Showing posts with label Ballymurphy Massacre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ballymurphy Massacre. Show all posts
Martin Galvin responds to Trevor Ringland in the Irish News writing that "The Hunger Strikers’ political ideology was deeply flawed."

A Chara,

It was fitting that Trevor Ringland’s polemic, scolding all who honor the memory of the Hunger Strikers, appeared on the same day as the Ballymurphy Massacre inquest verdict. (The Hunger Strikers’ political ideology was deeply flawed-May 11th)

With words reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher circa 1981, Mr. Ringland complains about what he calls our deeply flawed political ideology. Why can he not see, much less be troubled by any flaws in the political ideology on display in Judge Keegan’s Ballymurphy Massacre findings?

Consider first that the Ballymurphy Massacre was regarded as a successful military operation. Why else send Colonel Derek Wilford and his Paras to Derry to do the same job on Bloody Sunday? Why else was future general, Mike Jackson, who gave discredited British Army versions of Ballymurphy killings to the press, given the same job, on Bloody Sunday? Surely, if British military commanders were displeased by the Ballymurphy killings, they would have given orders forbidding a second killing spree on Bloody Sunday.

Mr. Ringland says Republicans “struggle with the idea that a crime, including murder, committed for the cause is still a crime”. Why are the Ballymurphy Massacre killings, not murders committed for the cause of British rule?

A Catholic priest, Fr. Hugh Mullan, waving a white handkerchief, shot dead along with Francis Quinn, for going to help wounded victims. A mother of 8 children, Joan Connolly, shot and left bleed to death, in an act of “basic inhumanity”. Daniel Teggart, was felled by a bullet to the leg, then shot at least 11 times, as he lay on the ground. Noel Philips shot in the neck and throat at suspiciously close range. Joseph Murphy died from wounds aggravated by mistreatment.

Edward Doherty and John Laverty, shot in the back then labeled gunmen by Jackson, despite having no guns. John McKerr, a wounded British Army veteran, shot leaving Corpus Christi Church, and Edward Doherty shot and called a petrol bomber, without any trace of petrol.

Why in the name of justice, are these killings not crimes, no matter British law making the killers innocent and dead victims guilty for fifty years?

There are hundreds of families who cheered the Ballymurphy Massacre verdicts and believe genuine investigations by a Historical Investigations Unit, would prove their loved ones were also murdered by British crown forces, either directly or in collusion with loyalists.

Britain’s plans for those seeking justice today, are amnesty laws to stop prosecutions of crown forces and legacy mechanisms without a Historical Investigations Unit, to close down any path these families have to get the truth.

Mr. Ringland may see no flaws in his ideology that sanctioned a sectarian Orange state, state-sponsored murders, and internment etc. to uphold British hegemony.

Those across Ireland, and around the world, including myself, who honor the memory and ideals of the Hunger Strikers, will know better.

Slan
Martin Galvin

Martin Galvin is a
US Attorney-At-Law.

Making Killers Innocent And Victims Guilty

Fra Hughes  ✒ It only took the British 50 years in a coroners court to tell the people of Ballymurphy what they already knew. 


Their brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters had been murdered by British soldiers who ran amok on a killing spree in Ballymurphy housing estate in West Belfast between August 9 and August 11 1971.

The British Parachute Regiment was responsible for the murders. The same regiment and the same battalion and possibly the same platoon went on to murder 14 civilians in Derry, on what became known as Bloody Sunday on January 30 1972.

The first massacre in Belfast was focused on operation Demetrius when the British army arrested Irish Catholic nationalists in their homes and transported them to the Long Kesh concentration camp on the outskirts of Belfast to be ‘Interned without trial’

The second massacre in Derry by the same troops, who had been transferred there specifically on that occasion, to confront and subdue a Civil Rights March, whose aim was to highlight the continued Internment without trial of Irish Catholic Nationalists.

There is no irony lost, that these troops first arrested men without trial then murdered anyone who stood in their way and finally murdered those peacefully marching against their actions and those of the state.

By late afternoon on Bloody Sunday 30 January 1972, 13 were dead on the day and many more wounded.

By the end of the day on 11 August 1971, ten were to die and many were wounded.

The facts speak for themselves. The dead cannot.

It has been the onerous duty of the living, the family members, the witnesses and the survivors to speak the truth of the events on those bloody days.

Ireland has had many atrocities and many people murdered by the forces of the state and the illegal British occupation of Ireland over the centuries.

The reason why these events are so significant is that they have all occurred within living memory - well, of those who survived, anyway. And their determination that the truth will be spoken, has carried on for 50 years.

Maybe you are at a loss, confused and wondering why 50 years on people are still demanding the truth?

Well, it really is quite simple.

The British troops on the ground, their leaders at General Headquarters and their masters in the British House of Commons, all conspired in the lie that those killed, those murdered, those injured were all armed terrorists engaged in attacks upon her majesty’s armed forces.

That reasonable force was used by the army to defend itself and the survivors and witnesses were liars and assisting those prosecuting violence against the British peacekeeping forces.

The only people using force and violence on these occasions were the British Army.

The death toll, the injuries and the number of bullets discharged all prove one thing.

A cold-blooded decision to murder unarmed innocent Irish Catholic nationalist citizens under occupation and therefore protection of the British state. A state which conspired to kill them, cover up the atrocities and exonerate the guilty by denigrating the innocent.

There have been numerous murderous attacks by the British forces of occupation on the Irish people, from the Red Coats through Cromwell’s massacre of Catholic at Drogheda Cathedral, to the black and tans and the ‘paras.'

Many of those involved in directing these operations were subsequently promoted like Colonel Michael Jackson - commander of the troops involved in Derry and Belfast - who would later become GOC. General Officer Commanding British Land Forces.

Between collusion with loyalist paramilitary counter-revolutionary murder gangs, targeting and assassinating Roman Catholic Irish nationalists, republicans and socialists, the British state has been up to its neck in extrajudicial murders, covers ups and whitewash inquiries.

Yesterday finally after 50 years, an inquest into the deaths, returned a verdict.

Mrs Justice Keegan in the Corners Court Belfast at the Inquest of those murdered said they were’ entirely innocent’ and that the British army had shot dead at least 9 of the 10 killed.

Those murdered were as a direct result of the state’s imposition of a policy, long used against the nationalist community by successive British and unionist regimes of ‘Internment without trial’.

The subsequent arrests, beating and resistance by the community to this emergency powers act of subjugation, led to the murders of 10 innocent unarmed people including a mother, a priest and a young man.

While Britain continues to deny justice to the victims of British military interventions at home and abroad we will see many other campaigns demanding truth which continue to battle the lies and smears of the British Government against innocent unarmed civilians

From Kenya to Belfast, from Basra to Kabul, from Las Malvinas to Damascus, British war crimes are unpunished and remain unprosecuted.

The outcome of the Ballymurphy Massacre could see the full implementation of an amnesty for British soldiers in all its wars of oppression, occupation and subjugation.

We must all see justice done for the victims, their families and their communities.

There must be No moratorium on British war crimes.

The next possible leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, the party which misruled Northern Ireland for more than 50 years is a former member of the British Army who thrust his bayonet through the throat of an Afghan native in Helmand province in Afghanistan.

This is how far politics has moved in Northern Ireland.

50 years of Unionist misrule

50 years of British governmental lies.

Now we have the spectre of a former soldier, decorated for killing Johnny Foreigner - an Afghan in his own country - with a bayonet, becoming the next leader of the Ulster Unionist Party

The following was reported on BBC News NI, 09-05-2019

The discipline of the Army prevented a higher death toll at Ballymurphy, a former British soldier has said.
The Ballymurphy inquest is looking into the shooting dead of 10 people in west Belfast in 1971.

Henry Gow is a trained barrister, a former soldier, SAS member, and policeman.

He claimed that soldiers ran sweepstakes on who would shoot a gunman first.

He further said that he believed inquests like this one were “witch hunts”.

Timeline of deaths.

Six civilians were killed on 9 August:(Wikipedia):

  • Francis Quinn (19), shot while going to the aid of a wounded man.
  • Father Hugh Mullan (38), a Catholic priest, shot while going to the aid of a wounded man, reportedly while waving a white cloth to indicate his intentions.
  • Joan Connolly (44), shot as she stood opposite the army base. It has been claimed she was shot by three soldiers and that she might have survived had she been given medical attention sooner, but she lay injured in a field for several hours.
  • Daniel Teggart (44) was shot fourteen times. Most of the bullets entered his back, allegedly as he lay injured on the ground.
  • Noel Phillips (20), shot as he stood opposite the army base.
  • Joseph Murphy (41), shot as he stood opposite the army base.] Murphy was subsequently taken into army custody and after his release, as he was dying in hospital, he claimed that he had been beaten and shot again while in custody. When his body was exhumed in October 2015, a second bullet was discovered in his body, which activists said corroborated his claim.]

One civilian was shot on 10 August and another three were shot on 11 August:

  • Edward Doherty (28), shot while walking along Whiterock Road.
  • John Laverty (20) and Joseph Corr (43) were shot at separate points at the top of the Whiterock Road. Laverty was shot twice, once in the back and once in the back of the leg. Corr was shot several times and died of his injuries on 27 August.
  • John McKerr (49), shot by unknown attackers while standing outside a Catholic church, died of his injuries on 20 August.
  • Paddy McCarthy (44) got into a confrontation with a group of soldiers. Family alleges an empty gun was put in his mouth and the trigger pulled. McCarthy suffered a heart attack and died shortly afterwards
I encourage you to visit this online site for the full story. 

Fra Hughes is a Freelance journalist-author-commentator-political activist.
Follow on Twitter @electfrahughes

It Only Took The British 50 Years To Tell The People Of Ballymurphy What They Already Knew ‘Entirely INNOCENT’

Anthony McIntyre
The victims of the Ballymurphy massacre were not in the wrong place. Their killers were. The victims were in their own place, their home place. They died at the hands of armed intruders whose right place was elsewhere, across a sea.

The Innocent

For fifty years the British state denied, blocked, deferred and lied about the facts of what took place in Ballymurphy over a three day period in August 1971. Contemptuous of the slain, their relatives and campaigners, the British objective for half a century was to conceal the role of a rogue regiment, "out of control, killing people on the street and knowing that they would be protected.” Comprised of psychopaths and psychotics, British paratroopers were unleashed upon an unarmed and unsuspecting civilian population. 

Their government sought to deprive the massacred of their innocence by transferring the culpability of the killers to the killed. Because of that, today’s ruling in a Belfast inquest that the victims of the Parachute Regiment massacre were blameless and that the soldiers who killed them had no justification is a damning verdict.

The inquest was a tribunal for truth. Many came to it and lied out of self-interest. To each and every liar who cynically lined up, shoulder to shoulder, to swear their fabricated evidence in the one truth forum available to the relatives, the coroner's verdict is a serious slap down. It shows that despite the best efforts of the dishonest, a determined group of people focused on the pursuit of justice can prevail.

The sustained effort by British and unionist politicians to mystify the past so that their troops and police might be exonerated, and the IRA blamed almost exclusively for the North’s politically violent conflict, is being stripped away layer by filthy layer. Theirs was a dirty war in which their security services murdered civilians without regard to gender or age, tortured prisoners, armed loyalist death squads and colluded in the execution of their homicidal sectarian strategy, and allowed their agents in all armed groups to take life on an industrial scale. Yet they refer to those who took up arms against them as terrorists. People died on hunger strike to make the point that armed resistance to British state terrorism and the atrocities it committed was not criminal.

Apologists for state terrorism like to blame the IRA for commissioning and prolonging the North’s political violence: were it not for armed republicans none of it would have happened - and like a good fairy tale we would all have lived happily ever after. There are no armed republicans in Iraq or Afghanistan but plenty of British state war criminals.

The door has again been kicked in, the rotten structure of British state policy in Ireland once more exposed in all its hideousness. And yet it is most unlikely that there will be any prosecutions of murderous Mike Jackson and his massacre men for their crime against humanity in Ballymurphy. That should not detract from today’s judgement. The relatives and friends who made it happen should not underestimate the ethical and political significance of what they have achieved. A resounding victory for the innocent over the guilty.

The Guilty

 ⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

The Innocent & The Guilty

From the Morning Star British Squaddies ‘had a licence to kill and licence to lie,’ Ballymurphy Massacre inquest hears.

British soldiers “had a licence to kill and a licence to lie,” a Belfast court heard today as the army was accused of covering up the truth about innocent civilians shot dead in a three-day killing spree nearly 50 years ago.

The final day of a lengthy and much-delayed inquest into the deaths of 10 people gunned down in the Ballymurphy area of West Belfast in August 1971 heard statements from the legal teams of both the families and Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

The families of the victims and survivors have led a dignified quest for justice, hampered by the loss of key evidence and refusals to testify while they and their loved ones were falsely smeared as “terrorists.”

Michael Mansfield QC for the families insisted that the Paratroop Regiment “deliberately killed” 19-year-old Noel Philips and tried to plant bullets on 44-year-old Danny Teggart.

Continue reading @ the Morning Star

British Squaddies Had A LicenceTo Kill

ANTHONY MCINTYRE reflects on recent developments in the Ballymurphy Massacre inquest.

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we own only the truth." - Voltaire

Last week, the former IRA leader Gerry Adams appeared in the witness box at the Ballymurphy massacre inquest. He claimed to have witnessed nothing other than a couple of armed IRA volunteers running past him as they made their way through Springhill Crescent, in his view,  possibly to fire into Springmartin estate or provide "covering fire." True or not, we might never know, but part of his remaining testimony  – hard to call it evidence when he offered none  was less than honest. His enduring resistance to truth recovery was underscored by an insistence on never having been a member of the IRA.

He was not subpoenaed, leaving observers to wonder why he even appeared given that he brought nothing of substance. In line with past performances he ensured the proceedings were focused on him and not the victims. He knew he was going to be asked the obligatory IRA question, for which he has no convincing rebuttal and his answer was always going to pose a risk to the integrity of the relatives' quest for truth, by giving their critics leverage they had no right to.

The Sligo blogger, Alfie Gallagher, observed of the Adams contribution:

“I was not a member of the IRA, I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will until the day I die." 
The most remarkable thing about this statement is that it is a compound lie consisting of a logically interlocking chain of three individuals lies in which the fraudulence of each successive lie is demonstrated by the preceding lie!

Few would expect Adams to front up and admit his role in the IRA. The PSNI he promised to put manners on would prosecute him. Yet there is no reason why the need to avoid self incrimination should extend to lying. The option of saying "no comment” has always been one he has obstinately refused to utilise.

Again made to look ridiculous with the dog ate my homework type deflections – he was only getting a lift from others on IRA active service - he was spared some blushes by relatives of the dead who rightly applauded him from the public gallery when he queried the line of questioning from a Ministry of Defence barrister, insisting that the focus should have been on the killers from the Parachute Regiment, which it would have been had he not turned up. The relatives did not applaud him for his lying. Critics of their quest for truth should be robustly challenged if they imply that the applause was for lying in the midst of a truth recovery setting.

The message sent out on that day was that it was fine to lie at the inquest.

Fortunately, a former Para chose not to tread in the footsteps of Adams by denying he was ever a member of the Parachute Regiment, who had only ended up in Ballymurphy in August 1971 courtesy of a lift from some rifle wielding blokes in maroon berets and khakis who just happened to be passing as they headed to some duck hunting event in Springfield Dam. Earlier this week the former Para told the devastating truth of what was inflicted on the civilian population of Ballymurphy by trigger happy psychopaths who "were out of control, killing people on the street and knowing that they would be protected," thugs who had avoided jail by enlisting in the Paras.

The Parachute Regiment rampaged through Ballymurphy like ISIS in Paris. The people of the estate were subject to mass murder methodically carried out over the course of three days in 1971. It is crucial for both them and wider society that truth is accessed and that they are given the respect, and their slain loved ones the truth, they each deserve.

The truth forum the relatives struggled so hard to secure should never have been polluted with lies. Adams, who has weaponised truth only to find himself impaled on his own aversion to it, showed the living no respect and the dead no truth. He has bequeathed a moral inversion that stains the narrative of republicanism: a former member of the Parachute regiment told a massacre inquest the truth while a former member of the Provisional IRA told it lies.

Truth & Lies

Martin Galvin in a letter to the Irish News summed up the British legacy strategy as "deny, delay and die."

Ballymurphy Courtroom Battles

Martin Galvin in  a letter to the Irish News continues his exchange with Trevor Ringland  over the role of the British state in the North's violent political conflict.

Ballymurphy And Flawed Politics

Anthony McIntyre last night watched Callum Macrae’s film Massacre At Ballymurphy.

Massacre At Ballymurphy

Daniel Bradley shares his thoughts on Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy massacre. 

Questions To Be Answered

We were honoured to receive a Christmas card from a family who lost a loved one to British state killers during the Ballymurphy Massacre.

In wishing all our readers a Merry Christmas we are mindful that many have been deprived of the presence of loved ones through the actions of licenced British State killers.

Remembering ...



... The Slain



Remembering @ Christmas