Gordon Wilson (peace campaigner)
From Free net encyclopedia
Gordon Wilson (1927 - 1995) was the father of Marie Wilson, one of 11 victims of the Enniskillen Remembrance Sunday Parade bombing by the Provisional IRA in 1987.
He was born in Manorhamilton, County Leitrim in the Irish Republic shortly after the partition of Ireland. He spent most of his adult life running the family drapery business in Church 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 the Seanad Eireann 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 PIRA, 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 68.