THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the conference shifts to Ulster City Hall in downtown Belfast. With hundreds of people listening attentively, three natives of Northern Ireland talk not about the current situation in their land, but the past. They tell tales of how their lives were directly, painfully and forever changed by The Troubles. Their names are Mary, Richard and Alistair.

ONE COOL OCTOBER EVENING IN 1975, a Belfast teenager named Mary walked along a downtown city street. At her side strolled a date and they chatted about the movie they had just seen, “Godfather II.” A car pulled up beside them and slowed. The window wound down, guns poked out at them. “I thought, ‘My God, they’re going to shoot us!’” Mary says.

There was a huge explosion and Mary and the boy fell to the sidewalk. As they lay there, her date exhorted her: “Lie down and pretend you’re dead!” She worried that this was one date that would end especially badly. “This was the first time I’d ever been out with this guy and I thought, ‘Oh, my, he’s going to be dead!”

But it was she who had been hit. The car sped away. Sirens of ambulances and police cars pierced the night as help arrived. “I tried to get up and couldn’t,” she said. “The ambulance man tried to lift me and it was sheer agony.” It was the last day of her life that she would walk upright.

Months later, first at Royal Victoria Hospital and later at rehabilitation centers, she would wrestle with her now useless legs and her new life in a wheelchair. She was not pleasant to be around, she admits. “I was very horrible.” In the eyes of some, neither was she merely a random victim of IRA violence worthy of compassion. How could she be? “Everyone assumed I was in a paramilitary organization. Innocent people didn’t get shot.”

But this one had.

THE DATE WAS MAY 4, 1972, in the Northern Ireland city of Derry, which along with Belfast has been the other chief urban flashpoint of The Troubles. Richard Moore, a boy who lived in Cragan Estates, was out on the streets as British troops roamed about, trying to squelch any protests by Derry’s restive Catholic population.

A British soldier fired off a volley of rubber bullets. “I was hit on the bridge of my nose. I lost my right eye, I was blinded in the left,” says Richard. When he regained consciousness, he lay stretched upon the canteen table in his local school cafeteria. His teacher sought to cut his schoolbag and bloodied shirt off him. “The teacher didn’t recognize me because my face was so disfigured.”

Richard’s father arrived at the school first, then his mother. His father wouldn’t let his mother into the room to see Richard like this. The Troubles had already darkened this family’s door five months earlier in Derry. “She had her brother shot dead in January 1972, in Bloody Sunday.”

Later, after her now blind son returned home from the hospital, Richard’s mother took over his treatment in her own fashion. She spent much time in prayer, seeking heaven’s help in the return of his eyesight. She sought out blessed holy water from Ireland’s many holy wells, which she rubbed upon his sightless eyes. She scoured Masses and church services for holy medals. “I had about 30 holy medals pinned on my chest like I served in World War II,” Richard said.

Yet despite her herculean efforts, heaven wouldn’t budge.

AT THE TENDER AGE OF 14, Alistair Little joined the Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. The father of one of his friends had been killed by the IRA and he was ready to sign on for revenge. He must have been good at the snipings, the bombings and mayhem caused by these secretive, self anointed soldiers fighting on Britain’s side for Loyalist Ulster, because by age 17 he was sentenced to prison for 13 years.

Of the violence he committed, he says: “I felt I had done something for the cause. I also believed because I was a Protestant -- and God was a Protestant -- I would be OK. But in the back of my mind I felt I had done something wrong.” In prison, he was constantly afflicted with guilt “at the pain and hurt I had caused my family, and my parents who had aged 10 years in a couple of years.”

Alistair was behind bars in Northern Ireland’s infamous Maze prison in 1981, when Bobby Sands and 9 other IRA prisoners undertook a hunger strike. It was part of a campaign by Irish Nationalist inmates to have their status as political prisoners returned to them after it had been revoked. Sands would continue the strike for 66 days until his death, which turned him into a martyr and brought worldwide attention to The Troubles.

“I heard three prison officers laughing at Bobby Sands’ death. And saying they couldn’t wait until they ALL died,” Alistair says. He scolded the officers for their remarks. Then he wondered why. “Why I was defending Bobby Sands? I despised everything he stood for. If I'd had the chance I'd have killed him and he'd have killed me.” Yet he had seen in Sands “a certain courage,” Alistair says. “I realized I was seeing him as a human being for the first time.”

The Dalai Lama speaks quietly to Alistair Little, a former Protestant paramilitary who served 13 years in prison for his violent acts against Catholics. “There’s no sense in having redeemed myself. I’m unable to find that inner peace,” he says during his conference remarks. Photo by DOUGLAS IMBROGNO

FAST FORWARD, NOW, TO THE YEAR 2000 in downtown Belfast on the October morning of all this tale telling. More than 400 people fill the ornate Ulster City Hall on this Saturday as sunlight beams through tall windows ornamented with stained glass gold crowns and greenery. Mary, Richard, Alistair and others sit in chairs on a small stage in front of the windows. The program had blandly listed the event as “Testimonials from Victims of Sectarian Violence.” But this hardly prepares the conference members and other visitors for the heart-tugging tears and -- surprisingly -- the belly laughs that the session produces.

Father Freeman and the Dalai Lama quietly share the stage with the Irish speakers, with the Tibetan monk’s ears cocked toward his translator as the stories unfold. In her wheelchair, Mary pauses in her tale-telling, stymied by tears. “I blame this emotion on the Dalai Lama, because normally I’m not like this,” she says.

“I don’t like to be called disabled,” she continues after gathering herself, “because I’m not. I just can’t walk. I do have a problem with the built environment. It’s absolutely torture.” The one upside was that young guys would help lift her wheelchair in and out of places “so that was good fun.” She later left Belfast to work in London and Switzerland, married and had a child -- she points out her husband videotaping her from the audience -- and just last year she earned a Phd. Irish folk are some tough cookies, an observer might think, hearing this tale. Yet some days she doesn’t feel so tough, Mary says. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy getting old, dealing with the wheelchair. But that’s just the way it is.”

Yet it’s not the way it should be for one single other person in Northern Ireland, Mary goes on. No other family should have to suffer as she and her family did from The Troubles, and from the fallout of the frequent failed attempts to bring them to a close. “I don’t think it’s acceptable, that would be my greatest gripe. I blame the politicians. I don’t think they take the responsibility seriously enough. Northern Ireland is a very inflammatory situation. And we need decent, hardworking people to help us get peace.” She pauses. “I don’t want my daughter to go through what I had to go through, or any family. And that’s what I have to say.”

RICHARD, THE BLIND MAN FROM DERRY, is the hit of the morning. Half of it is that after all that he has suffered and lost he remains light-hearted and witty, in the wry, self-deprecating fashion of Irish humor. The other half is that he is totally, totally without rancor.

“I know you’re thinking to yourself that’s horrible,” Richard tells the audience, after recounting the bloody details of the day he became a blind man. “But for me, it was very easy to accept. I cried once about being blind that night -- because I wasn’t going to see my daddy or mummy’s face again.” But resoluteness followed. “Nobody was going to treat me as one of those handicapped people. Nor was I going to be seen mixing in those circles,” he adds smiling, as the audience breaks up into laughter.

He soon returned to his normal schooling and later graduated from university. He then plowed government compensation he received for being blind into the purchase of two hometown pubs. “So I’m probably partly responsible for the alcohol problem in Derry,” Richard says.

These days, he is married and has two children. He has traveled to Africa and elsewhere as part of a program called Children in Crossfire, which it might be noted once accurately described him. He is quite clear about what aided him best in getting on with his life. “The one big thing that helped me most was the fact I had no bitterness. In fact, I would be quite intrigued to meet the soldier that shot me.”

Of course, there have been deep, painful losses, he says. He was there at the birth of his children “but I couldn’t see them,” Richard says. “There is a price to pay and always will be. But I don’t allow that to dominate the rest of my life. My daddy always said: ‘Never let one cloud ruin a sunny day.’”

It is an astonishing remark, equating being shot and blinded with a mere cloud passing overhead. After the session, the Dalai Lama rises, cross the stage and hugs each of the tale tellers. But it is not the first time Richard and the Dalai Lama had touched. Before the Ulster Hall session, someone had asked Richard --- did he have any idea what the Dalai Lama looked like? The Dalai Lama came over and invited Richard to touch his face. The Derry man then ran his fingers over the monk’s bare scalp, down his high cheekbones, across his lips.

It could be said, though, that Richard, even before he ever laid hands on the Dalai Lama, already knew the contours and thrust of the Buddhist leader’s teachings by heart.

ALISTAIR, THE FORMER PARAMILITARY, often looks down at the floor as he speaks in a flat monotone to the audience. Seated in his chair, he wraps his arms around himself, knots his legs. He is talking about how easy it is to hurt other people. “It’s easy to commit acts of violence against people you have demonized,” he says. But the encounter with the Maze guards over Bobby Sands’ death was the beginning of something, he says. “That was a catalyst for me in moving away from violence -- realizing that the pain and loss was the same for me as it was for him.”

All of us in the audience wonder what exactly Alistair's crimes were, of course. But he doesn't offer up the details of who and how he killed. (The details are, one conference member remarks later, "the elephant in the room.") Yet if Alistair's body language didn’t reveal his continued self-loathing for the acts of his youth, he confirms it with his words. “There’s no sense in having redeemed myself. I’m unable to find that inner peace,” he says. “I think that’s the price you pay for being involved with violence.”

He spent “torturous years” in prison questioning the culture that led him to becoming a paramilitary and “realizing you have been lied to, used as a pawn in someone’s bigger game,” Alistair says. “But you have to take responsibility for your own actions, for the hurt and pain you cause.”

The crowded room falls into a still, pained silence. Many in the room, including myself, are quietly weeping at this point in his testimony. It’s true what he’s saying -- what of the families whose sons and daughters died or were hurt because of the bombs and bullets he and his cohorts conspired to launch? What of their stories? Yet it’s also true that this is a lost soul trying to find itself, and still wandering in deep darkness.

Alistair quotes a long, moving passage from some Zen monk’s ancient treatise on the cost of beastly behavior waged against other living beings. I need to track it down because it has much to say. But my eyes are blurred with tears as Alistair rings the curtain down on his story with the monk's dire words about the cost to one's own self of violence: “The stakes are not merely one’s life,” Alistair says, “but one’s very humanity.” He pauses. “Thank you.”

He, too, gets an embrace from the Dalai Lama, and a few words whispered into his ear. I cannot imagine what they are. But Alistair smiles back at the monk, the only time all morning his face brightens.

Later, an acquaintance from the conference -- a heart-on-her-sleeve, sweet-souled American woman named Bethany -- tells me she tracked Alistair down in the hallway afterward. She told him this: “If you can’t forgive yourself, how can we forgive ourselves? Because we created the world you were living in.”

Whatever the merits of such a view -- and it may not be as overly well meaning as it appears at first glance -- Alistair sounded as if the word “forgiveness,” at least as applied to himself, was from a foreign language he did not know and could not learn. “He’s holding the weight of the world,” Bethany says to me. “It just took such guts to be here.”

PAGE 4: Roots of a "tribal conflict"