Gordon Wilson (peace campaigner)
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Gordon Wilson (25 September 1927 – 27 June 1995) was the father of Marie Wilson, one of 11 victims of the Enniskillen Remembrance Day Bombing by the Provisional IRA in 1987.
He was born in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim several years after the partition of Ireland. He spent most of his adult life running the family drapery business in High Street, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
A man of great Christian faith (he attended Enniskillen Methodist Church and studied at Wesley College, Dublin), he came to national and international prominence with an emotional television interview he gave to the BBC the same evening in which he described his last conversation with his daughter, a nurse, as they both lay buried in rubble.
He expressed forgiveness to his daughter's killers and pleaded with loyalists not to take revenge for her death. Although a resident of Northern Ireland, he was invited to become a member of Seanad Éireann in 1993, on the nomination of the then-Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds.
On many occasions he met with members of Sinn Féin. He also met once with representatives of Provisional IRA, seeking the reasons for the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing, but failed — in his view — to get a satisfactory answer. He also met several times with loyalist paramilitaries in an attempt to persuade them to abandon violence.
He died of a heart attack in 1995, aged 67, survived by his wife, Joan, and their surviving children.
An anecdote concerning Gordon Wilson's extraordinary spirit of forgiveness on the evening of his daughter's death is included in William Ury's book The Third Side (1999):
In an interview with the BBC, Wilson described with anguish his last conversation with his daughter and his feelings toward her killers: "She held my hand tightly, and gripped me as hard as she could. She said, 'Daddy, I love you very much.' Those were her exact words to me, and those were the last words I ever heard her say." To the astonishment of listeners, Wilson went on to add, "But I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She's dead. She's in heaven and we shall meet again. I will pray for these men tonight and every night." As historian Jonathan Bardon recounts, "No words in more than twenty-five years of violence in Northern Ireland had such a powerful, emotional impact."
