ILLYLEAGH, Northern Ireland - As the campaign limps to the finish, the referendum vote here becomes a matter of how people handle the bitter, individual memories that are as much a part of the landscape as all the jobless youngsters who prop up the streetcorners on a daily basis and measure their future with a wristwatch. The long years of violence have left a cultural DNA impression that is a cluster of sadness, depression, rage, and a fear so deeply ingrained that optimism is greeted like a stranger in a storm.
Helen McHenry was 13-year-old Helen McConville the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1973, when the IRA arrived at the family's apartment in Divis Flats, Belfast, to kidnap her mother, Jean, who was a 37-year-old widow and stood looking at 10 children for the very last time. Only yesterday on the Irish clock.
''She was a Protestant married to a Catholic,'' Helen McHenry recalled. ''My father died in January of that same year. Wasn't a very good time for us now, was it?
''That day, she was home with seven of us kids. I had an older sister; she was 19, and mentally handicapped. She's dead five years now. I had an older brother. He was 17 then, but he'd been interned by the British, so he wasn't in the house when it happened. He was in the Maze prison.''
''It was half-five in the afternoon,'' she was saying, the words cutting at the present like a raw razor. ''Three of them come in wearing masks. They dragged her out of the house at gunpoint. They were IRA.
''A few weeks earlier, my mother had gone to the aid of a British soldier who got shot in the street outside our place. That was the reason we were given for why she was kidnapped and killed.
''We found out they took her up the Falls Road. We found people who saw her inside a place with a plastic bag over her head. We never found her body and we've been trying to get the remains for 25 years, but the IRA won't tell us what they did with her. At first they said she'd run off with a British soldier. Tried to defame our family, but I was 13 when it happened, and I think I knew my own mother better than those bastards. We found out later they put her body in the foundation of a unit under construction up there. All they did was send us back her wedding ring. That's all we got.''
The police (the Royal Ulster Constabulary) did not bother to investigate another Catholic murder. The army never got involved. Today, the police are a huge issue in the campaign because few trust them, and there are whole areas in Catholic neighborhoods where the RUC refuse to go, so crimes against people are often unreported and any justice is difficult to obtain.
''Our family was broken up and the 10 of us were placed in care,'' Helen McHenry continued. ''Ten different homes except for my brother, who has spent most of the last 25 years in and out of jail. We never really knew each other as a family and that is very sad, as well as the fact that we have no place to go to pray for my mother. No grave. No cemetery.''
Helen McHenry is 42 now, married, with five children of her own. She was raised Catholic with the cruel memory of the IRA depriving her and nine others of a mother but tomorrow she will walk to the polling place in this village outside Belfast in order to try to expel the ghosts that haunt the land.
''I'll vote 'Yes,''' Helen McHenry said. ''I don't agree with everything in the resolution, but it's a way forward and that's the direction we have to move. We have to get beyond yesterday if we're to find tomorrow.
''And it might help me find my mother,'' she added. ''I've been trying to find her body since the first cease-fire in 1994.
''I must do this for her,'' the daughter was saying. ''I remember the afternoon she was kidnapped and killed. My younger sisters and brothers blocked it out, but I could not. She had sent me to the store and I still remember her telling me, 'Hurry back. Don't be stopping for a sneaky-smoke and be careful, love.' I can still hear her. I can still see her standing there, sending me off with a kiss. It was a long time ago but it won't go away.''
