Last updated 14:06, Monday, 03 November 2008

How do you go about meeting the man who killed your father? Even more challenging, how do you go about working side by side with that same man to build peace?

Ex-IRA bomber Pat Magee and Jo Berry, daughter of one of his victims, are now on friendly terms

On October 12, 1984, Patrick Magee, an IRA activist, planted a bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, which was designed to take out Margaret Thatcher and the entire British government.

Five people died in the blast, including Jo Berry’s father, the MP Sir Anthony Berry. Many more people staying the hotel for the Conservative Party Conference were injured although the Prime Minister and her Cabinet escaped death.

Moving on to 2000, after Magee had been released from prison under the Good Friday Agreement, having served 14 years of his life sentence, Jo Berry found herself travelling on a ferry to Ireland and feeling terrified at the prospect of coming face to face with the man who represented “the enemy.”

She said: “I wanted to meet Pat to put a face to the enemy, and see him as a real human being. At our first meeting I was terrified, but I wanted to acknowledge the courage it had taken him to meet me. We talked with an extraordinary intensity. I shared a lot about my father, while Pat told me some of his story.”

Now Jo Berry and her father’s killer both work for peace. In 2003, with Jo’s help, Pat Magee set up Causeway, a healing project that helps individuals address unresolved pain caused by the The Troubles.

Magee doesn’t seek forgiveness for what he did. And Jo Berry admits that, these days, she uses the word sparingly.

They are friends, but Jo says it took a long time before she could say that and not feel she was betraying her father or her family.

This month Jo and Patrick will share a discussion at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake, where a play inspired by the events that led them to meet, will be performed in the Studio.

The Bomb, written by Kevin Dyer, looks at the impact two extraordinary people had on each other through the eyes of its central characters, Ned and Elizabeth.

When her father was killed, Jo was thrown into a conflict she knew little about. Since then she has visited Ireland many times and worked with victims and former combatants on all sides.

She says that when she first met Dyer, who had just attended the 20th anniversary of the Brighton bombing, she immediately felt a sense of trust in him and what he was seeking to explore through the play.

“He wanted to understand the emotional journey I had been through and I felt we had a shared language which was important,” she said.

Jo says she and Patrick have shared a lot together since that first meeting. “That sometimes can be difficult because it feels like there was much taboo about meeting someone who has killed your loved one and you mustn’t start caring about them! It is still challenging. It is not like meeting someone normal, like meeting my mates, nothing like that. There’s always an extra dimension.”

Jo Berry says that young people are aware of the risk of terrorism today. Everyone has experienced bullying or being threatened. Everybody has been hurt, or has hurt others. “The choice is how we live with that, how we deal with it,” she says. “It’s important to me that I feel all my feelings, even the difficult ones like anger. I have found that with anger I have a choice whether to use it to hurt others or to use it to empower myself.”

Jo says that, if something positive does come out of her father’s death, then it helps to make sense of it for her. “No-one needs to stay a victim. Everyone can go on a journey of healing however difficult the situation. There are always alternatives to blaming which can heal the pain without continuing the cycle of violence and revenge.”

Jo Berry says it felt as if part of her died in the bombing. “I was totally out of my depth, but somehow I held on to a small hope that something positive would come out of the trauma. So I went to Ireland and listened to the stories of many remarkable and courageous people who'd been caught up in the violence. For the first time I felt that my pain was being heard.

“In those early years I probably used the word ‘forgiveness’ too liberally – I didn’t really understand it. When I used the word on television, I was shocked to receive a death threat from a man who said I had betrayed both my father and my country.”

Now she doesn’t use the word forgiveness. But she can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgment. “Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat, I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there’s nothing to forgive,” she once said.

The question Jo sometimes asks herself is, had she been brought up in the same circumstances as Pat Magee, would she have followed the same path. Just one of many questions and issues this award winning play raises.

Pat Magee will always carry the burden that he harmed other human beings, but maintains he is not seeking forgiveness.

“If Jo could just understand why someone like me could get involved in the armed struggle then something has been achieved. The point is that Jo set out with that intent in mind – she wanted to know why.

“I decided to meet Jo because, apart from addressing a personal obligation, I felt obligated as a Republican to explain what led someone like me to participate in the action. I told her that I’d got involved in the armed struggle at the age of 19, after witnessing how a small nationalist community was being mistreated by the British. Those people had to respond. For 28 years I was active in the Republican Movement. Even in jail I was still a volunteer.”

Magee admits he can’t claim to have renounced violence, though he does not believe he is a violent person and has spoken out against it. “I am a hundred per cent in favour of the peace process, but I am not a pacifist and I could never say to future generations, anywhere in the world, who felt themselves oppressed, ‘Take it, just lie down and take it.’ “

Patrick says it’s rare to meet someone as gracious and open as Jo. “She’s come a long way in her journey to understanding: in fact, she’s come more than half way to meet me. That’s a very humbling experience.”

• The Bomb is at Keswick’s Theatre by the Lake on Wednesday and Thursday, November 12 and 13, performances at 2pm and 7.30pm. The post-show discussion will be for the evening show on the Thursday. Tickets £13 and £7 for under 16s from the box office, tel 017687 74411.