The Men:
Bobby

He is a father and a husband, living in Bangor and working as a joiner.

Bobby is now a Born Again Christian and teaches art to inmates in the prisons where he served time. When Bobby joined the Ulster Volunteer Force, he believed he was fighting a just cause. But now, he feels he was wrong.

Bobby talks about the pain he has been through to find God and how sorry he is for his past. He speaks honestly about the paramilitaries, the high suicide rate and the deaths that have occurred as a direct result of The Troubles. He describes the tragic results of the poor choices made by young men in their late teens and twenties and how the consequences are still playing out today.

We first met Bobby at the Epic Centre on the Shankill Road at a meeting of former prisoners. We wanted to speak to an ex-prisoner with a loyalist background and we’d been recommended that we go and speak to these men. After an hour or so of tea and Kit Kats Bobby came up to us and offered to chat to us further. He told us that he was an artist and that he’d like to show us some of his work.

Over the next few months we got to know Bobby and his family. He took us to the streets where he’d grown up and showed us his old house from when he was a boy. Bobby described how when he was young he’d had one leg shorter than the other and that he’d had to wear a steal calliper to help lengthen the leg. It was clear that Bobby had wanted to be in with the rest of the boys and this steal calliper had made him feel left behind at times and that he didn’t fit in.

It was when Bobby first told us this story that I began to understand how a young boy who was desperate to fit in, could find himself embroiled in a paramilitary organisation. I was reminded of this recently when we screened the film in Bray, Co Wicklow, Ireland. Whilst doing a Q&A afterwards, a man in the audience stood up. He hadn’t known anything about the film but had come along to see it at his local cinema. He said that he had been at school with Bobby, ’any of the children in our class could have ended up doing what Bobby did,’ he told us.

Whilst filming, Bobby took us to the prison where he had first been incarcerated, we walked along the tunnel that he and his friends walked down after the court had passed their verdict and they were sentenced to 16 years in jail and he told us how some of the best years of his life were in prison. They were all young and in it together, he was part of the ‘gang.’

Bobby’s story is a complicated one, he told us how his gun never went off, but he did pull the trigger and ‘another man shot him so he still played his part’.