First Responders from the Conflict coming together to tell their stories? Great idea, I tell the Playhouse director, I must book tickets. Remind me.

Here followed the first of so many abrupt awakenings.

No, he patiently explained, I should take part. As a news journalist who spent her twenties reporting from the front line during some of the bloodiest years in our most recent history, I was that First Responder.

Even then I demurred. I’d had enough of war stories: apocryphal, distorted by time and declining memory, grimly honest but arguably best left in the past.

But twice in recent weeks I’d heard myself described as a piece of walking history. Awakening number two. I owed it to my younger self, to my colleagues dead before their time, to my daughter's generation, to do what I have always tried to do – tell my truth as honestly as I can. To set the record straight, for the future. To make sense of my life, to leave a legacy.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m there. We are a disparate group – paramedics, nurses, police officers – often at variance with each other in the troubled days of the 1980s, but finding so much shared history, even in the specifics of incidents. Ireland is indeed a small place. All of us thinking we were mentally shielding, getting on with the job, cavalier in our youth – we were so young – oblivious to the Tsunami of dysfunction and ill health waiting in our middle years. To lives forever changed, a landscape forever blighted by the impact of what we’d witnessed. For me, ghosts haunt every border road, every country churchyard.

Then, the magic happened. The young participants arrived, our wonderful drama students. Fresh, generously receptive minds pointed out to us how much we had normalised the abnormal. How scars run generations deep. Trauma, we are told, takes at least three generations to work through a society. Unless we deal with the boxes (of trauma) now we are burying them under the feet of the next generation – and they will out. Our young team didn’t spare us in pointing out their problems are in many ways deeper, more profound than ours. How dare they? How dare we. This production was for them. For all our futures.

Then, more magic. Our audiences. The response was overwhelming. They got it. Our words, poems, images, recollections resonated with them. They cried. We cried. On stage and off. Like us, they were a disparate group. But they got it.

Covid stopped us where thirty years of Conflict couldn’t. Post production wrap parties are infamous for well-intentioned but doomed promises to keep in touch...but it’s temporary.  First Responders is us, now.

Twentysomething me is at peace. I see hope for the future. All through the touchstone of creative writing and performance. It really is life changing.

FELICITY McCALL