The bombing takes place at a time when the Northern Ireland Office arranges multi-party talks, known as the Brooke/Mayhew talks, on the future of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin members are not invited to attend because of their links with the IRA, which prevents them from being recognised as a “constitutional” party. The talks end in failure soon after.
Built in 1972, the barracks house two companies of the 2nd Battalion, Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). Seen as an outpost, it sits on the dividing line between a Protestant area and a Catholic area. Although the military barracks itself had not been attacked by the IRA previously, seven UDR soldiers from the base had already been killed during the Troubles.
At 11:30 PM, a driverless truck loaded with 2,500 lb (1,100 kg) of a new type of homemade explosive is rolled down a hill at the rear of the barracks and crashes through the perimeter fence. According to a witness, a UDR lance corporal who alerts the base, the truck is a Mercedes, and a Toyota HiAce van carrying at least two men acts as a support vehicle. The men are seen outside the parked van, masked and armed, one with a handgun and the other with a submachine gun. This same witness alerts the base believing the IRA team are about to carry out a mortar attack, and debris thrown up on the roof by the lorry as it plunges down the hill is misinterpreted by some inside the base as a mortar projectile. Automatic fire is heard by other witnesses just before the main blast. A Reuters report claims that IRA members trigger the bomb by firing upon the driverless vehicle. It is later determined that the lorry had been stolen the day before in Kingscourt, County Cavan, in the Republic of Ireland.
The blast leaves a crater 200 ft. (61 m) deep and throws debris and shrapnel as far as 300 yards (270 m). The explosion can be heard over 30 miles (48 km) away, as far as Dundalk. This is the biggest bomb detonated by the IRA up to this point. Most of the UDR base is destroyed by the blast and the fire that follows. At first, a massive mortar attack is suspected. Some livestock are killed and windows broken around the nearby Mossfield housing as a result of the explosion. The cars parked outside the base are obliterated. Ceilings are brought down and the local primary school is also damaged.
The barracks is usually manned by eight soldiers, but at the time there are 40 people in the complex, attending a social event. Three UDR soldiers – Lance Corporal Robert Crozier (46), Private Sydney Hamilton (44) and Private Paul Blakely (30) – are killed and ten are wounded. Two of them are caught by the explosion when they come out to investigate after a sentry gives the alarm. A third dies inside the base. Four civilians are also wounded. The Provisional IRA claims responsibility two days later.
The base is never rebuilt. It had outlived its operational usefulness and a decision had already been taken to close it down. The decision not to rebuild the compound raises some controversy among unionists. A memorial stone is erected by the main entrance road with the names of the UDR soldiers killed over the years while serving in Glenanne.
The Brady funeral is making its way along the Andersonstown Road toward Milltown Cemetery when the corporals’ car appears from the opposite direction. The car drives straight towards the front of the funeral, which is headed by several black taxis. It drives past a Sinn Féin steward who signals it to turn. Mourners at the funeral say they believed they were under attack from Ulster loyalists, as three days earlier, loyalist Michael Stone had attacked an IRA funeral and killed three people. The car then mounts a pavement, scattering mourners, and turns into a small side road. When this road is blocked, it then reverses at speed, ending up within the funeral procession. Corporal Wood attempts to drive the car out of the procession but his exit route is blocked by a black taxi.
An angry crowd surrounds the car, smashes the windows and attempts to drag the soldiers out. Wood produces a Browning Hi-Power 9mm handgun. He climbs partly out of a window and fires a shot in the air, which briefly scatters the crowd. The crowd then surges back, with some of them attacking the car with a wheel-brace and a stepladder snatched from a photographer. The corporals are eventually pulled from the car and punched and kicked to the ground.
The attack is witnessed by the media and passersby. JournalistMary Holland recalls seeing one of the men being dragged past a group of journalists. “He didn’t cry out; just looked at us with terrified eyes, as though we were all enemies in a foreign country who wouldn’t have understood what language he was speaking if he called out for help.”
The men are taken to nearby Casement Park sports ground, just opposite. Here they are beaten, stripped to their underpants and socks, and searched by a small group of men. The BBC and The Independent write that the men were “tortured.” A search reveals that the men are British soldiers. Their captors find a military ID on Howes which is marked “Herford,” the site of a British military base in Germany, but it is believed they misread it as “Hereford,” the headquarters of the Special Air Service (SAS).
Redemptoristpriest Father Alec Reid, who plays a significant part in the peace process leading to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, intervenes and attempts to save the soldiers, and asks people to call an ambulance. “I got down between the two of them and I had my arm around this one and I was holding this one up by the shoulder….They were so disciplined, they just lay there totally still and I decided to myself they were soldiers. There was a helicopter circling overhead and I don’t know why they didn’t do something, radio to the police or soldiers to come up, because there were these two of their own soldiers.”
One of the captors warns Father Reid not to interfere and orders two men to take him away.
The two soldiers are placed in a taxi and driven fewer than 200 yards to a waste ground near Penny Lane (South Link), just off the main Andersonstown Road. There they are taken out of the vehicle and shot dead. Wood is shot six times and Howes is shot five times. Each also has multiple injuries to other parts of their bodies. The perpetrators quickly leave the scene. Father Reid hears the shots and rushes to the waste ground. He believes one of the soldiers is still breathing and attempts to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Upon realizing that the soldiers are dead, he gives them the last rites. According to photographer David Cairns, although photographers have their films taken by the IRA, he is able to keep his by quickly leaving the area after taking a photograph of Reid kneeling beside the almost naked body of Howes, administering the last rites. Cairns’ photograph is later named one of the best pictures of the past 50 years by Life magazine.
The whole incident is filmed by a British Army helicopter hovering overhead. An unnamed soldier of the Royal Scots says his eight-man patrol is nearby and sees the attack on the corporals’ car but are told not to intervene. Soldiers and police arrive on the scene three minutes after the corporals had been shot. A British Army spokesman says the army did not respond immediately because they needed time to assess the situation and were wary of being ambushed by the IRA. The large funeral procession also prevents them getting to the scene quickly.
Shortly after, the IRA releases a statement:
“The Belfast Brigade, IRA, claims responsibility for the execution of two SAS members who launched an attack on the funeral cortege of our comrade volunteer Kevin Brady. The SAS unit was initially apprehended by the people lining the route in the belief that armed loyalists were attacking them and they were removed from the immediate vicinity. Our volunteers forcibly removed the two men from the crowd and, after clearly ascertaining their identities from equipment and documentation, we executed them.”
Two men, Alex Murphy and Harry Maguire, are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, but are released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Several other men receive lesser sentences for their part in the corporals killings.
(Pictured: Catholic priest Father Alec Reid administers the last rights to Corporal David Howes, one of two British soldiers brutally beaten and murdered in Belfast)
The Shankill Butchers, a gang of eleven Ulster loyalists, are sentenced to life imprisonment on February 20, 1979, for 112 offences including nineteen murders. Many of the gang are members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) that is active between 1975 and 1982 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The gang is based in the Shankill area and is responsible for the deaths of at least 23 people, most of whom are killed in sectarian attacks. The gang is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering random or suspected Catholic civilians. Each is beaten ferociously and has their throat hacked with a butcher’s knife. Some are also tortured and attacked with a hatchet. The gang also kills six Ulster Protestants over personal disputes, and two other Protestants mistaken for Catholics.
Most of the Butchers are eventually captured and eleven of them come to trial during 1978 and early 1979. On February 20, 1979, the eleven men are convicted of a total of nineteen murders, and the 42 life sentences handed out are the longest combined prison sentences in United Kingdom legal history.
William Moore pleads guilty to eleven counts of murder and Bobby “Basher” Bates pleads guilty to ten counts. The trial judge, Lord Justice Turlough O’Donnell, says that he does not wish to be cast as “public avenger” but feels obliged to sentence the two to life imprisonment with no chance of release. Gang leader Lenny Murphy and his two chief “lieutenants,” however, escape prosecution.
In summing-up, Lord Justice O’Donnell states that their crimes, “a catalogue of horror”, are “a lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry.” After the trial, Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Nesbitt, head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Murder Squad in Tennent Street Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) base and the man charged with tracking down the Butchers, comments, “The big fish got away,” a reference to Murphy (referred to in court as “Mr. X” or the “Master Butcher”) and to Messrs “A” and “B.”
Lenny Murphy is assassinated by a Provisional Irish Republican Army hit squad early in the evening of November 16, 1982, outside the back of his girlfriend’s house in the Glencairn estate. The IRA is likely acting with loyalist paramilitaries who perceive him as a threat.
The first of the Butchers to be released from prison is John Townsley, who had been only fourteen when he became involved with the gang and sixteen when arrested. Bobby Bates is released in October 1996, two years after the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994. He reportedly “found religion” behind bars. He is shot and killed in the upper Shankill area on June 11, 1997, by the son of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) man he had killed in the Windsor Bar. “Mr. B”, John Murphy, dies in a car accident in Belfast in August 1998. William Moore is the final member of the gang to be released from prison in August 1998, in accordance with the Good Friday Agreement, after over twenty-one years behind bars. He dies on May 17, 2009, from a suspected heart attack at his home.
The investigations by Martin Dillon, author of The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder (1989 and 1998), suggests that a number of other individuals (whom he is unable to name for legal reasons) escape prosecution for participation in the crimes of the Butchers and that the gang are responsible for a total of at least thirty murders.
The Butchers brought a new level of paramilitary violence to a country already hardened by death and destruction.
From 1985 onwards, the IRA in East Tyrone had been at the forefront of a campaign against British state police and army facilities and their personnel. In 1987, an East Tyrone IRA unit was ambushed with eight of its members being killed by the SAS while they were making an attack on a police station in Loughgall, County Armagh. This was the IRA’s greatest loss of life in a single incident during The Troubles. Despite these losses, the IRA’s campaign continued, with it attacking nearly 100 police and military facilities over the next five years, wrecking thirty-three and damaging the remainder to varying degrees. The SAS ambush has no noticeable long-term effect on the level of IRA activity in East Tyrone. In the two years before the Loughgall ambush, the IRA killed seven people in East Tyrone and North Armagh, and eleven in the two years following the ambush.
Three other IRA members – Gerard Harte, Martin Harte and Brian Mullin – had been ambushed and killed by the SAS as they tried to kill an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier near Carrickmore, County Tyrone. British intelligence identified them as the perpetrators of the Ballygawley bus bombing, which killed eight British soldiers. After that bombing, all troops going on leave or returning from leave were ferried in and out of East Tyrone by helicopter. Another high-profile attack of the East Tyrone Brigade was carried out on January 11, 1990, near Augher, where a Gazelle helicopter was shot down.
On June 3, 1991, three IRA men, Lawrence McNally, Michael “Pete” Ryan and Tony Doris, were killed at the town of Coagh, when a stolen car they were driving in on their way to kill an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment soldier was ambushed by the Special Air Service. Ryan was the same man who, according to Irish journalist and author Ed Moloney, had led an attack on Derryard checkpoint on the orders of IRA Army Council member Thomas “Slab” Murphy two years earlier.
The IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade lost 53 members killed by the British Forces during the Troubles – the highest of any “Brigade areas.” Of these, 28 were killed between 1987 and 1992.
At 10.30 p.m. on the night of February 16, 1992, a stolen car and lorry carrying multiple IRA attackers drives into the centre of the village of Coalisland and, pulling up at its fortified Royal Ulster Constabulary security base, fires 30 rounds of armour-piercing tracer ammunition into it at close range from a Soviet Union made DShK heavy machine-gun that they had mounted on the back of the lorry. The heavy machine gun is fired by IRA member Kevin O’Donnell, the rest of the unit being armed with Soviet-made AKMassault rifles. The IRA attackers then drive off at speed up Annagher hill, without any apparent pursuit from the security forces. While making their escape they drive past the home of Tony Doris, an IRA man who had been killed by the British Army the previous year, where they stop to fire into the air, shouting, “Up the ‘RA, that’s for Tony Doris!” Witnesses also report the IRA men waving Irish Tricolours from the back of the lorry. After this they drive on at speed to the car park of St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in the village of Clonoe, two miles away from Coalisland police station, arriving at 10.45 p.m., where getaway cars are waiting.
Immediately on arrival, the IRA attackers are in the process of preparing to abandon the attack vehicles and dismounting the DShK to take with them when they are assailed by a British Army detachment that had been lying in wait for them in the car park’s perimeter, primarily composed of soldiers from the Special Air Service, who engage them with sustained automatic fire. Patrick Vincent, age 20, the driver of the stolen lorry, is shot dead with five bullets while still in its cab. Peter Clancy, age 19, and Kevin O’Donnell, age 21) are killed while dismounting the DShK on the back of the lorry. Sean O’Farrell, age 23, is pursued on foot across the church grounds over a distance of 100 yards before being shot dead with five bullets while trying to climb over a fence. Two other IRA men, one of them being Aidan McKeever, who are found sitting in a car in the car park with the intention of acting as getaway drivers, surrender after being wounded and are taken prisoner. The roof of the church is accidentally set on fire after a stray round hit a fuel storage tank. One British soldier is wounded during the confrontation. An IRA statement reports that another active service unit made up of at least four volunteers taking part in the operation at Coalisland “escaped unharmed” under heavy fire in other vehicles after splitting up into two teams.
Several witnesses to the ambush later claim that some of the IRA men tried to surrender to the British Army engaging unit during the ambush but were summarily executed. Justice Seamus Treacy of Northern Ireland’s High Court awards McKeever, the IRA getaway driver, £75,000 in damages in 2011. It is unclear whether or not this decision is appealed, or whether the damages are ever paid.
A local IRA source points out areas of incompetence in the attack by the IRA unit involved that leads to its destruction:
The use of a long-range weapon for a short-range shooting. The DShK can be used up to 2,000 metres from the target, and its armour-piercing capabilities at 1,500 metres are still considerable.
The use of tracer rounds is ill-judged as they easily reveal the firing location of the gun if it is not being fired from a well-hidden position.
The escape route is chosen at random, with the machine-gun in full sight and the support vehicle flashing its hazard lights.
The gathering of so many men at the same place after such an attack is another factor in the failure to escape for most of the attacking force.
During the funeral services for O’Donnell and O’Farrell in Coalisland, the parish priest criticises the security forces for what happened at Clonoe church, which had resulted in the deaths of the four IRA men. The priest, Fr. MacLarnon, then appeals to the IRA and Sinn Féin to replace “the politics of confrontation with the politics of cooperation.” While Francie Molloy, a local Sinn Féin councillor, walks out of the church in protest, leading Sinn Féin politicians Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness remain in their seats. There are hundreds of Royal Ulster Constabulary police officers outside the church during the funeral, the RUC having changed its policy after the Milltown Cemetery attack. This show of force is criticised by Sinn Féin.
This is the last occasion that IRA members are killed in a series of ambushes by the British Army, spearheaded by the Special Air Service, in Northern Ireland. Growing tension between locals and the British military foot-patrols lead to street confrontations with soldiers from the Parachute Regiment three months later.
(Pictured: The ambush scene at Clonoe, County Tyrone, where four IRA men were shot dead by the British army in February 1992)
On February 1, 1998, up to 40,000 people march from the nationalistCreggan estate to the Bogside area of Derry to commemorate the 26th anniversary of Bloody Sunday and to remember the 14 people who died after paratroopers opened fire during disturbances 26 years earlier. Organisers say it is one of the biggest Bloody Sunday marches to date.
Jean Heggarty, whose brother Kevin was among those killed on January 31, 1972, pays tribute to the families’ quest for truth. “The families have never doubted the truth would survive. Due to their determination 26 years later, Tony Blair stated in the House of Commons that he would establish the truth,” she says.
John Kelly, whose brother Michael was killed, says, “The families have had a long struggle but what Tony Blair has said has really surprised us. I think we are in a more jovial mood after that announcement.”
The Sinn Féin chief negotiator, Martin McGuinness, calls for prosecutions to result from the new Bloody Sunday inquiry. He says those commanding the paratroopers on the day should be called to account for their actions.
McGuinness includes in his remarks General Sir Robert Ford, who was Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland at the time of the killings. “I think the role of General Ford in particular is going to come under the microscope,” he says. “If people such as General Ford are found to be complicit in the killings then I think they should be subjected to proceedings in the courts. The implications of all that are enormous for the British establishment.”
In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, General Ford told the BBC that his men had returned only three shots after having between 10 and 20 rounds fired at them.
(From: “Special Report: Remembering Bloody Sunday,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk, February 1, 1998 | Pictured: In driving rain, relatives lay wreaths at the Bloody Sunday memorial)
Collins is born in 1954 in Camlough, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, the son of Brian Collins, a farmer, livestock trader, and cattle smuggler, and Kathleen Collins (née Cumiskey). His extended family has no history of political involvement, though his upbringing is fervently Catholic and nationalist. He leaves secondary school at age 16 and briefly works as a clerk in the Ministry of Defence in London. He returns home for family reasons and resumes his education in 1971 through a scholarship to St. Colman’s College, Newry, County Down. In 1973 he goes to Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) to study law.
Collins develops ultra-leftist political beliefs in his late teens and supports the Northern Ireland civil rights movement but retains reservations about the use of violence. He is further radicalised by being beaten up by soldiers searching his family’s farm at Easter 1974 and by the downfall of the power sharing executive. He loses interest in his studies, leaves QUB in 1976 without completing his degree, and drifts for two years, joining an anarchist collective in Belfast. He comes back into contact with the republican movement through the blanket protest by Long Kesh inmates; he had known hunger strikerRaymond McCreesh as a teenager. In 1978 he joins the customs service in Newry and begins to pass information to the IRA, which he joins in 1979. He is central to IRA recruitment and intelligence in Newry and south Down. Without firing a shot himself he facilitates at least five murders, including that of a customs colleague.
In 1982 Collins marries and the couple has four children. By 1984 he has developed doubts about his activities. He antagonises the Belfast leadership, which is moving towards political engagement and away from the all-out revolutionary violence that he favours, and while he admires the hardline South Armagh IRA for its military professionalism, he regards its members as political primitives. On February 28, 1985, he is arrested after an IRA mortar attack in which nine Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) members are killed. He breaks down after six days of interrogation and is recruited as a “supergrass,” but retracts his evidence a fortnight later and is held on remand on the basis of his confessions.
In January–February 1987 Collins is tried for murder but acquitted after the judge rules his statements inadmissible. He completes an Open University degree while awaiting trial. After his release he is ostracised and is interrogated by the IRA, which in July 1987 orders him to leave Northern Ireland. He engages in youth work in Dublin from 1987 to 1990, taking a diploma in community work at Maynooth. His wife and children remain in Newry and he visits them regularly in defiance of the expulsion order. In 1990 he returns to live in Newry and teaches at the Ulster People’s College in Belfast. From 1992–94 he is a community worker in Edinburgh. His wife and children continue to live on the Barcroft Park estate in Newry.
In 1994 Collins returns permanently to Northern Ireland after securing a job at a youth club in Armagh. In April 1995 he describes his career in a television documentary, admitting the murders for which he had been tried. In 1997 he publishes a memoir, Killing Rage, a powerful account of life as a paramilitary, although it is not entirely reliable. After the 1995 documentary he experiences verbal and physical harassment. This intensifies after May 1998 when he testifies for The Sunday Times in a libel action by Thomas Murphy, whom the paper accuses of being a leading IRA member. Four months after Murphy loses the case, the family farmhouse in Camlough, which Collins is renovating, is burned down. After the Omagh bombing he publishes several articles denouncing the Real IRA, several of whose activists he had recruited into the IRA from the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in the early 1980s. Graffiti regularly appears outside his home in Newry denouncing him as a British agent.
Early in the morning of January 27, 1999, Collins paints out the latest graffiti, and is walking his dogs near the Barcroft Park Estate in Newry along a quiet stretch of country lane at Doran’s Hill, just within sight of Sliabh gCuircin (Camlough Mountain). His body also bears marks of having been struck by a car moving at speed. The subsequent police investigation and Coroner’s Inquest comments upon the extremity of weaponed violence to Collins’ head and face used during the attack.
Rumoured reasons behind the murder are that Collins had returned to Northern Ireland in breach of the IRA’s banning order, and further he had detailed IRA activities and publicly criticized in the media a multiplicity of Irish Republican paramilitary splinter groups that had appeared after the Provisional IRA’s 1994 ceasefire, and that he had testified in court against Murphy. Gerry Adams states the murder was “regrettable,” but adds that Collins had “many enemies in many places.”
After a traditional Irish wake, with a closed coffin necessitated due to the damage to his face, and a funeral service at St. Catherine’s Dominican Church in Newry, Collins’ body is buried at the city’s Monkshill Cemetery, not far from the grave of Albert White, a Catholic former Royal Ulster Constabulary Inspector, whose assassination he helped to organise in 1982.
In January 2014 the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) releases a statement that a re-examination of the evidence from the scene of the 1999 murder had revealed new DNA material of a potential perpetrator’s presence, and makes a public appeal for information, detailing the involvement of a specific car model, a white coloured Hyundai Pony, and a compasspommel that had broken off a hunting knife during the attack and had been left behind at the scene. In February 2014 detectives from the Serious Crime Branch arrest a 59-year-old man at an address in Newry in relation to the murder, but he is subsequently released without charge. In September 2014 the police arrest three men, aged 56, 55 and 42, in County Armagh in relation to inquiries into the murder, all of whom are subsequently released without charges after questioning. In January 2019 the police release a statement regarding the murder that one of the assailants had been seriously injured by an accidentally sustained knife wound during the attack, and had left traces of his own blood at the scene, and that recent scientific advances in DNA evidence had increased the possibility of his identification. In May 2019, three men aged 60 to 62 are arrested and questioned, but then released unconditionally.
The Shankill Butchers gang is based in the Shankill area and is responsible for the deaths of at least 23 people, most of whom are killed in sectarian attacks. The gang is notorious for kidnapping, torturing and murdering random or suspected Catholic civilians. Each victim is beaten ferociously and has their throat hacked with a butcher knife. Some are also tortured and attacked with a hatchet. The gang also kills six Ulster Protestants over personal disputes, and two other Protestants mistaken for Catholics.
The commander of the Shankill Butchers gang is Lenny Murphy. He is the youngest of three sons of Joyce (née Thompson) and William Murphy from the loyalist Shankill Road area of Belfast. At school he is known as a bully and threatens other boys with a knife or with retribution from his two older brothers. Soon after leaving school at 16, he joins the UVF. He often attends the trials of people accused of paramilitary crimes, to become well acquainted with the laws of evidence and police procedure.
On September 28, 1972, Murphy shoots and kills William Edward “Ted” Pavis at the latter’s home in East Belfast. Pavis is a Protestant whom the UVF say has been selling weapons to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Murphy and an accomplice, Mervyn Connor, are arrested shortly afterwards and held on remand in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol. After a visit by police to Connor, fellow inmates suspect that he might cut a deal with the authorities with regard to the Pavis killing. On April 22, 1973, Connor dies by ingesting a large dose of cyanide. Before he dies, he writes a confession to the Pavis murder, reportedly under duress from Murphy. Murphy is brought to trial for the Pavis murder in June 1973. The court hears evidence from two witnesses who had seen Murphy pull the trigger and had later picked him out of an identification parade. The jury acquits him due in part to Murphy’s disruption of the line-up. His freedom is short-lived as he is arrested immediately for a number of escape attempts and imprisoned, then interned, for three years.
In May 1975, Murphy is released from prison. He spends much of his time frequenting pubs on the Shankill Road and assembling a paramilitary team that will enable him to act with some freedom at a remove from the UVF leadership (Brigade Staff). His inner circle consists of two “personal friends.” These are a “Mr. A” and John Murphy, one of Lenny’s brothers, referred to as “Mr. B.” Further down the chain of command are his “sergeants,” William Moore and Bobby “Basher” Bates, a UVF man and former prisoner.
Moore, formerly a worker in a meat-processing factory, had stolen several large knives and meat-cleavers from his old workplace, tools that are later used in more murders. Another prominent figure is Sam McAllister, who uses his physical presence to intimidate others. On October 2, 1975, the gang raids a drinks premises in nearby Millfield. On finding that its four employees, two females and two males, are Catholics, Murphy shoots three of them dead and orders an accomplice to kill the fourth. By now Murphy is using the upper floor of the Brown Bear pub, at the corner of Mountjoy Street and the Shankill Road near his home, as an occasional meeting-place for his unit.
On November 25, 1975, using the city’s sectarian geography to identify likely targets, Murphy roams the areas nearest the Catholic New Lodge in the hope of finding someone likely to be Catholic to abduct. Francis Crossen, a 34-year-old Catholic man and father of two, is walking towards the city centre at approximately 12:40 a.m. when four of the Butchers, in Moore’s taxi, spot him. As the taxi pulls alongside Crossen, Murphy jumps out and hits him with a lug wrench to disorient him. He is dragged into the taxi by Benjamin Edwards and Archie Waller, two of Murphy’s gang. As the taxi returns to the safety of the nearby Shankill area, Crossen suffers a ferocious beating. He is subjected to a high level of violence, including a beer glass being shoved into his head. Murphy repeatedly tells Crossen, “I’m going to kill you, you bastard,” before the taxi stops at an entry off Wimbledon Street. Crossen is dragged into an alleyway and Murphy, brandishing a butcher knife, cuts his throat almost through to the spine. The gang disperses. Crossen, whose body is found the following morning by an elderly woman, is the first of three Catholics to be killed by Murphy in this “horrific and brutal manner.” “Slaughter in back alley” is the headline in the city’s major afternoon newspaper that day. A relative of Crossen says that his family was unable to have an open coffin at his wake because the body was so badly mutilated.
Most of the gang are eventually caught and, in February 1979, receive the longest combined prison sentences in United Kingdom legal history. However, gang leader Lenny Murphy and his two chief “lieutenants” escape prosecution. Murphy is murdered in November 1982 by the Provisional IRA, likely acting with loyalist paramilitaries who perceive him as a threat. The Butchers brought a new level of paramilitary violence to a country already hardened by death and destruction. The judge who oversaw the 1979 trial describes their crimes as “a lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry.”
On October 2, 1975, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalistparamilitary group, carries out a wave of shootings and bombings across Northern Ireland. Six of the attacks leave 12 people dead (mostly civilians) and around 45 people injured. There is also an attack in the small village of Killyleagh, County Down. There are five attacks in and around Belfast which leave people dead. A bomb which explodes near Coleraine leaves four UVF members dead. There are also several other smaller bombs planted around Northern Ireland, sixteen in total, but other than causing damage they do not kill or injure anyone.
There is a rise in sectarian killings during the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) truce with the British Army, which begins in February 1975 and officially lasts until February 1976. Loyalists, fearing they are about to be forsaken by the British government and forced into a united Ireland, increase their attacks on Irish Catholics/Irish nationalists. Loyalists kill 120 Catholics in 1975, the vast majority civilians. They hope to force the IRA to retaliate and thus end the truce. Some IRA units concentrate on tackling the loyalists. The fall-off of regular operations causes unruliness within the IRA and some members, with or without permission from higher up, engage in tit-for-tat killings.
The first attack of the day takes place at Casey’s Bottling Plant in Belfast. The UVF group, which is alleged to have been led by Shankill Butchers leader Lenny Murphy, enters the premises by pretending to have an order to be filled before launching the attack. Four employees are shot and killed in the attack, sisters Frances Donnelly (35), Marie McGrattan (47) and Gerard Grogan (18) all die that day, with a fourth, Thomas Osborne (18), dying of his wounds three weeks later. Murphy personally shoots all except Donnelly who is killed by his accomplice William Green. The two sisters are forced to kneel on the ground and are shot in the back of the head.
In the next attack Thomas Murphy (29), a Catholic photographer from Belfast, is killed in a booby-trap bomb and gun attack, when two UVF gunmen enter his premises on Carlisle Circus (close to both the loyalist Shankill Road and republican New Lodge areas of Belfast) and shoot him in the chest, before planting a duffel bag bomb in his shop. The resulting explosion injures several people including a female passer-by who loses her leg.
Next the UVF carries out a gun and bomb attack on McKenna’s Bar near Crumlin, County Antrim, which kills a Catholic civilian John Stewart (35) and injures scores of people.
In Killyleagh, County Down, a no-warning bomb explodes outside a Catholic-owned bar, The Anchor Inn. Irene Nicholson (37), a Protestant woman, is killed as she is passing by while the attack is being carried out. Three UVF members are later arrested for this attack in Bangor and one of them claims the attack was “a small one to scare them.”
Next Ronald Winters (26), a Protestant civilian, is shot dead by the UVF in his parents’ house on London Road, Belfast.
Later that night four UVF members are killed as they drive along a road in Farrenlester, near Coleraine, when the bomb they are transporting explodes prematurely.
The following day, October 3, the UVF is once again made a proscribed terrorist organisation. Secretary of State for Northern IrelandMerlyn Rees had unbanned the UVF in May 1974, the same day the ban on Sinn Féin was lifted, a move never extended to the IRA. Despite this the UVF are still able to kill Catholic civilians at will for the remainder of 1975 and for most of 1976 also.
Sinn Féin says the meeting is a hugely significant move. “This is the first time in Irish history that a republican leader and a leader of unionism have sat down together in a room on their own,” says a spokesman. “This is about normalising relations between Sinn Féin and the First Minister.”
But the two men are not expected to shake hands after Trimble says Adams is still holding arms. They are likely to discuss decommissioning terrorist weapons.
The men meet briefly on Monday, September 7, in a round-table discussion of party leaders on procedural matters of the future government of the province, the Northern Ireland Assembly.
News of Trimble’s invitation to Adams breaks the previous week after the Sinn Féin President issues a firm denunciation of violence. But Trimble is adamant that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) must hand over arms before Sinn Féin can take seats in the new government. Sinn Féin has made moves in this direction by appointing strategist Martin McGuinness as an intermediary between the international arms decommissioning body and the IRA.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement includes a power sharing administration under British rule and an all-Ireland ministerial council to promote island-wide co-operation. London is due to hand over a large measure of home rule powers by February 1999. In the meantime a “shadow” ruling executive must up be set up and mechanisms put in place to ensure smooth implementation of all aspects of the Agreement.
Meanwhile, two rebel Ulster Unionists who ran against official candidates in the 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly election are waiting to learn if they have been expelled from the party. Party officials say it will take several days to decide the future of the two members of the new parliament, Denis Watson and Boyd Douglas, who contested the June poll on an anti-Agreement ticket.
(From: “Trimble and Adams make history,” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk, September 10, 1998)
Edward Montgomery O’Rorke Dickey is born in Belfast on July 1, 1894, the son of Edward O’Rorke Dickey. He later marries Eunice Emmeline Howard and they have one son, Daniel. He is educated at Wellington College and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studies painting under Harold Gilman at the Westminster School of Art.
Dickey becomes the first curator of The Minories in Colchester, Essex, a post he holds for five years from 1957 to 1962.
Dickey is a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and exhibits with them from 1920 to 1924. He is at his most active in the early 1920s and virtually all his engravings date from this period.
In 1922 Dickey contributes a wood engraving to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Gerald Duckworth and Company and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, writes about him in his introduction to the book Mr. Hagreen and Mr. Dickey are among the engravers who rely very much upon the effective use of white lines and spaces. This is a limited edition of 550 copies, as is the only book that he illustrates with wood engravings, Workers by the Irish writer Richard Rowley, published by Balston at Duckworth in 1923.
seamus dubhghaill 