Hurson, from Cappagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, is one of nine children born to Johnnie and Mary Ann Hurson. He is educated to a primary level at Crosscavanagh Primary School in Galbally and at secondary level in St. Patrick’s, Galbally.
After leaving school, he works as a welder for a while before going to England where he stays for eighteen months with his brother Francis and works in the building trade. Returning to County Tyrone at the end of 1974, both he and his brother spend time in Bundoran, County Donegal, a known IRA training and supply centre.
In November 1976, Hurson, together with Kevin O’Brien, Dermot Boyle, Peter Kane, and Pat O’Neill are arrested. Hurson is tried and convicted of involvement in three IRA landmine incidents, one at Cappagh in September, one at Galbally, County Tyrone in November 1975 and a third at Reclain in February 1976, when several members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment narrowly escape being killed. He receives concurrent sentences of twenty, fifteen, and five years for these convictions.
Hurson becomes engaged to his long-term girlfriend, Bernadette Donnelly, while in prison. He is part of the blanket protest and joins the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike on May 28, replacing Brendan McLaughlin who withdraws following a perforated stomach ulcer.
He loses the ability to hold down water after about 40 days on hunger strike, and dies of dehydration after only 46 days, considerably shorter than any other hunger striker (the next shortest is Francis Hughes at 59 days). Near the end, his family considers the possibility of intervening to save his life, but they are told that he would probably have permanent brain damage.
On and around the Twelfth, large parades are held by the Orange Order and Ulster loyalist marching bands, streets are bedecked with British flags and bunting, and large, towering bonfires are lit. Today the Twelfth is mainly celebrated in Northern Ireland, where it is a public holiday, but smaller celebrations are held in other parts of the world where Orange lodges have been set up, including the Canadian province of Newfoundland where it is a provincial holiday. The Twelfth involves thousands of participants and spectators, although not all Protestants celebrate it.
In Northern Ireland, where almost half the population is from an Irish Catholic background, The Twelfth is a tense time. Orange marches through Irish Catholic and Irish nationalist neighbourhoods are usually met with opposition from residents, sometimes leading to violence. Public disorder during The Twelfth parades of the early 19th century led to them being banned in the 1830s and 1840s.
Many Catholics and Irish nationalists see the Orange Order and its marches as sectarian, triumphalist, and supremacist. The Order is also politically a unionist/loyalist organization. Violence related to the Twelfth in Northern Ireland worsens during the 30-year ethno-political conflict known as The Troubles. The Drumcree conflict is the most well-known dispute involving Orange marches.
Attempts have recently been made to downplay the political aspects of the marches and present the Twelfth as a cultural, family-friendly event at which tourists are welcome. Although most events pass off peacefully, some continue to result in violence.
The Springhill Massacre, a shooting incident which claims five lives in the Springhill estate in west Belfast, takes place on July 9, 1972. Three civilians, including a Catholic priest, and two members of Fianna Éireann are shot dead by British Army snipers firing from a timber yard.
The Northern IrelandTroubles have been raging for three years and hundreds have already been killed by the two warring factions in Northern Ireland, unionists, including Ulster loyalists and the British Army, and Irish republicans wanting unification with the Republic of Ireland. Violence has been taking place all day and the five dead are part of ten people killed on that day.
According to a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) statement on July 10, British Army snipers take up sniping positions in Corry’s timber yard and reinforced them with sandbags. Two cars pull into Springhill and the snipers fire two shots at them. One of the cars flees while the other drives a short distance and stops. The occupants get out and the snipers open fire again, seriously wounding one with a shot in the back of the head. A resident rushes to help the injured man but is immediately shot in the arm. This man’s brother and a friend run to the downed occupant, but both are shot by the snipers. At some point during this time a 13-year-old girl is fatally shot by the snipers. The parish priest, waving a white cloth, and a passer-by rush to her but a sniper kills both with a single bullet that passes through both their heads. All of the victims are unarmed.
The British Army disputes the IRA’s version of events and claims its troops were fired on first by the IRA, ending a temporary IRA ceasefire. A British Army spokesman states, “There has been a heavy exchange of fire between the IRA and troops. Some of the dead and wounded were undoubtedly caught in the crossfire.” On July 10, the British Army claims that it has killed terrorists. An open verdict is recorded at the inquest into the events.
No British soldier has been held accountable for these murders.
It takes its name in memory of King William of Orange of the house of Orange who fights at the Battle of the Boyne, brings about the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights giving the Westminster parliament ultimate power of the country rather than the Monarch. The Independent Order is small compared to the main organisation with 1,500 to 2,000 members. It is largely based around north County Antrim in Northern Ireland but has lodges around the world, including England, Scotland, and Australia. Its annual main Twelfth of July demonstration is held in a north Antrim town or village.
The first notable effect after the formation of the Independent Order is a more liberal interpretation of the rules of the “Old Order.” In the early years of the Institution, many suffer the full wrath of the “powers that be,” who are opposed to any splitting of the Orange Order. Jobs are lost, homes are burned, and their headquarters in Belfast is bombed.
Independent Orangeism today maintains that it is essential for the Orange Institution to be kept free from politics and to guard the principles of Reformation Protestantism. They often express alarm when they believe these principles are endangered by conciliatory politicians. They are opposed to ecumenism and, while being opposed to Orangeism being linked to the Ulster Unionist Party, they are not apolitical and tend to work alongside unionist politicians and parties.
The Institution also promotes Ulster Protestant history and proclaims the principle of “Liberty of Conscience.” They declare their right to think and act independently without direction from political or clerical masters, they seek to strengthen the position of Orangeism, and they often warn of the danger of the development of a social and cultural Orangeism devoid of Protestant principle.
The 30-pound bomb is planted behind a bath in a room on the sixth floor more than three weeks prior to the Prime Minister’s visit. Timed to go off on the final day of the conference, it explodes in the early morning hours of October 12, 1984 and nearly wipes out most of Thatcher’s cabinet, killing five prominent Conservatives and injuring thirty-four.
The bomb destroys a bathroom that Mrs. Thatcher had been in just a few minutes earlier.
Magee stays in the hotel four weeks previously under the false name of Roy Walsh, during the weekend of September 14-17, 1984. He plants the bomb, which includes a long-delay timer, in the bathroom wall of his room, number 629. Magee becomes the primary suspect when forensic officers find his palm print on a hotel registration card following the blast.
Magee is arrested in the Queen’s Park area of Glasgow on June 22, 1985 with other members of an active service unit, including Martina Anderson, while planning other bombings.
Sentenced to a minimum 35 years in jail, he is released from prison in 1999 as part of the Good Friday Agreement early release program. Magee is one of many on both sides of the conflict whose release raises differing emotions.
In one of the more compelling twists associated with the Northern Irelandtroubles, Magee works diligently since his release to ease tensions in Northern Ireland and develops a strong working relationship with Jo Berry, daughter of Sir Anthony Berry MP who was killed in the Grand Brighton Hotel blast. They first meet publicly in November 2000 in an effort at achieving reconciliation. They have met publicly on more than one hundred occasions since that date.
The Good Friday Agreement brings to an end the 30 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.” Northern Ireland’s present devolved system of government is based on the Agreement.
The Agreement is made up of two inter-related documents: (1) a multi-party agreement by most of Northern Ireland’s political parties and (2) an international agreement between the British and Irish governments called the British-Irish Agreement.
The Agreement sets out a complex series of provisions relating to a number of areas including the status and system of government of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom (Strand 1), the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (Strand 2), and the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom (Strand 3).
Issues relating to civil and cultural rights, decommissioning of weapons, justice and policing are central to the Agreement.
The Agreement is approved by voters across the island of Ireland in two referendums held on May 22, 1998. The people of both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland need to approve the Agreement in order for it to come into effect. In Northern Ireland, voters are asked whether they support the multi-party agreement. In the Republic of Ireland, voters are asked whether they will allow the state to sign the agreement and allow necessary constitutional changes to facilitate it.
The British-Irish Agreement comes into force on December 2, 1999. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is the only major political group in Northern Ireland to oppose the Good Friday Agreement.
Paisley becomes a Protestant evangelical minister in 1946 and remains one for the rest of his life. In 1951, he co-founds the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and is its leader until 2008. Paisley becomes known for his fiery speeches and regularly preaches and protests against Catholicism, ecumenism and homosexuality. He gains a large group of followers who are referred to as “Paisleyites.”
Paisley becomes involved in Ulster unionist/loyalist politics in the late 1950s. In the mid-late 1960s he leads and instigates loyalist opposition to the Catholic civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. This leads to the outbreak of The Troubles in the late 1960s, a conflict that engulfs Northern Ireland for the next thirty years. In 1970, he becomes Member of Parliament for North Antrim and the following year he founds the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which he leads for almost forty years. In 1979, he becomes a Member of the European Parliament.
Throughout the Troubles, Paisley is seen as a firebrand and the face of hard-line unionism. He opposes all attempts to resolve the conflict through power-sharing between unionists and Irish nationalists/republicans, and all attempts to involve the Republic of Ireland in Northern affairs. His efforts help bring down the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974. He also opposes the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, with less success. His attempts to create a paramilitary movement culminate in Ulster Resistance. Paisley and his party also oppose the Northern Ireland peace process and Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
In 2005, Paisley’s DUP becomes the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, displacing the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which has dominated unionist politics since 1905. In 2007, following the St. Andrews Agreement, the DUP finally agrees to share power with republican party Sinn Féin and consent to all-Ireland governance in certain matters. Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness become First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively in May 2007. Paisley steps down as First Minister and DUP leader in May 2008 and leaves politics in 2011. Paisley is made a life peer in 2010 as Baron Bannside.
In November 2011, Paisley announces to his congregation that he is retiring as a minister. He delivers his final sermon to a packed attendance at the Martyrs’ Memorial Hall on December 18, 2011, and finally retires from his religious ministry on January 27, 2012.
Paisley dies in Belfast on September 12, 2014. He is buried in Ballygowan, County Down on September 15 following a private funeral and a public memorial for 800 invited guests is held in the Ulster Hall on October 19. An obituary in The New York Times reports that late in life Paisley had moderated and softened his stances against Roman Catholics but that “the legacies of fighting and religious hatreds remained.”
In early 1912, the Liberal British government of H. H. Asquith introduces the Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland, which proposes the creation of an autonomous Irish Parliament in Dublin. Unionists have objected to being under the jurisdiction of the proposed Dublin Parliament. Ulster Unionists found the Ulster Volunteers (UVF) paramilitary group in 1912, aided by a number of senior retired British officers, to fight against the British government and/or against a future Irish Home Rule government proposed by the Bill.
In September 1913, with Irish Home Rule due to become law in 1914, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Sir John French expresses his concerns to the government and to the King that the British Army, if ordered to act against the UVF, might split. The British Cabinet contemplates some kind of military action against the Ulster Volunteers who threaten to rebel against Home Rule. Many officers, especially those with Irish Protestant connections, of whom the most prominent is Hubert Gough, threaten to resign rather than obey, privately encouraged from London by senior officers including Major-General Henry Hughes Wilson.
Although the Cabinet issues a document claiming that the issue has been a misunderstanding, the Secretary of State for WarJ.E.B. Seely and French are forced to resign after amending it to promise that the British Army will not be used against the Ulster loyalists.
The event contributes both to unionist confidence and to the growing Irish separatist movement, convincing Irish nationalists that they cannot expect support from the British army in Ireland. In turn, this increases renewed nationalist support for paramilitary forces. The Home Rule Bill is passed but postponed, and the growing fear of civil war in Ireland leads on to the British government considering some form of partition of Ireland instead, which eventually takes place.
The event is also notable in being one of the few incidents since the English Civil War in which elements of the British military openly intervene, as it turns out successfully, in politics.
The 1981 hunger strike begins on March 1, 1981, when Bobby Sands, a former commanding officer of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and prisoner at Long Kesh prison, refuses food. Other prisoners join the hunger strike one at a time at staggered intervals, which they believe will arouse maximum public support and exert maximum pressure on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
The movement initially struggles to generate public support for the hunger strike. The Sunday before Sands begins his strike, only 3,500 people march through the streets of west Belfast as compared to 10,000 marchers during a previous hunger strike four months earlier.
Five days into the strike, however, Independent Republican Member of Parliament (MP) for Fermanagh and South TyroneFrank Maguire dies, resulting in a by-election. There is debate among nationalists and republicans regarding who should contest the election, but they ultimately agreed not to split the nationalist vote by contesting the election and Sands stands as an Anti H-Block candidate against Ulster Unionist Party candidate Harry West. Following a high-profile campaign the election takes place on April 9, and Sands is elected to the British House of Commons with 30,492 votes to West’s 29,046.
Sands’ election victory raises hopes that a settlement can be negotiated, but Thatcher stands firm in refusing to give concessions to the hunger strikers. The world’s media descends on Belfast, and several intermediaries, including Síle de Valera, granddaughter of Éamon de Valera, Pope John Paul II‘s personal envoy John Magee, and European Commission of Human Rights officials, visit Sands in an attempt to negotiate an end to the hunger strike. With Sands close to death, the government’s position remains unchanged, and they do not force medical treatment upon him.
On May 5, Sands dies in the prison hospital on day 66 of his hunger strike, prompting rioting in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. Over 100,000 people line the route of his funeral, which is conducted with full IRA military honours. Margaret Thatcher showed no sympathy for his death.
In the two weeks following Sands’ death, three more hunger strikers die – Francis Hughes on May 12, and Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara on May 21. The deaths result in further rioting in Northern Ireland, particularly Derry and Belfast. Following the May 21 deaths, Primate of All Ireland Tomás Ó Fiaich criticises the British government’s handling of the hunger strike. Despite this, Thatcher still refuses to negotiate a settlement.
On July 28, following the deaths of Joe McDonnell (July 8) and Martin Hurson (July 13), the families of some of the hunger strikers attend a meeting with Catholic priest Father Denis Faul. The families express concern at the lack of a settlement and a decision is made to meet with Gerry Adams later that day. At the meeting Father Faul puts pressure on Adams to find a way of ending the strike, and Adams agrees to ask the IRA leadership to order the men to end the hunger strike. The following day Adams holds a meeting with six of the hunger strikers to outline a proposed settlement on offer from the British government should the strike be brought to an end. The strikers reject the settlement, believing that accepting anything less than their original demands will be a betrayal of the sacrifice made by Bobby Sands and the other men who had died.
On July 31, the hunger strike begins to break when the mother of Paddy Quinn insists on medical intervention to save his life. The following day Kevin Lynch dies, followed by Kieran Doherty on August 2, Thomas McElwee on August 8, and Michael Devine on August 20. On September 6, the family of Laurence McKeown becomes the fourth family to intervene and asks for medical treatment to save his life, and Cahal Daly issues a statement calling on republican prisoners to end the hunger strike.
A week later James Prior replaces Humphrey Atkins as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and meets with prisoners in an attempt to end the strike. Liam McCloskey ends his strike on September 26 after his family says they will ask for medical intervention if he becomes unconscious. It also becomes clear that the families of the remaining hunger strikers will also intervene to save their lives. The strike is called off at 3:15 PM on October 3. Three days later Secretary of State Prior announces partial concessions to the prisoners including the right to wear their own clothes at all times. The only one of their original five demands still outstanding is the right not to do prison work. Following sabotage by the prisoners and the Maze Prison escape in 1983, the prison workshops are closed, effectively granting all five of the demands but without any formal recognition of political status from the government.
Over the summer of 1981, ten hunger strikers die. Thirteen others begin refusing food but are taken off hunger strike, either due to medical reasons or after intervention by their families. Many of them still suffer from the effects of the strike, with problems including digestive, visual, physical and neurological disabilities.
Army bomb experts recover a fully armed handheld rocket launcher in County Tyrone on the morning of February 29, 2000. It is found at the side of a house near the rear of Killymeal Army base in Dungannon. The discovery comes just hours after it is learned that large amounts of Semtex high explosive have been stolen from Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) hides.
The weapon is linked to dissident republicans and is of a type not seen in the province before. It is believed to have originated in eastern Europe and has been abandoned by those about to carry out an attack at the rear of the army base. The weapon is similar to one recently seized by the security forces in the Republic of Ireland and linked to the Real IRA.
The rocket launcher is found just after pupils have finished traveling to three local schools. The nearby leisure centre is also closed. Families are removed from their homes on Killymeal Road while the device is investigated.
Superintendent Julie Lindsay says that to abandon such a device in the area is an “act of indescribable recklessness which clearly put the life of people living nearby in danger.” She says officers were able to prevent children from walking by the garden where the device was located as they were going to the leisure centre.
Ken Maginnis, Ulster Unionist Security spokesman and Member of Parliament (MP) for the area, says the discovery of the weapon vindicates his party’s insistence that paramilitaries should disarm. He also says it proves that republicans are “wedded to the past.”
Social Democratic and Labour Party councillor Vincent Currie says the find will bring back bad memories of a previous mortar bomb attack on the army base which devastated many houses in the area. He adds that it is lunacy to leave such a device on a road used by schoolchildren.
Edward Martin Hurson, a volunteer in the East Tyrone Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), dies on July 13, 1981, after 46 days on hunger strike.
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