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Showing posts with label Sectarianism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sectarianism. Show all posts
It's Still Only Thursday ✒ Let us begin this blog post by reiterating our condemnation of the recent video which emerged of a number people, who would probably describe themselves as Unionists or Loyalists, singing a vile and hateful song about Michaela McAreavey, who was murdered whilst on honeymoon in Mauritius in 2011.

8-June-2022

Those people do not represent anybody but themselves. Songs like the one they sang about Mrs McAreavey are sick and disgusting. There can be no justification for such sectarian behaviour, no “ifs or buts”. It was wrong. It was deeply offensive. It was spiteful. It was sick. Full stop.

Unfortunately, some of the reaction to it has been every bit as hateful, bigoted and sectarian. People have reacted to a hateful incident by being just as hateful themselves. It has become a vicious circle of sectarianism. A closed loop of hate, bigotry, anger, outrage, offence and distrust, leading to yet more hate, bigotry, anger, outrage, offence and distrust.

Make no mistake about it – if we truly want Northern Ireland to work, if we genuinely want our wee country to have normality and stability, then that vicious circle of sectarianism and hatred must be broken.

We cannot break that circle by reacting to hate and sectarianism with even more hate and sectarianism.
Houses of Glass

Continue reading @ It's Still Only Thursday.

Hate Begets Hate ✑ The Vicious Circle Of Sectarianism

Peter Anderson ⚽ Last week I tuned in to see the Northern Ireland Women's team in action in their first ever Euro Cup game.

It didn't go well. To be fair it wasn't expected to go well, but you live in hope. The part-timers were up against a very accomplished Norway and were 3-nil down by half-time. After the restart though, Northern Ireland got one back. The hundreds of Northern Ireland supporters in the stadium went crazy, just like they had scored the winner! It is something that is part of the GAWA experience whether at men's or women's games. We aren't very good and we don't score many goals, but we still love it anyway.

I have to say that I love the GAWA. Not having a proper quality league in Northern Ireland means that the only time we see good players playing here is in international matches. And thanks to Billy Bingham, we have a culture of hoping for the best and supporting our boys (and now girls) in their endeavours because sometimes, just sometimes, we pull off something special.

The big difference between today's GAWA and that the Billy Bingham years is the lack of sectarianism. I went to as many games as I could afford in the 80s. I loved the atmosphere in the Kop end and the singing of loyalist songs was a big part of that. By the 90s my perspective was changing as I fell out of loyalism over Drumcree. Around the same time Neil Lennon started getting stick from Northern Ireland fans for being "one of them". I'm not a big fan of Lennon but he was definitely one of ours. I was at a Northern Ireland game around that time and a fight broke out among the fans, I heard later it was over some feud among paramilitaries from the Shankill and Sandy Row. It all kicked off right in front of me and I had to flee, lest I end up getting a diggin'. That was me finished with Northern Ireland. I vowed never to return.

About 10 years later after moving to Madrid, one of my mates told me that the IFA had cracked down on sectarianism in the stadium. I was sceptical, but he insisted. I decided to watch one of the games to check it out. I went to a bar in the centre of Madrid to watch Northern Ireland against Spain in a qualifier at Windsor. The atmosphere was electric and there were no loyalist songs. To make it even better, we won 3-2. As the only Northern Ireland supporter in a bar packed with Spanish, I thoroughly enjoyed beating it up the locals.

Once I moved home, I decided to check out this "new" Windsor Park. I was amazed. Somehow the IFA had managed to stamp out the sectarianism and improve the atmosphere at the same time. Big kudos to them, it was a minor miracle. In 2016 I travelled to Lyon and Paris with the GAWA for the Euros and have never been so proud of the fans. On the ferry from Rosslare, we drank with the Republic fans in a wonderfully friendly way, no problems at all, even after the drink was in. And at Lyon's central square, tens of thousands of GAWA drank merrily and behaved themselves admirably, gaining much praise from the local police and French media. The French Euros were a resounding success for us.

The IFA have achieved what I believed would be impossible: the complete changing of our football culture and (almost) total eradication of sectarianism. Not only that, but they have increased attendance and improved the noise level, and therefore the atmosphere. So, seated stadiums and family friendly policies have ruined football's atmosphere? The GAWA will show you that it doesn't have to be that way.

Peter Anderson is a Unionist with a keen interest in sports.

All The Way With GAWA

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ The chant, The Billy Boys can be heard often at Glasgow Rangers and Linfield football matches and on Orange parades around the six counties and Britain, particularly Glasgow and Liverpool. 

Hearts supporters also sing a version of this hate filled bigoted song which is sang to the air Marching Through Georgia. A different version of this song, totally unrelated, in fact in many respects the absolute opposite, can be heard at Old Trafford Manchester as Manchester United fans sing; We are the Busby Boys in tribute to Matt Busby United’s former legendary manager. The same song as that at Old Trafford can be heard at Broadhurst Park, home of FC United of Manchester, as their supporters also claim Matt Busby’s heritage. The Glaswegian version, unlike that of Man Utd fans, is an anti-Catholic chant and Rangers FC, in fairness, tried to ban it. UEFA looked into the possibility of banning the song but concluded that as the Scottish Government had not done so (up to that point) they were powerless. So much for kicking racism out of football as this song is in itself a kind of racist chant or, at very best, ethnocentric.

It is often erroneously thought the song was originally about the Williamite Wars in Ireland, 1689-91 and the victory of King William, the Dutch Protestant, over England’s last Roman Catholic monarch, James II. This is not an unreasonable assumption but it is wrong. The song over the years took on and evolved into a dual meaning, the original and the evolved version about the events of the late seventeenth century. King William, William III, Prince of Orange, was also known as King Billy so it is perfectly understandable how the song quickly evolved into relating historically to his victory. Having briefly examined the historical connections, referring William III “King Billy’s” victory over James II in 1691, to the chant it is time to examine the songs real origins.

The Brigton “Billy Boys” were a sectarian Glasgow gang of Protestant bigots formed in 1924 by Glasgow’s own “King Billy”, William “Billy” Fullerton. Fullerton was an arch sectarian bigot, anti-Roman Catholic, who formed this gang of notorious thugs as he had allegedly been attacked by a gang of Catholic youths. Another tale is that he was an up and coming footballer until he was injured in a game and the offending player happened to be a Roman Catholic. Whatever the reason he decided to form one of the most ruthless razor gangs in Glasgow, the “Brigton Billy Boys” named after himself. Their anthem was The Billy Boys which was adopted by sections of Glasgow Rangers football supporters. 

The area the gang came from was Bridgeton Cross in Glasgow’s east end, not far from Glasgow Celtic's football ground, the traditional Catholic club in the city. Their anthem would ring out when the gang paraded through Catholic areas where they were often opposed by the native “Norman Conks” gang, a Catholic retaliation group. The Billy Boys words were/are: 

Hello, Hello, we are the Billy Boys, 
Helllo, Hello you’ll know us by our noise. 
We are up to our knees in Fenian blood surrender or you’ll die, 
we are the Brigton Billy Boys. 

Sometimes it is changed to “up to our knees in papist blood” but the meaning is still the same. Glasgow Rangers FC tried to ban the song due to its sectarian meaning, how hard they tried is open to interpretation, but have been unsuccessful. In 2011 the Scottish government (local authority in real terms) included this song on their list of chants banned from football grounds in Scotland. It was specifically banned because of its sectarian “up to our knees in Fenian blood” line. Billy Fullerton often gave public orations against Roman Catholic and Irish immigrants in the Bridgeton Cross area and was a well known street agitator of the most right-wing kind.

The “Billy Boys” often took part in Orange parades in Belfast where the song was adopted changing the words “we are the Brigton Billy Boys, to we are the “Shankill Billy Boys” and by now the song was becoming equated with the Williamite wars in Ireland, themselves part of a much larger European conflict between Catholic France and the Protestant Dutch Republic led by William Prince of Orange. How a Prince could be head of a republic is another conundrum and would be far too long to go into for this article.

The “Billy Boys” gang were often used as expendable foot soldiers by the Conservative and Unionist Party at election times. They were used to break up Labour Party, socialist, and trade union meetings by the Tory respectable thugs in parliament. Billy Fullerton was also a notorious strike breaker during the 1926 General Strike called by the TUC in support of the miners. Despite his sectarianism, much of it privately shared by some Conservatives, he was commended by the Conservative and Unionist Party for his strike breaking. Fullerton regularly scabbed, doing the work of striking workers. Fullerton later went o to join Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) and also tried to raise a branch of the US Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as they were, like him, anti-Catholic and, again like him, anti-Black racist people. This last escapade gained little traction. He would also have been known, if not friendly with, the Conservative and Unionist MP, Archibald Ramsey. Ramsey was a supporter of the Nazi ideology and opposed the war with Hitler. He was interned along with Mosley during the Second World War.

There were many ironies surrounding Billy Fullerton because despite his well-documented hatred of Roman Catholics he often did work for some people who were Catholic by denomination. One such character who Fullerton was in the employ of was Tommy Gilmour. Gilmour was a bookmaker and boxing promoter and a Roman Catholic yet, and despite his open hatred of Catholics, “King Billy” worked for him, often to erect boxing rings, a job he was renowned for being competent at. 

After the Second World War Fullerton worked for the Glasgow bantamweight boxer, Peter Keenan, another Roman Catholic and devout Celtic supporter. Keenan was the only Scottish boxer to win two Lonsdale Belts outright, 1953 and 1957, and was held aloft on Fullerton’s shoulders on the Parkhead pitch much to the delight of the Celtic fans. Had “king Billy” changed his opinions? Or was it a question of if the price is right! It must be wondered what the views of the Celtic fans would have been had they been aware who the person carrying the boxing icon on his shoulders was.

Billy Fullerton, Glasgow’s “King Billy” died in poverty in 1962 aged 57.

The Williamite war in Ireland ended with the siege of Limerick resulting in the Jacobite forces surrendering under Patrick Sarsfield in 1691. This signalled the successful conclusion, for the aspiring bourgeoisie and British rulers, the Tories and Whigs (later the Conservative and Liberal parties) of the misleadingly termed “Glorious Revolution” and the installation of King William as the King of Ireland, as well as England and Scotland. The chant The Billy Boys was made up by sectarian bigots led by Billy Fullerton, the Billy Boys, in 1924 two hundred and thirty-three years after the Siege of Limerick and the end of the war. It quickly evolved and was adopted by the Orange Order and those who celebrate the Williamite victory as to be about “King Billy”, William III and is so to this day. The Williamite war was not, and is not, the origins of this song and it initially was not about William of Orange and his victory over James II, the last Catholic King to sit on the throne of Britain and Ireland, now “Northern Ireland” as some term it. It was initially about Glasgow’s own “King Billy”, William Fullerton. 

To this day Fullerton, despite dying in poverty, is hailed as a hero among elements within the Glasgow gangland and Orange Order, Freemasons and other Protestant triumphalist groups. In truth he was a ruthless street thug, sectarian bigot, racist and anti-Semite. Whether, as some have argued, in later life he tried to change his life around would be contradicted by the large Protestant gangland attendance at his funeral. The truth about his final years will perhaps remain shrouded in mystery and could be adapted to suit the narrative of the teller.

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent 
Socialist Republican and Marxist

The Origins Of The Billy Boys ✑ Sectarian Song

Lesley Stock ✒ In all the time of the troubles we, as a community, were all hit by the inhumanity of our fellow man. We witnessed atrocities, murders and destruction based on someone’s firmly held beliefs. (The wrongs or rights of those for another time).

We all remember the horror of hearing in 2011 the heart-breaking story of a talented, beautiful young teacher having been brutally murdered in Mauritius whilst on her honeymoon. That young woman was Michaela McAreavey, daughter of Micky Harte. The fact that she was a Catholic never entered our heads. She was one of us and that was enough to grieve for her and her family. That was, until a few days ago, when details of a band at Dundonald Orange Lodge broke its foul stench onto the internet.

The first I was made aware of ‘that’ video, was by chance on Twitter, and unfortunately I was stupid enough to watch it. I sat for some time in the kitchen, wondering had I actually misheard the words of the song drunken louts were singing in a hall. Then, details of the words were published and I sat and cried, not only for the Harte/McAreavey families, but for the disgust I felt for being born a Protestant, for I knew that some would ‘cash in’ (not literally) on the premise that ‘all prods were sectarian bastards and of course, this kind of rabble are indicative of the PUL community.' And then, there it was, including the trolls who have nothing better to do all day other than abuse anything Protestant or British.

These idiots in the video, thankfully, have been now put under investigation for what I can only describe as one of the worst cases of vile, sectarian behaviour I’ve had the misfortune to witness. But, apart from wondering how the heck a human can sit down and make up such grossly offensive words to a song about another beautiful human purely based on her religion, it then struck me as the condemnation poured in from the Orange Order and others, that this has been going on in band halls and Orange Halls for years. This, hopefully would be the time whereby the Orange Order had a prime opportunity to get their house in order.

With the unprecedented revulsion from every community now being on the world's stage, I’m hoping that the Orange Order can put robust measures in place to eradicate this type of sectarianism within its ranks. Some have been calling for it for decades, and with every song, every drunken action by either bandsmen or members of the OO, it has been (quite rightly) fueling the gap between the two communities.

For the loyalists who cry ‘our culture has to be acknowledged and protected’ I say – you’ve just lost your battle if nothing changes.

The only way that you can have any credence in that argument is if both members of bands and OO members are now held to account by strict sanctions if found to be in breach of a code of conduct. And nothing short of booting out will suffice!

It came as no surprise to me that I learned that the vermin in the video hadn’t even marched! This show of drunken loutish behaviour occurred even before what was to be a celebration of the Platinum Jubilee. A family day of celebration I might add. Then again, some would say the 12th celebrations are that as well. Perhaps in the rural areas, but never in the city.

The Orange Order should now dump any band who is drunk prior to a march – even should it be one member. When bands are prohibited from marching they’ll soon get the message. However, the leaders of the Orange Order have to implement and enforce these rigidly, otherwise - like spoilt kids of parents who always back down and give them their way - the sectarianism will just carry on. Now is the time for a turn in PUL actions which give CRN communities the ammunition to call for their demise. But even whilst typing this, I reflect that some within the PUL haven’t really had their heads screwed on for years!!

If you want your culture to be respected, start having respect for yourselves! You can’t complain about eradication of culture, when that culture breeds the kind of vile sectarianism we as a nation witnessed last week. Get the act sorted:

  • have events people of all ages, classes and religion can attend without the trappings of drunks, foul imbeciles
  • have a zero alcohol tolerance for participants and ‘hangers on’, and by all means get snattered at the end of the parade/event if that’s your thing.

The organisers now have a chance to turn the tables. I only hope they take it.
 
 Lesley Stock is a former PSNI and RUC Officer
currently involved in community work. 

Maybe This Could Be The Start Of ‘Respect’

Brandon Sullivan ✒ As with my previous article on this subject, I have used the British Newspaper Archive.  Some of the links will only be accessible if you have an account with them.  I have also linked to some videos from BBC Rewind - this is a free service from the BBC, but requires the viewer to register.

Introduction

My last article received constructive criticism as I included the killing of UDA members alongside the killing of politically uninvolved Protestants under the article title The Sectarian Murder of Protestants by Catholics. This was fair comment. The inclusion of the killing of the UDA men was, I think, relevant, but it could have been introduced in a clearer way. The comments underneath that piece led to an interesting debate about the presence of sectarian intent behind the 1993 Shankill bomb.

This article looks at the Bayardo Bar bombing of August 1975. The IRA clearly considered it a target, and I have found some evidence that it was a place where arms were stored, prominent loyalist paramilitaries drank, and where violence happened. Despite this, I believe that there is simply no question that the attack was anything other than a sectarian bombing. The men shot dead in the opening stages of the attack were 30 years older than seasoned mature paramilitaries would be, and the use of a bomb ensured that the attack was indiscriminate in nature. A UVF man was killed, but a UVF man was also killed by the UVF when they shot up the Chlorane Bar on Gresham Street.

The murders of Peter and Malcolm Orr were despicable crimes. It is not surprising that no organisation has wanted to associate itself with this wanton act of prolonged cruelty. The Shankill Butchers are rightly held up as a totem of sectarian depravity. But one theme I have uncovered in the murders of Protestants by the 3rd Battalion of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade is that the victims were in the hands of their killers for a long time. I have not seen any evidence of violence being meted out to the Orr brothers, but they were in the hands of the organisation who would ultimately kill them for at least 10 hours, according to the available evidence.

The Murders of Peter and Malcolm Orr, July 1972

As reported by Martin Bell (on BBC Rewind), at around 6am on Wednesday 5th July 1972, a farmer’s wife heard shots. These were the shots that killed Peter (19) and Malcolm Orr (20), two brothers who were murdered together and left near what is now Belfast International Airport, not far from where James Carberry would be found a few years later. They were the 8th and 9th people to die in less than a week.

Peter and Malcolm’s parents, gave an extended interview (BBC 24 Hours: When Will the Killing Stop?) in which Mr Orr described how they left the family home just after 8pm, and were expected at their girlfriend’s home half an hour later. They never made it. Mr Orr described receiving a phone call from one of the son’s girlfriends asking where he was. Worried, Mr & Mrs Orr traced the route they would have taken, and raised the alarm. Mr Orr spoke with great dignity of how he spent the night awake, without a phone or access to a car, hoping for news, and walking to barracks and up to patrols, asking the police and army if they had heard anything. He described his relief at hearing that no bodies had been found on radio bulletins the next morning. However, at 11:30am, a newsflash reported that two bodies had been found, and Mr Orr said he instinctively knew that they were his sons. Mrs Orr, less than a fortnight after losing her two sons, said that she felt sorry for their killers as they would have to live with what they had done. She also said that perhaps she “had thought too much about my own little family and not enough about the world outside.” Mr Orr spoke to receiving cards from the Falls Road expressing sorrow, and letters from all sections of the community. A wreath arrived from the mother of Fusiliers John and Joseph McCaig, who were killed by the IRA, along with another soldier, Dougald McCaughey.

At the Peter and Malcolm’s funeral (BBC Scene at Six), Mr Orr walked between the two hearses, a hand on each car, wishing to walk with his sons to their final resting place. When asked how he felt about vengeance, he said he did not feel any desire for it, and developing the point, asked how anyone could feel vengeance against someone that they didn’t know.

Lost Lives stated that the murder of the Orr brothers “have always been regarded as one of the mysteries of the Troubles.” Lost Lives was published in 1999, and several sources have since placed the responsibility for the killings with the IRA in North Belfast.

Kevin Myers wrote that one of the killers of the Orr Brothers was Terence “Cleeky” Clarke.

Terence “Cleeky” Clarke

Born in Belfast, it appears that Cleeky Clarke spent some time in Coventry. He was arrested and charged with arms offences in 1971, the Belfast Telegraph giving an address in Coventry, but noting that he was from Etna Drive. Clarke escaped from the Crumlin Road prison as part of the “Crumlin Kangaroos” and was captured on the 14th August 1972. Clarke was also charged with possessing a .45 pistol and four rounds of ammunition. He refused to recognise the court and was passed packets of cigarettes from a woman in the public gallery. The resident magistrate, William Staunton ordered that the cigarettes be confiscated, and asked Clarke to treat the court with respect. Clarke replied “do you want to see the marks on my neck and body. Is that courtesy?

The day before Clarke’s capture, loyalists committed what was described as “the most sadistic murder yet” of a politically uninvolved 48 year old Catholic man, named Thomas Madden. In terms of sectarian murders, loyalists accounted for over double the number than republicans did in 1972.

Staunton was shot dead by the IRA in January 1973. One of the Orr brothers had bought 40 cigarettes shortly before he was abducted. 38 remained unsmoked and untouched when his body was found many hours later.

The Orr brothers lived on Alliance Road, a ten minute walk from Clarke’s family home on Etna Drive.

There remains no explanation for why the Orr brothers were selected for a prolonged abduction, followed by murder.

Cleeky Clarke did over 20 years in prison for a variety of IRA actions, including his part in the killings of two British Army Corporals during the funeral of IRA Kevin Brady. As is widely known, Clarke, along with many others, believed a car which drove into the way of the cortege was another loyalist attack and, with considerable personal bravery, was first on the scene to challenge the intruders, who were armed. I was unable to find the relevant footage, but I think Clarke saved a press photographer from an angry crowd which had mistaken him for another infiltrator.

The IRA were officially on ceasefire when the Orr brothers were killed. The ceasefire began on 26th of June 1972, and a condition of it was the release of Gerry Adams from Long Kesh to take part in a republican delegation to engage in talks with representatives of the UK Govt, on the 9th July. Adams commanded the IRA Belfast Brigade’s 2nd Battalion. Martin Meehan commanded the 3rd Battalion, which included Clarke’s Ardoyne unit. Meehan was captured and interned on the 9th August, just over a month after the murder of the Orr brothers. The Belfast Brigade commander was Seamus Twomey. Chief of Staff was Seán Mac Stíofáin.

On TPQ, Anthony McIntyre described how “scathing” Gerry Adams had been of the blatantly sectarian murder of the Orr brothers. It is rumoured that Adams was furious with Clarke for his role in the double murder. With the passage of time, though, the relationship had been repaired, and Clarke acted as co-ordinator of Adams’ security team.

Cleeky Clarke died of cancer in June 2000, which he was first diagnosed with in 1990, in the same Crumlin Road prison that he escaped from 19 years earlier.

He was 53 years old and was survived by his wife, two children, and also his two brothers, Gerard, and Seamus.

At his funeral, Fr Des Wilson, who conducted the funeral mass at the Holy Cross Church in Ardoyne, said:

He was a man of great courage and generosity. He had a tremendous ideal that Ireland should be shared between all the people. He brought up his two children beautifully, when he was allowed to be with them.

The Bayardo Bar bombing, 13th August, 1975


Illustration from the Birmingham Post, 1st April, 1972


On the 19th of November 1971, a 17 year old man named Hugh Alexander Harris was remanded in custody for malicious wounding. Harris, the RUC alleged, had carried out a knife attack on a Catholic boy, 15 year old Michael Patrick Conlon. The court heard it was a “partly sectarian attack” and that Conlon’s left ear was cut in two. The court also heard that Harris admitted the attack but alleged that “he started it first.”

On the 4th of February, 1974, a man was injured when a bomb exploded in a mail box opposite the Bayardo bar. An hour later, a controlled explosion was carried out on a suspect letter in a mail box in Percy Street, off the Shankill Road.

On Saturday, 8th June 1974, Ernest Lionel McCurdy (36) Shankill Parade and Charles Miller (29), of Forth River Parade, were remanded in custody on charges related to a serious assault on an unnamed victim who sustained serious face and mouth injuries. The victims injuries were so severe that he was unable to make a statement. The attack took place in the Bayardo Bar, The judge ruled that there was a danger of witnesses to the assault being intimidated.

On Thursday the 19th of June, 1974, two IRA members on a motorcycle threw a bomb at the Bayardo Bar, which blew in windows and injured five people. Local people stopped a passing army patrol and told them a black taxi driving away contained the bombers. The army opened fire, hitting the taxi, but mercifully not injuring anyway, before realising their mistake.

On the 29th November 1974, a judge acquitted the Bayardo Bar manager, George Thompson, of possession arms and ammunition. A Thompson submachine gun, and dozens of round of ammunition, were found concealed in a loft above a backroom. Thompson accepted that he knew they were there, but claimed he feared for his family’s safety if he did anything about it. The judge apparently accepted this.

On Thursday, 13th August, 1975, an IRA unit from the 3rd Battalion carried out a multi-fatality, multi-casualty gun and bomb attack on the Bayardo Bar.

The Belfast Telegraph described the murder of five people at the Bayardo as a “forgotten atrocity.” The article, published in 2011, said that following the Miami Showband massacre:

A retaliatory attack was expected from the IRA for such a blatant UVF outrage and it came almost exactly a fortnight later when a gun and bomb attack was mounted on the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road.
More than 50 people were injured when the old pub structure crumbled, engulfing them in bricks, wooden joist frames, plaster and roof tiles.
Samuel Gunning was chatting to his brother-in-law, William Gracey, who worked in the bar, when the IRA unit arrived at Aberdeen Street in a stolen car and unleashed a fusillade of bullets from an automatic weapon, killing both men.
The gunman's accomplice then walked into the crowded bar and left a bag with a bomb inside it. Customers ran to the toilets in the hope of finding sanctuary, but the bomb exploded, trapping many beneath the rubble - just as the McGurk's bar bomb had done. Hugh Alexander Harris (21) and Joanne McDowell were found dead beneath the rubble and, even though she was pulled alive from the debris, Linda Boyle didn't survive her rescue.

Contemporary reports of the trial of the men convicted of the bombing detail how a list of loyalist pubs was found in Seamus Clarke’s house. The court heard that Brendan “Bik” McFarlane was the driver, and that Peter “Skeet” Hamilton was the man who planted the bomb that killed three people.

Hugh Alexander Harris was a UVF member, and appears on the roll of honour. It is not difficult to imagine that the IRA in Ardoyne were aware of the weapon being found on the premises. Nevertheless, this was a blatantly indiscriminate attack.

Seamus Clarke, Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, and Peter “Skeet” Hamilton were all sentenced to five life terms for carrying out this atrocity.

At 01.20am on 2nd March, 1976, Hugh Leonard Thompson “Lenny” Murphy was detained for questioning upon leaving the rebuilt Bayardo Bar with Robert “Basher” Bates. Later that morning, Murphy attempted to murder two Catholic women. The RUC captured him attempting to retrieve the pistol used in the murder bid, and Murphy was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison, of which he served six. The IRA’s two bombings of the Bayardo Bar clearly did not deter the UVF from using the bar socially, or for using it as a place to plan the murder of nationalists from.

The murder of Alexander Patterson, 4th June 1976

Two members of the IRA’s 3rd Battalion sat in the back of a taxi being driven by George McDermott. Sitting in the front beside the driver was Alexander Patterson, aged 42, and there was a young woman sitting in the back. The taxi stopped at Hesketh Road (scene of the murder of UDA man Trevor Kell in 2000), whereupon Gerard O’Halloran and Gerard Clark got out and immediately opened fire on the men sitting in the front. Mr McDermott was injured, and Mr Patterson was killed almost immediately. The female passenger in the back was unharmed and apparently not targeted.

O’Halloran and Clarke were 16 when they murdered Mr Patterson and attempted to murder Mr McDermott. In October 1977, they were sentenced to be detained at her majesty’s pleasure. They were sent to HMP Maze, and the blanket protest.

Reflections

A postscript to this collection of stories is the theme of brotherhood. Peter and Malcolm Orr socialised together as friends and brothers, and died together. Cleeky Clarke, their alleged killer, had two brothers, Seamus and Gerard, who were convicted of blatantly sectarian murders. At one stage, all three Clarke brothers endured the privations of the blanket protest.

Perhaps the Bayardo Bar’s most infamous customer was Lenny Murphy. His older brother John was also a prominent UVF member, and is the viciously sectarian Mr B in Martin Dillon’s flawed, but well-read, account of the Shankill Butchers gang. In 2008, Lenny Murphy’s nephew, William Murphy, had received a life sentence for the barbaric murder of a 78 year old man named Andrew Spence. 

It appears that the bulk of sectarian murders of Protestants were committed by members of the IRA’s 3rd Battalion, and that most of them happened from 1974 - 1976. There are of course exceptions, the 2nd Battalion area saw the murder of Samuel Llewellyn two days after the Bayardo bomb attack, and on the 11th July 1976, the body of Thomas McKenzie was found at the Divis Flats, having suffered terrible stab wounds.

In my next article, I would like to look at the command structures in place in Belfast and their effect on encouraging or limiting sectarian murders carried out by republicans.

If anyone has any information, or ideas for exploration, I’d be very interested in hear from you.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

The Sectarian Murder Of Protestants By Catholics – Part Two

Brandon Sullivan ✒ In the literature available covering the Troubles, the area of sectarian murder of Protestants by Catholics has not received much in-depth attention. 

There will be a number of reasons for this, among them the reticence of republican leaders to acknowledge, let alone rationalise, sectarian murderers within their ranks.

Incidents such as Darkley and, most notoriously, Kingsmill demonstrate Catholics deliberately murdering Protestant civilians. But away from these headline grabbing incidents were scores of murders with one or two victims which, if community of perpetrator and victim were swapped, would have appeared as standard loyalist murder gang modus operandi.

I plan to look at a few of these in depth. Simply, incidents I have managed to gather together some information about that is not included in the most widely read accounts of the troubles.

South Belfast

The murder of Gerard David Turkington – 9th July, 1972

Gerald David Turkington was one of 11 people to die on the 9th July 1972. He was abducted along with another man, named in the Belfast Telegraph as Witness A in Madrid Street and brought to the Markets area of Belfast, where they were both beaten over a period of at least three hours. Witness A also had a tumbler shoved in his face. The brutal treatment meted out to these men was no different to that endured by many nationalist victims of loyalist killers. The Turkington killing stands out for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Witness A survived and gave compelling testimony to his ordeal. But it had other effects.

Turkington was a member of the UDAs “G Company” in East Belfast, and had been on “barricade duty” in East Belfast that night. A former IRA source told me that despite his membership of a loyalist organisation, Turkington’s killing led to anger within the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, which sent a high-ranking member to visit the units involved, warning them that they would be stood down if they killed any more Protestants.

In 1988, a man named Peter Anthony Burns was charged with Turkington’s murder, the attempted murder of Witness A, and a number of other IRA offences. Burns had been living in Burnley, found God, suffered psychiatric issues, and gave himself up, saying to detectives “I shot the Prod, a UDA man.” At Burns’ trial, Witness A was called, and gave testimony as he had done during the 1973 inquest. Burns was found guilty, but the conviction was overruled in 1991 on the grounds that he had been suffering from schizophrenia when interviewed.

1974, a 24 year old man named Peter Anthony Burns was sentenced to three years for arson. He, with others, in January 1972 had burned down a primary school, for what were noted might have been “sectarian reasons.” His rationale in court was that he had “had a row” with his wife. He was arrested in London and brought back to Belfast to stand trial for this action. I could not independently verify if it was the same man charged in relation to the Turkington murder.

Capturing the UDA - 1974

Another East Belfast man, Robert Ronald Trimble, was abducted by IRA members in January 1974. Trimble had entered a pub in a nationalist area and aroused the suspicions of IRA men inside it. The IRA men interrogated Trimble, who named Sammy Tweed as an active UDA man. The IRA sought permission from the IRA leadership in Belfast to kill their captive, but this was denied to them. They tried to kill him anyway, but missed. Trimble, like Witness A two years earlier, had a lucky escape.

Trimble’s naming of Tweed is interesting. Three months later, Tweed escaped from a courtroom where he was answering arms charges. He evaded capture for more than 40 years, but was finally brought before a court in 2012. He was also interviewed, in 2015, as a suspect in the 1972 torture and murder of Patrick Benstead. The Irish News reported that Tweed was a member of a gang which included Albert “Ginger” Baker and Ned McCreery, and which tortured and murdered a number of politically uninvolved Catholics in the early 1970s. The unfortunate Mr Benstead had been tortured with a red hot poker, with the number 4 branded on his back. The Irish News posited that this was a reference to the murder being committed by the “G4” unit of the UDA’s East Belfast bridge. I am unaware about whether this is true. Martin Dillon suggested that the “4” referred to Mr Benstead being the gang’s fourth victim.

A number of DUP politicians, including Peter Robinson, wrote letters in support of leniency for Mr Tweed when he was finally brought to justice for the arms possession trail he escaped from.

North Belfast

The Third Battalion’s sectarian murderers: Killers from Ardoyne.

In 1979, Ardoyne man Brendan Patrick McClenaghan was convicted of four murders, including that of Nicholas “Nick the Brit” White, a former British soldier and community activist who lived in Ardoyne, and the hapless UDA leader Sammy Smyth who opined to a room containing IRA activists that any member of the Catholic community was a legitimate target for murder. Another victim of McClenaghan was a former member of the Parachute Regiment, John Lee, who settled in Mountainview Gardens in Belfast. The 35 year old was shot dead in after leaving the Crumlin Star Social Club, in 1977.

McClenaghan was found not guilty of the murder of James Carberry, a 20 year old Protestant, who worked at the Rumford Street Loyalist Club. According to Lost Lives, on 12th July 1975, Carberry was abducted off a street and taken to the Saunders Club, in Ardoyne. McClenaghan admitted bringing Carberry to a house in Ardoyne, tying him up, and leaving him there. Either at the Saunders Club, or the house in Ardoyne, or both, Carberry was “subjected to violence” and was bound hand and foot with carpet wire, gagged, and blindfolded, before being shot twice in the head near what is now Belfast International Airport, his body being left covered with a “bullet riddled and bloodstained sportscoat.” The drive from Ardoyne to where Carberry was murdered would have taken at least 20 minutes, and it is unclear how long the ordeal he endured prior to his death lasted. A man charged with crimes related to this murder said “He was shouting something when he was on the ground. It sounded like, ‘help me.’”

Again, the brutal nature of Carberry’s demise is similar to that experienced by many nationalist victims of loyalist killers except that, arguably, loyalist murders of this type have been covered more extensively in histories of the troubles. Carberry was a member of the West Belfast UDA, where he is remembered as Jimmy Carberry.

Charged alongside McClenaghan were two other men from Ardoyne: John Joseph Todd, and Norman Patrick Basil Hardy. Along with Brendan McClanaghan, they were all members of the IRA’s Third Battalion. Norman Hardy was acquitted of the Carberry murder but, with Todd and another man named Michael Donnelly, was convicted of a heinous double sectarian murder.

Turkington and Carberry were members of the UDA. That is not to say that either were involved in sectarian actions – there is no evidence for this, though through Carberry’s employment at the Rumford Street Loyalist Club it is likely he will have known many leading loyalist paramilitaries.

In The Times newspaper, 11th November 1974, Robert Fisk wrote that there seemed to be a rise in Catholic gunmen bent on killing Protestants out of revenge. 12 days later, and following an attack on the People’s Garage in which a 20 year old Catholic woman, Geraldine Macklin was murdered, Catholic gunmen made Fisk’s words a grim reality.

The murders of Heather Thompson and George Thomas Mclean were sheer unadulterated sectarian murder. Three Ardoyne Provos went to Edenderry filling station on the Crumlin Road with murder on their minds, and shot dead the 24 year old garage manager, Mr McLean, and garage assistant Ms Thompson.

At trial, according to the Belfast Telegraph, "Hardy said that as a result of murders of Catholics he decided to carry out a retaliation and he approached two friends and told them his intentions." The report also stated that Hardy claimed the murders “had not been done on behalf of a political organisation and were not politically motivated.” Whatever the truth of this statement, it did not stop the men serving their time on the IRA blocks and wings in prison.

Heather Thompson, like John Lee, lived on Mountainview Gardens. A two minute walk away, lived James Carberry on Moutainview Parade. The Ardoyne Provos killed three people from this tiny adjacent pair of streets from 1974 to 1977. A report from December 1976 claimed that Mountainview remained a mixed area, but that people lived in fear.

Brendan McClenaghan was the subject of a “comm” sent out HMP Maze detailing a serious beating he received at the hands of prison warders. He later joined Republican Sinn Fein, and, when asked in 1999 about the possibility of Irish republican bombs going off in England said "Nothing has changed much to suggest to me that it isn't a possibility that something like that could happen again."

Norman Hardy, also known as Basil Hardy, returned to Ardoyne, where his presence was used as an excuse for the Holy Cross attacks on Catholic schoolgirls. Hardy has also been involved in community work, part of which involved cooperating, to an extent, with the PSNI about a savage attack on a member of his local community.

The Provisionals in Ardoyne seemed to be particularly active in sectarian murder in the 1970s. Other killings committed by their members will be covered in the second part, which I am working on now.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

The Sectarian Murder Of Protestants By Catholics – Part Ⅰ

Winnie Woods  ✒ Someone born at the time of the first IRA ceasefire will be 28 this year. Younger Nationalists and republicans no longer have to justify what happened during the conflict, and now more freely say that they want a united Ireland. 

Kate Hoey’s now infamous comments last week spoke of welcoming the encouragement being given to young loyalists to further their academic and professional ambitions. Tangible evidence of this encouragement is difficult to find, but what is clear for all to see is that Joel Keys has been warned by the PSNI about his safety. The threats, and widespread abuse on social media, have come from his own community. There is an Ulster Unionist Party candidate from the Falls Road, from a Catholic family and with a grandfather murdered by loyalists. He has not been threatened. Interestingly, he graduated from Ulster University with a degree in journalism.

On the Falls Road, working class politics are visible and dynamic, coming through on murals etc. It’s not the same in East Belfast. Many of the murals there are concerned with territory, not with politics. The last thing that the Unionist political classes want is an educated Protestant working class as they are going to realise that they have been sold a pup.

Following Hoey’s assertion that Nationalists are dominating professions (citing law, journalism, and public service as examples) and using this domination to push their nefarious agenda towards a united Ireland, prominent Unionist MLA Jim Wells appeared on Talkback on (6 January 2022).

There is so much to pick apart about Jim Wells comments on Talkback. In this part of the world everyone is used to politicians blithely throwing out statements that in other parts of the UK or Ireland, or any civilised place, would end a career. Wells focused on the 1947 Education Act as being the cause of the problem. It didn’t have to be done, he said, but good old Lord Londonderry with the benevolence with which his class is known, faced down opposition and allowed Taig schools to be funded, and this had ‘laid down the foundation for a very well educated middle class which has then fed through to domination in the courts and other professions.’

What is interesting to me is why the likes of Hoey and Wells fear the well-educated Catholic / Nationalist middle class.

If the union is so appealing and only someone who is prepared to vote against their own interest would vote for a united Ireland why is this Catholic/Nationalist middle class to be feared? Surely they would be persuaded to the Unionist view and would be a massive voting bloc who would help secure the union indefinitely? But they mostly aren’t persuaded. And it’s not because of tribalism or a romantic view.

People in professions who are doing fairly well at life generally favour the status quo. They are worried about mortgages, their own children’s education and so on. The problem, as Hoey knows, is that reunification now feels like more of a status quo as it would be a return to a more appealing union in the EU.

Unionists have never, over the course of the last 100 years, sought to make the union appealing to Catholics or Nationalists. During these recent discussions, both Hoey & Wells did the usual ‘not all Catholics are Nationalists: some of the biggest Unionist are Catholic’ messaging. Most people don’t give a damn about religion and would give even less of a one if it wasn’t still being used as method of othering. I am Catholic but went to a Protestant (or state) school, swore allegiance to the Queen of England in Girl Guides, wore a poppy when they were sold in school and had maybe one Catholic friend when I was growing up. I was in a Unionist town, and my parents had pragmatically decided to raise us to fit in with the majority around us. If the Northern Ireland experiment was going to work on anyone it should have worked on me. I never saw the RTÉ toy show, and was far more familiar with British culture than Irish. On a family holiday when I was a teenager I was asked by an American if I would use a British or Irish flag and I said British. The problem was, to the PUL community that I was living amongst, I was still a Fenian and that was made clear to me in a load of small ways. I am not complaining or saying it was a difficult - it was just part of my experience but it was there.

Part of the reason I felt like this was of course the usual name-calling, but I was growing up in a pretty middle class environment and I was never chased or beaten up or anything. Instead I would notice the side-eye to me when someone would say ‘my dad says all those ones at Bloody Sunday were in the IRA’ or ‘the priests hide guns in Belfast/’ It still makes me cringe that I would agree with such stupid statements, young teenager or not. But it felt like it was a test at the time and I didn’t want to face the consequences of failing it. Increasingly, nationalists are not only accepting these challenges, but confidently and easily rejecting them. This will not regress, and will only get more pronounced.

Ben Lowry remarked that Queens University is a cold house for Unionists and backed this up citing the number of students wearing GAA tops round the place. I too found it shocking. I was shocked that they were brave enough to be wearing a top that would have attracted, at the very least, a good degree of negative attention in my town.
 
⏩ Winnie Woods is a recently retired housewife with an interest in human rights & politics.

The Unintended Consequences Of Unionist Domination – Part Ⅰ

Pádraic Mac Coitir ✒ It's a cliché but every day is a learning day and today I learned something new. 

For years I've drank Guinness and despite its despicable history I won't stop drinking it. 

I know the history of the Guinness family- English planters, financed the scum in their fight against the United Irishmen, forced families off their stolen land during An Gorta Mór, supported the British army during The Easter Rising (they built armoured cars), they didn't employ a catholic until 1966 (and probably paid De Valera and other scum traitors to keep their cowardly mouths shut).The Free State 'government' is as bad as any quisling 'government' and any political party that takes part in it are traitors to the Irish Republic.
 
Anyway, after that rant, a friend was telling me he heard some bars on the Shankill Road and other unionist areas don't sell Harp beer because HARP, according to them, stands for Help All Republican Prisoners. I was telling a Celtic fan about it and he said they should sell Harp and brandish it as Heroes Are Rangers Players...! 

Yes, us Belfast people - the Taigs - do have a sense of humour. Must have something to do with the snouts - not talking about protestants - locking park gates on a Sunday and forcing their kids to go to a Free Presbyterian church and then to Sunday school to teach them how to hate Fenians.

Padraic Mac Coitir is a former republican
prisoner and current political activist.

Guinness

Sandy Campbell ✒ with a piece first published in The Leither magazine.

A hundred years ago there were over a dozen busy churches and mission halls in Leith. The Alhambra Theatre in the old Kirkgate hosted packed evening services with congregations of over 1,000. Religion mattered.

Today, many of these churches are warehouses or offices, the fate of others hanging by a tenuous thread. That doesn’t mean, of course, that religion itself is threatened by extinction. Faith matters to millions, if not billions, across the world. But in Scotland, like in most of the western world, we have, at least on the face of it, gone secular.

So, I wonder - where are the echoes of that world today? Was the past actually how we imagine it? Were our antecedents really such fervent seekers of the grace of God? Or was their collective devoutness more often a matter of simply doing what was expected; going with the flow of what comes with belonging to your community.

The inside of a church was a familiar part of life a hundred years ago. It was where your people systematically came together to be reminded of the faith that bound you together. And in Scotland, it also clearly marked out your tribe: Protestant or Catholic.

In secular times it is difficult for us to understand the overlap between religion and ethnicity. In the Scottish Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries Catholicism was effectively wiped out in the Lowlands. Then, after the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the 18th century, Lowland Calvinist missionaries set out to convert the Highlanders. By the mid 19th century Scotland was overwhelmingly of one denomination: Calvinist-Presbyterian. Yes, there were Episcopalians, mainly in the north-east, and some Catholics remaining un-converted in the Western Isles. But just like most nations of the time, Scotland was a country where overwhelmingly the dominant ethnicity worshipped as one.

That was all about to change. In the mid 19th century, literally millions of Irish fled the devastation of the potato famine. In a couple of decades Ireland’s population shrank by a third, and thousands upon thousands came to Scotland. Glasgow and the West were of course the destination for most, but not all. Many came to Edinburgh, and like any immigrant community, searching for a new life but starting at the bottom, they settled in the poorer areas: the Cowgate, soon to be known as ‘little Ireland’, and Leith, with the lure of ready work at the docks.

To many, the arriving Irish were seen as foreigners, bringing with them a religion which represented everything that Scotland wasn’t. More than that: it was Scotland’s struggle to break free from Catholicism which forged us a nation re-born in the 16th and 17th centuries. The overlap was total on both sides. To be Scots was to be Protestant. To be Catholic was to be Irish.

Nevertheless, like all immigrant communities, they changed the city they settled in. The fine football club they had founded, Hibernian FC, had won the Scottish Cup twice prior to the Great War and, along with their later Glasgow and Dundee offshoots, they had become a permanent fixture of Scotland’s sporting and cultural life. Edinburgh, the birthplace of the Scottish Reformation, the home to John Knox and the Covenanters, now had a settled and increasingly more confident Catholic Irish minority.

Meanwhile, following the Great War, all hell was breaking loose in Ireland. Britain was losing the southern counties, following the Easter Rising, ironically led by a son of the Cowgate, James Connolly, born of Irish immigrants in 1868, and forging his socialism in his young years in Edinburgh’s printing industry. Protestant Scotland, however, was on the side of its Protestant cousins in Ulster, descendants of Scot’s immigrants in the 17th century.

In Edinburgh today we tend to turn a blind eye to the Catholic-Protestant legacy in Scotland, labelling it conveniently as a west coast phenomenon, and packaging it tidily away under the term, sectarianism. Rangers and Celtic, Orange marches and Republican flute bands, Catholic Coatbridge and Protestant Govan? Nothing to do with us.

But there is an Edinburgh tale to be told, and from not that long ago, that helps to illustrate just how far and deep the Catholic-Protestant divide in Scotland went in our recent past. And it is a tale with Leith at its very heart.

In 1934 the voters of South Leith ward elected a new councillor to the City Chambers: John Cormack won by a clear majority under the new banner of ‘Protestant Action’. Later that year this new party won Central Leith in a by-election and another seat in Newington. Protestant Action, Cormack’s own creation, was on the up.

Then came the hot summer of 1935. Edinburgh’s Catholics had two events that year to look forward to. The first was a planned reception in the City Chambers for the city’s Catholic Young Men’s Society. The CYMS stood at the heart of the Irish experience in the Cowgate, with Hibs’ first team drawn from their ranks. They could also be relied upon to stand up to anti-Catholic hostilities and so, were no friends of Cormack. 10,000 Protestant Action supporters turned out on Cormack’s command to stop the reception taking place. The streets around the High Street became a battleground with the Gordon Highlanders barracked at the castle, and the Royal Army Special Corp at Leith Fort, all on standby in case the police became overwhelmed.

Then in June came the Eucharistic Congress of the Roman Catholic Church. The first ever to be held in Scotland. It lasted a week with violence every day, but the main event was to be on a Tuesday evening in the grounds of the Priest’s Priory on Canaan Lane, Morningside. At seven o’clock 10,000 worshipers faced a mob of 30,000 angry Protestants. This time the police had a plan and tricked the hostile crowd into believing the worshipers would leave by the Morningside Road exit. It worked, and most managed to make their escape through the back exists, only then to encounter gangs of Protestant Action supporters stoning their buses through the gentile streets of south Edinburgh.

With purportedly mesmerising powers of oratory, John Cormack had, almost single-handedly, sparked the flames of a veritable crusade against Catholicism in Scotland’s capital. And the voters of Edinburgh showed their support at the ballot box the following year. In the municipal elections of 1936, Protestant Action secured 9 councillors and 32% of the vote across the city. Labour were pushed into third place. Thankfully the momentum of Protestant Action began to peter out with events leading up to the Second World War - although Cormack himself continued as the Councillor for South Leith until 1962.

Looking back, it seems perplexing, if not downright unbelievable, to hear how anti-Catholic Protestantism found a political voice and burst violently onto the streets of Edinburgh, not so long ago. Thankfully, in these more secular times, when churches are turned into carpet showrooms, and the way you choose to worship is not something for others to be outraged about, those days are behind us.

But that’s not really the point. This is a story from Edinburgh’s recent past about mass immigration and the reaction of the indigenous citizens when hundreds of desperate people from a different culture, language, and way of worshipping, arrive seeking work and safety. It is also clearly a story of global relevance today, as similar scripts play out on our television screens every night.

And of pertinence to today’s independence debate, we should not forget that Irish immigration in the 19th century reshaped Scotland, just as Scottish immigration in the 17th century reshaped Ireland. Our two ethnically and religiously reshaped nations, inextricably entwined as we are, need to stop dancing around our unhappy progeny in Ulster and, dare I say it, start talking.

⏩ Sandy Campbell is a life long supporter of Edinburgh soccer team, Hibernian FC.

Edinburgh’s Secret Sectarian Past

Jude Whyte ✒ In May 1981 I took a bus from the city hall in Belfast to Rose Park House in East Belfast, an uncompromisingly ugly building, it was, on reflection a perfect place to recruit civil servants to run this part of the empire: dour, dank and reeking of colonization. 

First Featured in Jude Collins' blog

Mrs Windsor greeted me at the door with a contemptuous look.   Amazing as it may seem, one could smoke on the bus, indeed at the back of each bus the City transport authorities provided a cute little gizmo to enable the traveller to light one’s matches

The purpose of this visit was to be interviewed for a job in the NI Probation service. The context was simple. I was completing a master’s degree in social work at Queen’s University, had at last begun to understand complex terms and was finished my placement in Ballymena. It was while at Queen’s I learned that Sigmund Fred was in fact called Sigmund Freud, that there were two types of poor, the deserving and the non-deserving, as well as the best way out of this two-year master’s degree in compliance studies was whatever you say, say nothing that would offend the Course Director. The placement in Ballymena was of course a lesson in compliance, shadowing a brutal bully who terrorized me and all the staff in this office. Her delusion that she somehow was sent by God to police crime-ridden areas such as Cargin, Newtowncrumlin, Martinstown, Dunloy and Cushendun. In the seven months there I learned power does indeed corrupt the soul and the innocent.

The interview went a treat; you know that when one of the panel says afterwards “Well done, I think you will be joining us, do you fancy working on the Falls Road?” Thanks, Mr Badd you are a star, and you sound like a good Catholic into the bargain.

Off I went proud as Punch, back to my Belfast in the Ormeau Road, and told my late mother her son had got a job in the Probation service and – wait for it, hold your breath – he will be graduating with a Master’s Degree, yep not a Bachelor’s but a Master’s. God love her, she didn’t really understand all this stuff. It was enough that any of her kids who of course were cut from a finer cloth than those ruffians from Hatfield Street or God forbid McClure street got into Queen’s, never mind get a degree out of it. I never saw her as happy. She told everyone in work, at St Malachys Chapel, Holy Rosary, the local chippie known affectionately as Yellow Pat’s. She even told the parish priest, her lifetime friend big Denis Newbury. Such happy days.

The summer of 1981 changed this part of the empire forever. While I awaited my new job in the NI Civil service, ten men for some unexplained reason starved themselves to death in Mrs Windsor’s prison near Lisburn. Yes, the same Mrs Windsor who gave me that ghastly look before my so successful interview. While as a family we were far too nice and integrated into this wonderful place called Northern Ireland to know what these people were doing -  not eating as a protest - something seemed not right. The funeral of the first hunger striker attracted 100 000 mourners. For a criminal, I thought!!

The letter eventually came, unsigned, and informed me that my candidature had not been successful. You know, I can still feel the sense of shock forty years later. I was told that I got the job and clearly this must have been an error, you know a typo sort of thing, clearly this letter was intended for someone else, like maybe in an area of social housing.

I gave the wonderful Mr Badd a ring to his office and in fairness he was as shocked as I was: couldn’t believe it, he said, as I was recommended for the position. He further added that the interview panel was very impressed by my honest and open answers and he would get this cleared up very soon.

Within two days he contacted me and asked me to come and meet him and the then Chief Probation officer in a PUB in Central Belfast. A pub, I thought. Clearly they are going to apologise for the mess-up and buy me a lunch, and that’s that, such happy days.

Mr Badd who was really good didn’t seem comfortable that day in the pub. He pointed out that what he was doing could seriously damage his career and that we must never mention this meeting, like ever under pain of death. I was as you can imagine a little bemused, a typo is a typo, hardly life-changing stuff. A quick pint and a wee curried chip, apology and when am I starting my new career?

“Jude”, he said, “I don’t really know how to put this, you have been security vetted, you are deemed an enemy of the state”. I replied “Can you speak English, please? What does that mean?” 

It appears that you are an active member of the Republican Marxist Front, top bomb-maker, explosives expert, assassin and a character of low moral fibre. You will not get a position in this organization and my strong advice to you is to find employment in an area that does not require security vetting. I also would advise you to be careful in all matters of personal security.

 Such a kind man, I thought.

“What did I do?” He replied “I don’t know, this comes from our security advisors”. There’s me sitting in a bar, listening to this clap-trap and still unable to see what it really was. I mean, I was afraid of my shadow, I hadn’t the backbone to join the boy scouts, as I was terrified of sleeping in a tent on a mountain without my electric blanket.

After no lunch or drink I said “Thanks for your time”. Remarking in my naivety “This isn’t over, I will be back.” I returned home, told my mum and dad and even they gave me that look, you know the look no smoke without fire sort of stuff. In short, the police must be right, and I had indeed something in the closet that they didn’t know about.

Later that night I heard my mum say to dad “This isn’t right Doey [her nick name for him – not Jim!!! (my real name)]. “He is afraid of the dark.” Hardly reassuring, despite the context.

Happy days gone.

What I embarked on after this non-lunch still haunts me and in some ways, I still feel responsible for bringing attention to our home by putting up a long but futile fight to find the truth. I feel somehow responsible for the bombing and death of my late mother. I should have had the wit to take it on the chin and leave it, keep the head down, say nothing and return to QUB, get the Master’s and disappear into permanent obscurity. In retrospect I wish I had and maybe today I would be visiting the old people’s home to take her out for the day.

My fight back began with a visit to see John Hume in Derry. He was a busy man and seemed totally disinterested. He also smoked a lot (perhaps Derry buses are like ours in Belfast, had a wee gizmo things to light the feg on the back of the seat). He also gave me that look, you know the one, no smoke without fire etc etc. He referred me to Briege Rodgers, she referred me to Sean Farren, he referred me to a rather pleasant portly man from Cookstown who loved classical music, Denis Haughey.

I arrived at his house and he bluntly told me he would leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of this dreadful injustice. He duly arrived at our home, 139 University Street, and entered our parlour, you know that room, the good room that no one is allowed into except the priest or one’s new girlfriend for one night only.

He sat straight-faced and told me and my parents that the NIO had a massive file on me. The word massive still bugs me a little. That my behaviour was a threat to national security and furthermore, the very act of him doing this public service was indicative of how wonderful the SDLP were and always will be.

For some bizarre reason he was smiling and gratefully accepted my mum’s cup of tea and two jammy dodgers, you know the nice ones with jam in the middle. After some time, my mum asked him what her son had done. He said “I don’t know as I haven’t seen the file”. 
“How do you know it’s massive, then?” said Dad. At that point the atmosphere changed, a little bit of the jammy dodger fell into his immaculate suit and tie. He was in retrospect honest enough to say that all this information was the result of a phone call. I began at that point to realize this is nonsense. His role was not to help and support people against injustice, but in reality he was a messenger for the NIO, he had no sense of empathy, support or basic kindness. My dad asked why we could not go to a solicitor and get a judge to rule on this. Those words, those awful cover-all the words we now hear every day in this fag end of the empire: “National security”. He gave me that look again before he left, you know the one I am talking about.

I struggled on with further meetings. The late Cardinal O Fiaich – what a man! Radical priest Denis Faul and of course the wonderful and totally powerless Deans, Professors and an assortment of deluded academics who believe they count for something but who in reality are powerless in the fight for decency and human rights. I graduated from QUB with my Master’s. On the last day of the course it seemed all my student colleagues gave me that look, you know the one!!!! I have never seen any one of them from the class of 1982, ever again. I mean, would you try to get a pint with an international terrorist, bomb-maker and assassin, and talk of old times?

Footnote

Two years on in November 1983 my mum's home was bombed. Her and dad being card-carrying members of the Alliance Party seemed to make them legitimate targets. The bomber, a young fella called David Maitland, blew himself up in the process. He lived only because my mother rang an ambulance on a pay phone with a 10 pence piece. I put a pillow under his injured bleeding head and promised him help was on its way. I see his face every day, usually but not always while asleep.

Three years on, in April 1984, the UVF returned and murdered Mum along with a young policeman called Michael Dawson. He was from the Braniel estate in East Belfast. I attended his home to pay respects.

Four years on in September 1985, I was appointed by the Department of Justice in Dublin as a probation officer and posted to Kilkenny. It appeared my membership of the Republican Marxist front, chief bomber and international assassin did not stand in my way. None of these organizations ever heard of me and no record of income tax or national insurance contributions exists under my name. In short, a security risk north of Newry and professional officer of the court south of Dundalk.

⏩Jude Whyte is a victims campaigner in Northern Ireland. His home was bombed twice in the 1980s, killing his mother and Constable Michael Dawson.

Enemy Of The State

Harry Hutchinson ✒ This period marks the centenary of the partition of Ireland, the establishment of the separate state in the North and the ‘treaty’ state in the South, the latter eventually becoming the Irish Republic.


A hundred years after these events, the National Question remains the unsolved fundamental issue facing the people of this island. North and South, politics has been dominated through generations by parties that have maintained divisions on this question, and they will continue to do so for as long as the question remains unresolved. It was the creation of the border in 1921 that has since divided politics more than anything else.

This division is the product of attempts to resolve the National question from an imposed capitalist perspective, something that has not and will never be the basis of a solution of the issue. Driving British Imperialism from the 26 Southern counties was indeed a major advance, removing British landlordism from rural and urban areas. But this came at great cost in Irish lives, in both the War of Independence before the 1921 Treaty, and in the Civil War that followed it, between pro- and anti-Treaty forces in the South.

“…your efforts will be in vain”

If anything is to be learned from events a hundred years ago, it is that imposing a solution on the ‘Irish problem’ from a British or even an Irish capitalist perspective is usually dealt at the end of a gun, and in fact it doesn’t resolve anything for the majority of the people of Ireland as a whole.

As James Connolly once said:

if you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of a socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule over you.

Much has changed since Connolly’s era, in relation to capitalism internationally, particularly the utter collapse of Britain’s power and prestige on the world stage in the last hundred years. Nevertheless, Connolly’s words still resonate today, in the sense that in any approach to the Irish national question, the essential requirement is a socialist agenda, to empower the overwhelming majority of people – the working class – to own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange, and thereby to properly determine their own destiny.

Much has changed since Connolly’s time,
but many of his writings still resonate today

Partition between the North and South, and within the Northern state, between Catholics and Protestants, was a deliberate act by British Imperialism. It was a means of maintaining a ‘divide and rule’ policy, principally by means of the different religious and culture traditions in the North, to check the movement of the working class at that period.

Calls for a capitalist united Ireland

To the detriment of the people of the whole of Ireland, partition has dominated the political scene for the last century. Capitalist Unionist and Nationalist parties have dominated the Northern state for decades and in the South, Treaty and non-Treaty parties. Sinn Fein emerged as an all-Ireland political movement calling for a (capitalist) united Ireland. The terms still set today by Sinn Fein for a united Ireland remain based on capitalism, despite nods in the direction of ‘radical’ reforms, and they risk further division and at least the potential of renewed civil conflict.

After partition, discrimination against Catholics in the North in terms of jobs, housing and education were continued throughout the whole period of Unionist Government. Gerrymandering of boundaries ensured that Catholic majority cities like Derry remained in Loyalist hands and there were voting restrictions that limited Catholic votes and boosted Protestant votes.

Likewise in the South, the ethnic cleaning of Protestants continued throughout the century. Arson, intimidation and looting drove over 10,000 out of Dublin alone in the early 20s. Attacks on Protestants took place in 19 of the 26 counties in Ireland. Even in the recent centenary of the Easter Rising, in 2016, Protestant churches were forced to close.

Any attempts for a solution left to the capitalist and sectarian parties is doomed to failure, as is any from a British and/or Irish government intervention. None of these parties have the political capacity to bring workers together in a way that would resolve the problem of partition. On the contrary, there is a danger that the Northern state, which is more divided than at any time in its history, could degenerate into further violent conflict, leading to further ethnic cleansing from Protestant and Catholic enclaves.

Intelligence gathering during the Troubles

One of the main objectives pursued by the British throughout all of the period of the Troubles was intelligence-gathering. It is estimated within one year of the Thatcher Government coming into office, there were hundreds of Republican informers working for the British state. By 2002, when the IRA broke into Castlereagh Barracks and stole documents listing informers, one senior security officer claimed there were so many that the IRA were unable to act on their findings. Effectively, for them the ‘war’ was over.
The ‘Battle of the Bogside’ in August 1969 is usually marked
as the beginning of the Troubles in modern times.

Republican, Loyalist and British sources have claimed there was hardly one terrorist incident that the British security services did not know about in advance. British security either turned a blind eye or directly instigated killings, largely though the notorious Glenanne Gang, made up of British security personnel and Loyalist paramilitaries. The brutal gunning down of innocent civilians within a five-month period in Ballymurphy and then Bloody Sunday by paratroopers is today recognised as an International war crime.

Atrocities throughout the Troubles, like the 1974 Dublin/Monaghan bombings, which killed 34 people, to the 1998 Omagh bomb, the single largest loss of life in one incident, killing 29 people, were known in advance by British intelligence. Nothing was initiated to prevent these attacks, which included sacrificing RUC officers, to protect the identities of informers. Intelligence-gathering took precedent over people’s lives.

Ruthless repression used by British Army

The families of victims seeking justice have been frustrated by the British. Half a century later, some inquiries have taken place, like the Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy Inquiries, and they have exposed the ruthless repression used by the British in Northern Ireland. Of the number of inquiries by the Historical Investigations Unit, almost all have pointed to British security involvement. Yet only one British solder is facing trial for his crimes.

For the Britain to allow genuine and open inquiries into terrorist incidents during the Troubles, it would expose the role of MI5 and other security establishments. Terrorist incidents led to over 3,500 deaths. It remains one of the highest numbers in any conflict zone in the world and Britain cared nothing for the deaths.

The flaws in the Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement heralded a new era in Northern Irish politics, and it was supported overwhelmingly in both the North and the South, as a welcome ‘new dawn’ after 30 years of troubles. Workers both Catholic and Protestant were tired of the senseless sectarian deaths on both sides.

Graffiti in Derry. Sinn Fein is not the radical
party some on the left make it out to be.
However, the Good Friday Agreement was founded effectively on the institutionalisation of sectarian parties. The Unionist and Nationalist Parties had no intention of bringing the people of the North together. On the contrary, they have used every opportunity to maintain the divide between working people to maintain their electoral base. The divisions can be seen in the increase in the number of so called ‘peace walls’, which are more like ‘division walls’ at the interfaces between Protestant and Catholic communities.

After the GFA and the reopening of Stormont, the two main Parties, the DUP and Sinn Fein, formed a coalition, their cosy power-sharing arrangement isolating all other political parties. Unlike in the past, Sinn Fein are no longer able to act as a opposition to cuts in public services, and alongside the DUP, they have supported ruthless cuts in spending on hospitals, schools and other services. They have essentially abandoned the most vulnerable by handing over benefit reform to Westminster, with resulting hardship to many and tens of thousands of premature deaths.

Any illusions that a new all-Ireland agenda can be based on these neo-liberal sectarian parties or on building something on the Good Friday Agreement must be dispelled.

Labour and the trade unions.

The first Irish Labour Party, formed by Connolly, Larkin and O’Brien in 1912, was an all-Ireland Labour Party. Partition cut across this and it resulted in a reactionary “Unionist” Northern Irish Labour Party and an Irish Labour Party in the South that abandoned both the North and, since the 1950s, any pretence of working-class struggle in the South.

The NILP actively supported the Northern state remaining part of the UK. In the 1973 border poll, it urged people to vote to remain in the UK. This position split the party and its Catholic members left en masse. In the same year, the NILP even supported a strike called by the Ulster Workers Council that effectively brought down a Stormont government. It brought the Northern state to a standstill, although it was largely by roadblocks and intimidation, rather than by democratic work-place mass meetings or trade union votes. The NILP at that time, despite a momentary shift to the left, was soon supporting a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.

The NILP effectively wound up and the newly-formed SDLP – although largely a Catholic party – is looked upon by the British Labour Party as its ‘sister’ party. In the South, the participation of Labour in successive capitalist coalitions has reduced the party to a machine for the furtherance of a handful of parliamentary careers. It has not a single trade union affiliated to it today.

Neither of these two parties, therefore, is in any position to advance the struggle to defend the living standards and interests of the working class in Ireland, or to take up the challenge of the National and border questions.

Many missed opportunities

At different periods in the last century, there have been opportunities presented to both Labour Parties to unite workers around a struggle for change. In the run up to partition and after the involvement of the Irish Citizens Army in the Easter Rising, and subsequently the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Labour emerged as a potential major force in Ireland, including in the more industrialised North.

With partition looming, the Irish Labour Party leadership unfortunately failed to intervene and to appeal for unity between Northern Protestants and Catholics, as they could have done, on the basis that a British-engineered Parliament had nothing to offer them. They were being offered rule by a reactionary capitalist Unionist government that would offer them at best meagre advantages over Catholic workers.

Just as important, Irish Labour failed to struggle for an alternative to a capitalist Home-Rule, all-Ireland state, leaving the scene to be dominated by Sinn Fein. Their policy offered nothing to change Irish society, only a state dominated by the Church. This was in the context of a wave of workers’ struggles and revolution sweeping Europe in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Sinn Fein given a free run in 1918

Instead of an independent class programme, the Irish Labour Party even stood to one side and allowed Sinn Fein a free run to win a landslide in the 1918 all-Ireland election, an event that opened up the perspective of a Catholic Church-dominated all-Ireland state, in the eyes of the Protestant North.

Decades later in the late 1960s, we had the Civil Rights movement and the Battle of the Bogside in Derry. Although the CR movement was predominately Catholic, it had passive support among important sections of the Protestant working class and particularly among the youth. Again, the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions failed to intervene and unite workers – as they could have done, linking civil rights to the issues of low pay, housing, unemployment, education, and so on.

That left the Civil Rights movement to be taken over by largely Catholic nationalists and Church figures and then to be brutally crushed by the British state. Events that followed, like internment, the massacres in Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday were the inevitable consequences of the suppression of the Civil Rights movement two years earlier.

There have been crucial opportunities, therefore, for the Labour and Trade Union movement to intervene and change the course of Irish history, but such opportunities have not been taken.

Workers’ unity persists in the workplace

A key question facing the labour movement today is the campaign for a border poll. A significant head of steam has been built up by the Trade Unionists for a New United Ireland, which, although it appeals for workers’ unity in words, is in fact entirely based on the notion of a capitalist united Ireland. As it was in 1918, it is a case of first unification, and only then socialism.

The central question facing socialists today is exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Any campaign for a new Ireland can only be based on workers’ unity between Protestant and Catholics in the North and between workers North and South. This is not an incidental extra; it is the essential element of any resolution of the National Question.

The main organisation of the working class is the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, which represents over 800,000 workers across the whole of the island. The Northern Ireland Committee of the ICTU represents over 200,000.

These trade unions, their leaders and their tens of thousands of shop-stewards, reps and branch officials have a vital role to play in the struggle for unity that is the essential foundation for any development towards a genuine new Ireland. It remains the case today, despite the sectarian divisions in the North in terms of housing, that most large workplaces, particularly in the public sector, are fully integrated. This essential integration of the workplace could be a foundation on which a mighty new unified workers’ movement could be built.

Bread and butter issues, not constitutional issues are key

It would be a movement that focused not on ‘constitutional’ issues or the border per se, but on the issues of low pay, job insecurity, unemployment, health, education, welfare, housing provision and all the necessities of working-class life. It would raise the issue of socialist demands and socialist change to put into effect measures in the interests of working class people. The only way that a ‘new Ireland’ can be brought about in a way that respects all religious and cultural rights, along with human, civil and sexual rights, is on the basis of such a campaign for socialist change.

Across the whole of Ireland, including in the South, there are many community-based campaigns and struggles. There are environmental campaign groups, like the anti-mining movement. There have been huge campaigns in the South against the imposition of water rates, and there have also been very successful campaigns on women’s rights, on abortion, divorce and for marriage equality and reproductive rights. All of these have been supported by the trade unions and overwhelmingly by young workers. All of these campaigns can play a part in shaping a new Ireland.

An all-Ireland Labour Party

What is missing is a political voice to challenge the parties of capitalism and the status quo and to take up the National question on the basis of a unified front and bring people together with a socialist agenda to create a new Ireland. Ireland needs a new political voice, based on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and for the whole of the Island of Ireland.

What is absolutely essential now is bringing together all the community campaigns, environmental campaigns and especially the trade union movement in a new all-Ireland party of labour.

Build confidence and trust among Protestants and Catholics

A new Ireland Labour Party would need to deal with the Irish question from the standpoint of the day-to-day needs of workers, with social questions at the core of its programme: homes, pay, employment, investment, democratic state/community control of education and health services, and so on. Only on that basis would it be possible to build confidence and trust among Protestant and Catholic workers in the North. Uniting workers around a socialist agenda would be the main priority of an all-Ireland Labour Party, not just a thin veneer to hide a sectarian head count.

More than anything, a new Irish Labour Party would have to rest on the solid foundation of the trade union movement. It could provide a basis for building strong links with the labour movements in Scotland, England and Wales and with the trade union movement in Europe.

An-Ireland Labour Party could be a voice for working people in the whole of the island of Ireland. It could form the basis of a real unity among workers, instead of division. In a skilful and meaningful manner – meaningful in the sense of concrete day-to-day workers’ needs – it could bring the working class of this island together. It could be a solid foundation for a united movement to end centuries of capitalist exploitation and for a fight for a socialist united Ireland.

⏩Harry Hutchinson is a member of the Labour Party Northern Ireland.

Socialists Must Fight For An All-Ireland Labour Party

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