Martin O'BrienPeter Sheridan tells Martin O’Brien about his incredible close shaves working in the RUC during the Troubles
Few who read this will have come as close to being blown into the next world in a bomb explosion as Peter Sheridan OBE and chief executive of Co-operation Ireland. The peace-building charity master-minded the historic handshake between Queen Elizabeth and Martin McGuinness two years ago.
Peter (54), husband and father of two and native of Enniskillen parish, Co. Fermanagh, remembers those two events, separated by a quarter of a century, very clearly.
As well as being unforgettable moments in his life story, they are a useful reminder of just how far Northern Ireland has come.
As a 16-year-old boy attracted to the idea of a career in policing and greatly influenced by his careers teacher in St Michael’s College, Enniskillen, the late Fr Peadar Livingstone, Peter Sheridan, then and now a committed Catholic, did something “highly unusual”.
Depending on their point of view, others might also use words such as “highly dangerous,” “highly courageous” or “extremely foolhardy”.
That’s because Peter joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) as a police cadet in 1976, a force that had already lost 65 officers in the violence from 1969-1975, and was to lose a total of 303 officers in the conflict, making it the most dangerous police force in the world in which to serve.
Colleagues
In the year Peter joined, 24 of his colleagues were killed by the IRA including James Heaney, a 20-year-old Catholic constable from west Belfast who served in Derry city.
That’s where Peter would spend most of his 32-year-long policing career rising to the post of police commander in the area before eventually becoming a PSNI Assistant Chief Constable in charge of combatting organised crime.
Reflecting on “a very happy upbringing in a very traditional Catholic family”, Peter recalls serving as an altar boy in his local church, St Joseph’s Cradien, and being drawn to policing by several factors including “the huge variety it offered”, as well as the perceived glamour depicted in TV dramas.
“I also applied for the Met (London Metropolitan Police) and they said they weren’t recruiting that year, and to the Garda Síochána from whom I am still waiting a reply!”
He remains eternally grateful for the support of his “very brave parents,” his deceased father, Thomas and Nora, his 87-year-old mother.
He vividly recalls the reaction of his grandmother, a woman of deep faith who trusted in God’s Providence, and who was clearly influential in his faith development.
“She said ‘if you were born to be shot, you’d never be drowned’, so on that basis I got the go-ahead.”
Asked if the Patten Report’s replacement of the RUC by the PSNI vindicated those who opposed Catholics joining the RUC, he is emphatic that he made the right decision to join an organisation which he recalls was 95% Protestant.
“When I left in 2008, I got a copy of my personal file and it showed that my father had told the recruiting sergeant that more Catholics should join the police. The fact that Catholics didn’t join, and I understand why they didn’t, was a mistake, though we can’t hold the Protestant population responsible for that.”
Peter stresses that in his experience the vast majority of his RUC colleagues were decent and honourable people whom he liked very much though he did experience “the few scoundrels you’d find in any organisation”.
In March 1987, three masked IRA gunmen shot dead prison lecturer Leslie Jarvis (61) as he sat in his car at the front entrance to Magee College in Derry and booby-trapped his car with explosives.
Murder
Peter Sheridan was one of a party of RUC officers who came to investigate the murder, two of whom, Det. Sgt John Bennison and Det. Insp. Austin Wilson, were killed when the car exploded.
“One of the detectives asked me for my torch and, just as I handed it to him and went to walk away, the car exploded and killed the two of them. I was within yards of the car but I was lucky. I was injured, but not seriously.”
Mr Sheridan explains that, although he was much closer to the car than several of his colleagues who were more seriously injured, he was “bizarrely” protected by “the mushrooming effect” of the explosion.
He says it was the closest he came to being killed in a career in which he is grateful for never having to draw his gun nor wield his baton though he recalls his armoured vehicle being the target of several shootings.
In 1984 when he married Michele Young, a member of the Church of Ireland, in St Augustine’s on Derry’s Walls, his bride was held up for an hour by a bomb scare “probably aimed at preventing the service from taking place”.
He proudly reminds me that Fr Joe Mullin, his family curate from Enniskillen, took part in the Church of Ireland service, which was “pretty unheard of at the time”.
Peter recalls that in the early 90s, gardaí in Donegal stopped someone who had in his possession Peter’s and his children’s personal details “including what time I went to Mass in Greysteel”.
He still finds it chilling that there was apparently somebody attending Mass who was tailing his movements.
“The impact was I couldn’t go to Mass [publicly] on a Sunday and Bishop Edward Daly told me I could go any day of the week at a time of my choice,” he says.
Determined never to give up on the practice of his faith he began to attend Sunday Mass at the army camp in Ebrington.
Peter says that his faith “played a huge role” in sustaining him through the Troubles and became “even more important” when he realised he was joining an organisation overwhelmingly Protestant, where it would have been easy “to have lost my Catholic identity.
“I never got up any morning in my life thinking anybody was my enemy or who I could shoot, bomb or maim,” he says.
Refreshingly, for someone prominent in public life, he is unapologetic and open about his faith.
Asked about it and the type of God he believes in, he describes his faith as being “very strong.
“I believe in God as someone who is loving and has protected me and my family.”
As chief executive of Co-operation Ireland since 2008, when he left policing for a new challenge, Mr Sheridan was a pivotal figure in the intense diplomacy that culminated in the warm handshake between Queen Elizabeth II – the charity’s joint patron with President Higgins – and Martin McGuinness at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre.
He says Sinn Féin “called it wrong” by boycotting the Queen’s state visit to Ireland.
“The rest of Ireland had moved on” and an opportunity then presented itself for Sinn Féin to catch up, but he confides he was not sure the actual handshake would take place until Queen Elizabeth and President Higgins and the Deputy First Minister actually turned up “because the simplest things in this country can set things back”.
History
He was two feet away in the receiving line when it happened: “You knew you were watching history unfolding before your eyes.”
His vision and that of Co-operation Ireland is that healing and reconciliation will become an ever-advancing feature of our history in the decades and generations to come.
After “the peace-keeping, peace-making and [the current] peace-building”, he wants to see “normalisation where former enemies live together in peace as citizens together, that is a security on its own”.
While Peter Sheridan accepts “we can choose what we do in life”, he has a keen and humbly expressed sense that his career expresses “God’s want for me.
“I firmly believe that part of God’s want for me was to be in the organisation that I was in and to marry someone from a different background.”
One is left with the impression that, without that strong faith, Peter Sheridan might have found life incalculably more trying.