Facing truth: a televised reconciliation in Northern Ireland

Christian Century, June 27, 2006 by Ronald A. Wells

For the next quarter century he led a double life, publicly a construction worker and family man and, in his off hours, one of the main Loyalist paramilitaries. He fooled even his wife for many years, but when she found out about his double life she left him. A somber Tutu nodded at Stone's admission of his own vulnerability: he knows he is a marked man. For the security of his children and grandchildren he rarely sees them.

As for planning Dermot Hackett's death, Stone described the internally rational world of the terrorist assassin. Belying on intelligence dossiers prepared meticulously by his UDR commanders, he prepared intensively, making several dry runs by following the bread delivery van in which Hackett would ultimately die; he blocked out the reality that the target might be a family man with a pregnant wife and child awaiting his return home from work; he avoided reading the papers or listening to TV reports over the next days, because the stories tend to make a real human being out of what had to be thought of only as "the target."

Bishop Tutu allowed the Hacketts to ask again about the murder. Stone stunned them all by saying, for the first time, that he was not the trigger man that day, though he had intended to be. It was actually his accomplice who had shot Hackett. Stone took responsibility for the crime because he was going to prison for life anyway--and his taking the rap allowed another UDR man to be free to carry on the struggle. Making eye contact with Sylvia Hackett, Stone said that while he did not murder her husband, he had prepared to do so and took full responsibility for his death.

Tutu then challenged Stone in a way he had not challenged any other participant. He said that the Hacketts needed to know the truth about Dermot's death and asked Stone to affirm that what he had just disclosed was "the gospel truth." Stone glared at Tutu and said, "I may be many things, but I am not a liar." Tutu pressed him further, saying that Stone apparently went out that night believing that a person deserved to die. Stone quickly repeated that in the dehumanized dark world of his activities, Hackett was not a person but a military target. "He was a soldier and I was a soldier."

Donna Hicks noted that Stone had come to this meeting as a human being, not as a soldier. Did he now think Hackett's death was regrettable? Yes, it was regrettable, Stone said, but under the circumstances it was understandable.

Roddy Hackett demanded that Stone say something about the supposed evidence of Hackett's IRA involvement and asked where the dossier was to be found. Stone was kindly toward him, saying that he had no knowledge of how the dossier was assembled or where it was now located. It was not his area of assignment.

At this impasse, Tutu asked Sylvia what she was feeling. Choking back the tears, Sylvia said to Stone, "I pray for you, I honestly do, and I forgive you. I feel sorry for your family, and for your kids who have to grow up knowing what their Dad had done." Leslie Belinda then asked Stone, "Do you see Sylvia and Roddy who lost a husband and brother, or the family of an IRA man?"