Parents' Grief Over Boy's Death From Ira Bomb Leads To Peace Odyssey

THE PARRYS ARE the type of family the IRA wants to outrage so they will push Britain to leave Northern Ireland. But the slaying of the Parrys' son by the IRA brought a different result.

When the group at the Black Rose broke into an Irish rebel song last month, Colin Parry winced.

He wanted to understand. He really did. But he could not. It was beyond him.

"How can you romanticize killing people?" Parry asked the next day, the image of a boisterous Irish pub in Boston's Faneuil Hall marketplace still gnawing at him. That question brought Parry and his wife, Wendy, across the Atlantic to Boston, where they believe too many people support or at least are ambivalent about the politically motivated violence that killed their 12-year-old son.

Tim Parry was one of two boys who died last March when the Irish Republican Army left two bombs in a shopping area of Warrington, an English town just east of Liverpool.

The deaths of Tim Parry and 3-year-old Jonathan Ball were front-page news in Britain and Ireland for a few weeks. While their deaths were given scant notice on this side of the Atlantic, they led to unprecedented opposition in the Irish Republic to politically motivated violence, to elaborate shows of sympathy in Britain and to complaints in Northern Ireland that it took the deaths of two English boys to focus attention on a conflict that has taken more than 3,000 lives in the past 24 years.

The bombing also launched the Parrys on an odyssey, a search for a reason, a hint, a clue as to why their son died. As part of that search, they agreed to be the subjects of a British Broadcasting Corp. documentary. The program, which was broadcast last month in Britain and Ireland, took them to Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and finally to Boston.

In some ways, the Parrys are the very people the IRA seeks most to influence. Middle-class, with a house and kids and jobs, they are the average British family the IRA wants to outrage so they will push their government to pull out of Northern Ireland.

Yet in other ways the Parrys are the IRA's worst nightmare: ordinary, decent people who want answers and whose loss cannot be explained away by political rhetoric. How, after all, does one justify that a little boy's face was literally ripped off to advance a point of view?

"I sit up at night, often, and I ask myself, why did Tim have to die?" Colin Parry says.

Colin Parry is from Liverpool. His accent is a dead giveaway. Wendy grew up in Manchester. They met in the metal plant near Warrington where Colin is the personnel manager. After a four-year courtship, they married. Their first son, Dominic, was born in 1978. Tim followed in 1980. Abigail was born the next year, on Oct. 12, Dominic's birthday.

Tim was the practical joker of the family. He was also sports-mad. Like most English boys, he was especially crazy about soccer.

On the morning of March 20, Tim gathered two of his mates and headed for downtown Warrington, looking for shorts in the colors of his favorite team, Everton. His parents had gone to a garage in Manchester to have Wendy's car repaired.

Tim had tried on some pants, but didn't have enough money to buy them. He and his friends left the store empty-handed, just as the first bomb went off. A second blast went off, the force catching Tim flush in the face as he ran into it.

Arriving back in Warrington, Colin and Wendy found the whole town in an uproar. They quickly accounted for Dominic and Abigail. They learned one of Tim's friends had been hurt in the blast, but they couldn't find Tim.

It was bedlam at the hospital. More than 50 people had been injured in the explosions. For three hours, they waited at the hospital for word. There was confusion. Tim's name was on no list. Could it be, Colin wondered, that Tim wasn't hurt after all? Unfortunately, he was at the hospital. They had been asking for a 12-year-old. Someone at the hospital, gauging Tim's age by his height, had listed him as 16.

When they walked into the room, the Parrys saw their son's entire head was wrapped. Blood had soaked through some of the bandages. All they could see was the thin line of his mouth.

"It was every parent's nightmare," Colin says quietly.

At first, there was talk of Tim recovering. The surgeons held out hope, saying his severe head injuries could heal with time. Wendy began talking about quitting her job to help with what would surely be a long convalescence. But, after a few days, all hope was lost. The surgeons said there was nothing they could do.

Colin persuaded Dominic and Abigail to go in and see their brother one last time. Then Colin and Wendy sat at his bedside for several hours, summoning the nerve to authorize the staff to turn off the machines.

A doctor explained that when they shut off the respirator, Tim's body might go into violent spasms. Unable to bear that, Wendy left the room. Colin could not. He had to stay. He had to be there at the end, no matter. Colin lay briefly on the bed to be near Tim one last time, then sat back down and watched his son die. Tim barely moved.

Busy with their lives

Like most English people, the Parrys had paid little attention to Northern Ireland. They were busy with their own lives. Northern Ireland entered their consciousness only when there was a story in the paper or a report on the TV news.

"It would be wrong to say I knew nothing about it, because I'm an avid news watcher, and I read quite a bit," said Colin Parry. "I had a reasonable grasp of the political situation. But I had never been there and never would have gone there."

That changed when the BBC program "Panorama" suggested the Parrys take part in a documentary that would record their search for an explanation as to why Tim died.

The idea of the documentary appealed to the Parrys, Colin says, because they wanted to find out more about the forces that had converged that awful day in Warrington.

The Parrys spent 10 days in Northern Ireland this summer, visiting places - Belfast, Portadown, Dungannon - that previously had been only words they heard on news accounts of the latest atrocity.

They met with the family of Robert Dalrymple, one of four Catholic men who were shot to death by Protestant extremists in Castlerock, Northern Ireland, March 25. Dalrymple was murdered the same day Tim died.

"Mostly, we cried together," Colin recalls of the meeting in the modest home in County Antrim. "There was a bond there. They had lined all the children up in their Sunday best. It was really quite moving."

In Dublin, they met with Irish President Mary Robinson, who had attended a memorial service in Warrington in April.

"She is an extraordinary woman," says Colin, making it clear he is more impressed by Robinson than by any of the other public officials he and Wendy met.

Colin is defensive of Robinson, who was bitterly criticized by the British government, and even by some Irish commentators, after she exchanged a greeting and shook hands with Gerry Adams during a visit to West Belfast in June. Adams is the leader of Sinn Fein, the political party that supports the IRA.

The Parrys, in fact, wanted to meet with Adams themselves. They believe he has influence with the IRA.

"Sinn Fein wouldn't meet with us," Colin Parry says. "They said they saw no use in it."

Favors negotiations

As much as he believes Sinn Fein's mutual embrace of constitutional politics and violence is cynical and abhorrent, Colin Parry says he thinks his government should negotiate with Sinn Fein to bring about a cease-fire.

Despite their loss, the Parrys swear they are not bitter.

"We have more than 8,000 letters at home, in boxes, all over the house," says Colin. "The sympathy and compassion contained in those letters, I think, is what has prevented us from becoming bitter. It felt as though the world is full of good people. I think I believed that before, but I think this sort of outpouring convinced us of that.

"I can't guarantee I won't become bitter. I was feeling anger, sitting in that Irish bar, listening to rebel songs. This tendency to romanticize this sort of killing, to make martyrs out of killers, that makes me angry.

"I understand an Irishman's love of his country. But I don't understand how killing innocent people is an expression of that love. It's when that affection becomes an obsession that it becomes obscene and motivates people to do irrational, hateful things. I cannot understand that."

The Parrys have been told that rebel songs in Irish pubs are uncommon, that most Irish-Americans are, if anything, ignorant about Northern Ireland and do not support the IRA, and that criticism of British policy is not an endorsement of the IRA.

Yet, driving through South Boston, the Parrys were upset when they saw graffiti supporting the IRA. On the side of a convenience store across from the Old Colony housing project, a hooded IRA man is depicted with a rocket launcher. On a West Second Street wall, a mural tribute to three IRA members who were shot to death by British undercover soldiers on Gibraltar in 1988 proclaims that the IRA "is what Ireland means to me."

The Parrys seem unconvinced that financial and political support for the IRA is extremely limited here, in this most Irish of U.S. cities.

While saying he is not bitter, Colin Parry says he cannot forgive the IRA, as has his new friend, Gordon Wilson. Wilson held his daughter's hand while she died, trapped with him beneath the rubble of an IRA bombing in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, in 1987. Wilson has since become a peace campaigner.

After the Warrington bombings, Wilson met with the Parrys, then asked to meet with the IRA, to ask them to stop their campaign. When the IRA finally arranged to meet Wilson, they did so in Belfast at the same time a memorial service was being held in Warrington for Tim Parry and Jonathan Ball. The next day, the lead story in the news was not the memorial service, but Wilson's meeting with the IRA.

"Gordon forgives them," Colin says simply. "I don't, and we won't."

Wendy looks away. Her eyes are watering.