Torn Apart

by Ken Wharton

  Among the first soldiers on the street were the 2nd Royal Anglians, who fought tirelessly, unselfishly and courageously, tearing at the rubble with their bare hands to free the trapped survivors. One of their own, Captain Jeremy Snow, was shot dead by a PIRA gunman as he worked ceaselessly to protect his team of rescuers and, at the same time, prevent Loyalist rioters from the interface at Tiger’s Bay attacking Catholics. The disinformation given out by senior Army men was naïve in the extreme, ill-thought-out and ill-considered; it was foolish to try to blame the Provisionals, but it was just that: foolish and certainly not collusion. McGurk’s was a human tragedy that resulted in an appalling loss of human life. The UVF’s attack that night, the latest in a long line at that stage of the Troubles, surely demonstrates that the co-called ‘Protestant backlash’ was already well under way and didn’t appear like clockwork, as some experts have suggested, in Dublin/Monaghan or other flashpoints. However, twenty-two people in the space of seventy-six days had gone to their ‘local’ with the sole intention of enjoying a night out, relaxing with a pint or a ‘short’, forgetting their personal worries and putting behind them the worst crisis to affect Northern Ireland since partition. Those twenty-two people, ranging from the ages of 13 to 73, had never returned to their homes or to the bosom of their families. The men of evil on both sides of what had been a sectarian divide – rapidly turning into a sectarian abyss – now had their ‘excuses’ for escalating into an all-out war against the innocents.

  This then was the bloody game of ‘tit for tat’, an innocent childhood game enjoyed by the author and countless generations before and since. Only that this wasn’t a game of ‘tig’, it was a bloodily violent and tragic game in which the body counts were running up like a cricket scoreboard. A Republican atrocity was quickly followed by a Loyalist retaliation, which in turn was followed by another Republican ‘retaliation’, which was then eclipsed by a further Loyalist ‘retaliation’. On and on it went, with both sides forgetting whether they were striking or retaliating; ‘tit for tat’ meant that the cemeteries in Northern Ireland would soon be overflowing.

  In the context of sectarian slayings, there is one particular double murder that is noteworthy. In the strictest definition of the term, it was not a double murder, but rather two separate killings; moreover, it displayed a side of the Loyalist paramilitaries that could never be described as ‘defensive’. Defensive killings were used by Loyalists to justify some of their sectarianism. It involved the joint although separate killings of Edward Coogan and Margaret Hyrkiewicz on 19 May and 26 May respectively. Mr Coogan (39) was a Catholic man who earned his living as a painter, living in Dunleywey Street in the Lower Falls area. Ms Hyrkiewicz (24) was a Polish-born single mother of a 10-year-old girl, Niki, as well as an infant son who had been living with his father in the Bristol area. She had struck up a friendship with Mr Coogan and is thought to have moved to flats in the Limestone Road area of North Belfast.

  On the evening of the 19th, Edward Coogan was walking along Adela Street, close to the Antrim Road, when he was approached by two UFF gunmen. It is thought that they asked him if he was a Catholic, but whatever reply he made was enough to satisfy them that he was; they shot him twice in the chest, mortally wounding him. Alerted by the sound of the shots, a passing motorist drove him to the nearby Mater Hospital, but he died soon after admittance. It is then thought that Ms Hyrkiewicz, who had told her daughter that she was only going to Bath – 13 miles from their home in Bristol – had made her way to Belfast. She visited an RUC station close to the murder spot, announcing that she was going to conduct her own murder investigation. On the night of the 26th, just a few feet from where Edward Coogan had been cruelly murdered, she was attacked and killed by a UFF murder gang. She died where she fell, in a pool of her own blood, in an act as cruel as the shooting of her friend. An RUC spokesman said, ‘This was a brutal murder and there must have been blood on their [the murderers’] clothes, someone must know something.’

  Kevin Myers wrote:

  There had been many, many killings in the area I was now moving into – most terribly, that of Margaret Hyrkiewicz who had been stabbed twenty-four times, once for every year of her young life. The previous May, simultaneously and quite mysteriously, her four-month-old son, who was living with her father in England, had died in his cot.*

  There is one very sad postscript to these three deaths, two of which were Troubles related: her daughter was interviewed by the Belfast Newsletter:

  An emotional Niki Priddle, 45, from Peastown outside Bristol, clutched photos of her mother as she revisited the scene of the murder. She last saw her mother – 24-year-old Margaret Hyrkiewicz – sitting in a bus waving goodbye to her in May 1973. At the time, Ms Priddle was only 10. ‘I saw her a couple of days before she died. I can even remember what she had on,’ she said. ‘She was going into Bath on the bus. She had a long brown hippy coat on and she was wearing bangles and had a band around her head. She was smoking a roll-up because you could smoke on buses in those days. I never saw her again. She was not political, she would give you her last piece of bread, she was just in love with Eddie [Coogan]. I am coming [to Northern Ireland] for closure, for me to say I saw the place she saw with her eyes when she died. I want simply if they know anything to feel a bit guilty and know that they killed a real person.’

  Ms Priddle recalled how she learned of her mother’s death. ‘I came home from school and everyone was crying, and I wondered what had gone wrong. The local policeman was there, and I thought he had caught us nicking apples,’ she said. She said the impact didn’t sink in for some time and that she had not been told the full details – it was a boy in school who eventually told her that her mother had been stabbed in Northern Ireland. Ms Priddle said she felt bitter that her mother had been murdered in such a brutal way.**

  No one was ever charged with the murders, but informed sources say that the work was carried out by the UFF’s ‘C’ Company.

  We have spoken earlier about one of the Loyalists’ chief motivations for both mass and individual sectarian attacks; in the first instance it was to ‘punish’ the Nationalist communities for daring to support the Provisionals; for giving them safe houses; for providing caches in which to store arms and explosives; for providing them with places to eliminate any forensic evidence, such as washing off gunshot residue; and for helping to dispose of weapons after a ‘shoot and scoot’ attack on the SF. There is numerous evidence – including an incident witnessed personally by this author – of rifles being disassembled into their component parts and hidden beneath the mattresses of sleeping babies, as their mums wheeled them underneath the eyes of patrolling soldiers. There was also a vast army of dickers prepared to support the local PIRA men with information that would help them counter the presence of soldiers and help them better understand how to kill these young men from England, Wales and Scotland.

  These dickers would watch soldiers and police officers, noting their patrol patterns, routines and reactions to specific incidents. One method was to note the cap badges of the soldiers, to recognise the differences between the Green Howards and the Royal Green Jackets; to distinguish between the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and the Royal Welch Fusiliers; and between the Royal Hampshires and the Royal Anglians. They would also listen to the names of the soldiers being shouted between themselves, so that known players could play mind games with them when being stopped and searched. This author has lost count of the times he was asked by perfect strangers – and even known faces – ‘What about ye, Yorkie?’ After a while it became a bit of a joke, with banter going both ways. One soldier in the author’s regiment was told, ‘You are getting fat, Davie boy,’ to which the young soldier retorted, ‘That’s cos every time I shag your missus, she gives me a biscuit!’ There was, however, a deadly side to these dickers; using pen and notepad, later camcorders and then mobile phones, they would record standard operating procedures in several given circumstances.

  For example, whenever a patrol was
hit by a bomb or was present immediately following an explosion, the soldiers were trained to set up an incident command post (ICP) nearby. This was usually across the street from the blast, generally at a 45-degree angle to the seat of the explosion. This was noted by the dickers and thus the PIRA tactic of planting a secondary device was developed. A stunning example of this occurred at Warrenpoint in Co. Down on 27 August 1979, when eighteen soldiers were killed in PIRA blasts: the worst single loss of military lives in the Troubles. A device weighing 800lb (364kg) was planted on a lorry’s trailer containing bales of hay; as a mobile patrol from the Parachute Regiment passed by, it was detonated from across the border at Carlingford Lough by a watching PIRA gang. The blast killed six soldiers and dreadfully injured many more. At this point, officers and NCOs chose an ICP in the former gatekeeper’s lodge, opposite the Norman castle. It was about 100 yards from the first blast, at an angle of 45 degrees. A helicopter containing the CO of another regiment – the Queen’s Own Highlanders – and his radioman arrived; they joined other Paras at the ICP. However, using the experience and knowledge of their own army of dickers, the PIRA bombing crew had planted a secondary device under the very feet of where they knew that the survivors and reinforcements were likely to gather. The second device, also weighing 800lb, exploded, vaporising several soldiers, killing a total of twelve and bringing to eighteen the number of those killed indirectly at the hands of the dickers.

  Loyalists, who also employed their own version of dicking, were acutely aware of the invaluable logistical information that Catholics were giving to the Provisionals; they felt that they had to punish them, with their methods involving indiscriminate sectarian murder. Part of the Loyalist rationale was a fundamental belief that they could sicken Catholics into withdrawing their emotional and physical support for PIRA/INLA/IPLO by the carnage that people such as Stephen McKeag could create. Loyalist leaders such as Jackson, Adair and Wright were aware that many of those who gave aid to the Republicans often did it out of terror rather than through tacit support of their cause. The Loyalist paramilitaries were not interested in whether the aid was voluntarily, out of fear of punishment beatings or simply ostracisation by their peers and neighbours. One Catholic acquaintance, still resident in the Falls Road area, told me: ‘In those days, all it took was a man to walk unannounced or uninvited into your house, and authoritatively call out: “Provisional IRA” and you were either fucked or you wet yourself. My own da’, who was a strong man, knew when to act submissive when the RA* came calling.’ This clearly being the case, the Catholics knew what would befall them if they didn’t support the RA, and knew equally that the Loyalist gunmen would come driving down Lanark Way – the road that separates the Loyalist Shankill from the Nationalist Springfield Road – and not drive back until a good Catholic man or woman was lying in a pool of their own still-warm blood.

  Between 1975 and 1985, more than 500 Catholics were killed by the UFF, UVF or the Red Hand Commando; most were shot in sectarian attacks. The Troubles created an entire generation of widows and orphans and a new lexicon of the English language sprang into being. Some of it was graphic, some descriptive, some was downright obscene. Notably, the Loyalist tactic of ‘dial a Catholic’, which referred to the practice of calling a Catholic-owned taxi company or Catholic-owned fast food delivery company, to request a pick up or meal delivery, aware that the dispatcher only employed Catholics. It would never be as obvious a trick as calling for a collection in a Loyalist area such as Crumlin Road or the Shankill. A murder gang would drive into a darkened street in a Catholic area, call in for a pick up, giving an obviously** Catholic name, then lie in wait in the shadows. Once the unsuspecting driver arrived with a Chinese meal or to collect a Mr O’Callaghan to take him to the Celtic Club on the Whiterock Road, the murder gang would shoot him the head or chest, before escaping back to the Shankill.

  One of the most notorious exponents of ‘dial a Catholic’ was Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, leader of the UFF’s ‘C’ Company, running his operations from his house in the Shankill. He assembled a so-called ‘dream team’ of sectarian assassins who all killed for pleasure; this included: Steven ‘Top Gun’ McKeag, ‘Fat’ Jackie Thompson and Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory. Adair commanded others, men such as ‘Big Donald’ Hodgen and Stephen ‘Inch’ McFerran, who although not a member of the ‘dream team’ was nonetheless a prolific killer of Catholics.

  A stunning example of the profligacy with which Adair’s killers treated human life, especially the lives of Catholics, occurred on 28 April 1992, with the senseless and sordid murder of Philomena Hanna, shop worker in a chemists on the Springfield Road in Belfast. Philomena Hanna (26) was the mother of two very young children aged 1 and 6; she lived in Dermott Hill, a small cluster of streets to the west of the Whiterock Road, and close to the New Barnsley area. She worked at the Springfield Pharmacy on the Springfield Road, a journey of just 1.5 miles, or five minutes by car or bus. She was well known and well liked by both sides of the community and often volunteered to deliver prescriptions, oxygen bottles, etc., across the ‘peace line’ into Loyalist territory. Springfield Pharmacy no longer exists, and families requiring medicine now must walk to Isadore Avenue, half a mile away; it is on the same route that Ms Hanna would have taken most mornings. The shop stood at the bottom end of Lanark Way, a 500-yard-long road, which connects the Loyalist Shankill Road to the Nationalist Springfield Road. It was a ‘conduit’ down which Loyalist murder gangs drove to carry out sectarian murders and was occasionally sealed off by ‘peace gates’. In the days before the murder, UFF commander Johnny Adair – whose face was well known to many Catholics in the area – was spotted brazenly carrying out what later transpired to be a scouting mission.

  As Ms Hanna arrived at work, a Loyalist murder team was already preparing a stolen Suzuki motorcycle a few hundred yards away, in the Shankill Road area. Twenty minutes after the innocent Catholic – considered a ‘Saint’ by Protestants and Catholics alike – arrived at work, a two-man UFF murder gang drove down Lanark Way, turned left onto Springfield Road, before performing a U-turn; they then parked outside the chemists. One man – Steven ‘Top Gun’ McKeag – wearing a motorcycle helmet, walked into the shop, calmly shooting Ms Hanna at very close range without hesitation; as she slumped, mortally wounded, to the floor, he then fired several more rounds into her body; almost nonchalantly, he then walked outside and re-joined his accomplice on the motorbike before they reversed their journey along Lanark Way. He was known to refer to that route as the Yellow Brick Road. In fact, eyewitnesses heard him singing ‘Follow the Yellow Brick road’ as he headed towards the Shankill after the murder of Ms Hanna.

  David Lister and Hugh Jordan, in their excellent book about Johnny Adair, refer to the killings being carried out by Adair and his ‘dream team’ as bets. The authors wrote:

  One shocking example of Adair’s capacity for ruthlessness was made known to Special Branch following a sectarian murder in North Belfast. It emerged that the ‘C’ Company team were present on a Sunday evening in a Shankill Road club with the intention of engaging in a session of drinking. Upon the arrival of the first round of drinks the mood of the party was jovial when one of the assembled dozen or so members shouted: ‘Let’s bang a Taig,’ which was slang for let’s shoot a Catholic. Although this comment was intended in jest, Adair picked up on the suggestion and within 5 minutes had detailed every member of the team to play a specific role in the murder attempt which had now become a reality. Incredibly, 15 minutes later the operation was underway, and it was only then that the team realised that they hadn’t actually discussed a target. At this point it was decided to drive into a Catholic area and shoot the first male they encountered [Sean Rafferty]. Approximately 25 minutes after the first suggestion, the entire team had returned to the club and resumed their drinking, the celebration of the murder being led by Adair.*

  A mural to UFF gunmen just off the Shankill Road, Belfast.

  The ending of Mr Rafferty’s life, the widowing
of Mrs Rafferty and the orphaning of his five children was decided upon purely at random, by deranged killers, in cold blood, from start to finish in less than half an hour.

  We have previously considered the less than innocent version of ‘tit for tat’, to which we will now return. At 15.00 hours on 5 April 1975, Grand National Day in the UK, the UVF planted several explosives inside a gas cylinder (guaranteed to cause a lethal storm of razor-sharp shrapnel) outside the Catholic-frequented McLaughlin’s bar on the New Lodge Road. It was always likely to be a busy day, as many members of the racing fraternity are Irish, from North and South, with many thousands crossing the Irish Sea to Aintree, Liverpool, for the annual steeplechase event known as the Grand National. No warning was given, with the subsequent blast killing Kevin Kane (18) and his friend, Michael Coyle (20); seven more people were badly injured, with one man losing both legs.

  Three hours later, the Mountainview Tavern on the Shankill Road was the target of the Provisionals; it was claimed by the ‘Republican Action Force’, a flag of convenience and a nom de plume of the Provisional IRA; they claimed also that it was in retaliation for the earlier attack on McLaughlin’s. This was subsequently proved to be a mendacity, as the operation had been planned and organised some days earlier. Two masked men walked into the crowded bar, full of drinkers watching a rerun of the day’s races from Aintree on the pub’s television screens. They opened fire with pistols, causing the drinkers to drop to the floor; they then ran out, having left a bomb in the panic and confusion. Seconds after they ran outside, it exploded; four people were killed instantly, with a fifth dying the following morning in the Mater; a further sixty-one others were injured, some very seriously, as the upper floor collapsed on top of the dead, dying and injured. The dead were: Joseph Bell (52), Alan Madden (18), Nathaniel Adams (29) and UFF member William Andrews (33), with Albert Fletcher (32) being fatally wounded.