It was just another pause at a bus stop on another ordinary journey to school in Belfast for teenage Eamonn Holmes. Only this day, when the bus ground to a halt, the passenger that jumped aboard was a man with a balaclava helmet – and he was brandishing a machine gun.
“He said ‘right we’re commandeering this bus, as Provisional IRA, everybody off’. You stand up thinking oh my god. Then these two others came on behind him with petrol bombs in their hand. They light the petrol bombs and we all scamper off the bus and they fire the petrol bombs into the bus and burn it.” “I’m very close to being late for school,” Holmes adds, as he recounts the story nearly 50 years later.
As for mental health, “being in the public eye, there’s tremendous exposure and scrutiny, tremendous criticism and praise, your life is in the spotlight,” Holmes muses. “Everything you do affects your life and affects how you’re perceived. So I’m very surprised I don’t have issues outside of having an off day and feeling a bit down in the dumps.” He’s well aware, however, that is not the case for many and is patron for Platform 1.