The carnage must end

In that time Mr Rocke has witnessed the carnage and devastation wreaked on thousands of innocent people by terrorist bombs and bullets. He has watched children suffer in agony after being mutilated by explosives, broken the news of countless deaths and worked in a hospital where gunmen have shot patients in their bed. Now, he says, he has had enough.

Chosing his words carefully, the consultant trauma surgeon yesterday spelled out why he believes the people of Northern Ireland must vote Yes in the referendum.

''I have no great authority to comment politically on the vote,'' said Mr Rocke. ''But what I feel I am uniquely qualified to talk about is the physical effect of sectarian violence, because after what I have seen I have a responsibility to say all this must stop.

''A Yes vote gives us our best chance to achieve peace, perhaps our only chance to achieve peace. If everybody in Northern Ireland had seen the things I have seen I do not think they could do anything other than automatically vote Yes.''

Mr Rocke, 51, has witnessed injuries and suffering he struggles to find words to explain, but recalled two atrocities to underline why a Yes vote is essential.

He was a junior house officer at the Royal Victoria Hospital in August 1971. Six months later the IRA planted a bomb in a cafe in downtown Belfast and primed it to explode on a Saturday lunchtime.

''The cafe was filled with shoppers and young people when the bomb went off. Two girls died where they sat. One of them was the daughter of a consultant anaesthetist who worked in the hospital,'' said Mr Rocke. ''He came in and worked, anaesthetising people without realising his daughter had been killed.''

Mr Rocke was despatched to the resuscitation room where doctors were frantically working to save five women in their early twenties. ''I walked into the room and I couldn't take it in. Everybody had lost at least one limb.

''And then I saw her, a young girl was lying silently on her bed staring at the ceiling. She had lost both her legs and an arm. I can never forget how she looked to this day. Even people working in surgery had never seen anything like it.''

Mr Rocke said he spent the rest of that weekend in a state of profound shock. He said: ''When you are 24 you don't have a sense of your own mortality and I wasn't prepared enough to deal with what had happened to those other young people. In the doctors' mess people just sat around in silence. No-one spoke.''

The irony of the violence is that it has led Mr Rocke to becoming an internationally renowned expert on the treatment of bullet and bomb injuries. By 1994, when an IRA bomb exploded in a fish shop on the Shankill Road, he was a consultant trauma surgeon at the Royal Victoria.

''It happened on another Saturday afternoon,'' recalled Mr Rocke. ''I was on call and just about to pop up to my local rugby club when the bleeper went off. ''I went straight to the hospital where they were taking the victims and what I did was go into the ambulances to certify the people who were dead. One of the nine people who died was only about 10.''

Mr Rocke, a father of three, added: ''I am not someone who agonises about things, I certainly don't take my work home with me at the end of the day, but for the first time ever my children commented that they realised how affected I had been by that bombing. I haven't properly got over what I saw and heard and I don't think I ever will.''

Mr Rocke, known as Rocky, urged: ''People have to vote Yes to give us a chance to get away from violence. We must never go back to the dark days when we saw at least two or three people every day with gunshot wounds and bombs killed and maimed so many.

''When I left university my aim was to be a normal doctor. That was the plan 27 years ago and it is the plan today. That's why I'll be voting Yes to the agreement.''

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