alternative method of meting out perceived justice. In turn organisations have grown up that negotiate with different sides to try to get the threats – the summonses to come and be shot by a man a few streets over – lifted from their targets. Jim McCarthy runs one of the biggest acting for the republican side, Community Restorative Justice, which tackles about 300 threats a year. Meanwhile, youth group leader Steven Hughes has watched as one of his staff members used the tampons from her handbag to stuff the bullet wounds in one of the four shootings they have had behind the club. “And they’re often the most vulnerable children who have suffered very, very badly already, growing up,” he notes. He is at risk of punishment himself, for the work he does.
As a documentary, it was excellent. As a situation, it was broken, bloody and awful. Wait til Karen Bradley finds out about it.
