The guy lying on top of me said '˜just pretend you're dead'

She said: “I was an 18-year-old working in the Royal living on the Springfield Road. I’d been on a date to the cinema that afternoon to see The Godfather: Part 2. The reason we decided to walk was because my flatmates were cooking dinner, so if we got a taxi I’d have to help, but if we walked it would be ready by the time we got in.

“Just as we were coming up to a zebra crossing I saw a car slow down, then guns pointing at us out the windows. It was like something we had just seen in the film, so eerie.

“They started shooting, I heard an explosion and the next thing I remember I was trying to get up with him lying on top of me and saying, ‘just lie down and pretend you’re dead’. They were still shooting.

“I thought this poor guy who I don’t know is going to be dead on top of me. When it was over I couldn’t get up. I was in no pain but I couldn’t move.

“When they lifted me into the ambulance I knew I was in serious trouble. I just kept thinking about my poor parents because just the summer before my brother Gavin had died from leukaemia and now this had happened.

“This was at a time of random sectarian shootings in the 70s. We were both Catholics but I don’t know how they knew. I was told afterwards – and I don’t know how true this is – but if you were Catholic you walked on one side of the road and Protestants walked on the other.

“The person I was with had four or five grazes, but he was mentally scarred for life. I’d only met him, this was a first date.

“The poor guy came to see me in hospital, but I had to tell him I didn’t want to see him anymore. It was no way to start a relationship.

“The bullet that caused my paralysis hit my spine, ricocheted off my spine, hit my kidney and lodged in my hip.

“I’m a glass half full person. I’m lucky to be alive and I’ve had a great life.

“I’ve been in a wheelchair all my adult life. I’d just turned 18 when it happened.

“Everything is complicated when you’re in a wheelchair. You’ve always got to plan ahead, you can’t just do things in the spur of the moment, but even then things go wrong.

“I’ve just had to keep going, I don’t see any alternative. I can’t just spend my time saying woe is me.

“Whenever I was shot there was just a tiny wee bit in the newspaper because I didn’t die. But actually when you’re severely injured it has such a massive impact on your life.

“When I hear that now on the news – that someone has been severely injured in a bomb or other attack – I think about those poor people and wonder what they’ve been left with.

“I was very heightened after what happened. I would drive past parked cars and worried that they were going to blow up.

“I spent four months at Stoke Mandeville which specialised in spinal injuries. I met someone there who I later married and moved to England. But that didn’t work out.

“I moved to Switzerland before coming back to Northern Ireland in 1993 to do a PhD at Coleraine.”

Mary is remarried and has a 19-year-old daughter. She lives on the outskirts of Coleraine and is a lecturer in the biomedical science department of the university there.

As a university researcher she is studying upper limb damage in long-term wheelchair users.

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