by Ken Wharton
The Short Strand (Irish: an Trá Ghearr) is a wholly Catholic enclave in East Belfast; a Nationalist ‘island’ in a Loyalist ‘ocean.’ It is within the greater area of Ballymacarrat (Irish: Baile Mhic Gearóid) and sits on the eastern side of the River Lagan. During the 70s and indeed for many years prior to that, the most popular bar in the area was the eponymously named ‘Strand Bar’, located in Anderson Street. Like any Catholic-owned or patronised establishment, it was vulnerable to Loyalist attacks and given the vulnerability of the area, it was an atrocity waiting to happen. Further, as the bar was located on the western extremity of the Short Strand, Loyalist murder gangs had easy access from the Shankill and Crumlin Roads to the ‘boundary’ road: the B506.
That vulnerability was never more obvious than on the night of Saturday 12 April, just one week after the twin bombing attacks at the Mountainview and McLaughlin’s. An armed gang belonging loosely to the Red Hand Commandos drove into Anderson Street and approached the packed Strand bar, at around 20:10, entering the bar, they sprayed machine gun fire without discrimination and then tossed an explosive device amongst the panicked and shocked customers. They ran outside and with a pre-prepared piece of wood, jammed the front door and then drove off laughing and jeering. The device exploded within seconds of them leaving and one can only imagine the panic of the trapped people inside who desperately tried to escape the deadly blast; one man who later died from his wounds threw a chair through a window and was attempting to escape when the bomb went off.
Five people were killed instantly and a sixth died seven days later in hospital; scores were injured, some dreadfully in the cowardly attack. Those killed were: Mary McAleavey (57) mother of 11; Marie Bennett (42) mother of seven; Elizabeth Carson (64); Agnes McAnoy (62) mother of three and Arthur Penn (33) a father of three. The five deaths had resulted in the loss of a parent to a staggering 24 children. The man who made such a courageous attempt to escape, Michael Mulligan (33) died in hospital the following week. For the second Saturday in succession, sectarian killers had caused mayhem and death in bars in separate parts of Belfast. Today the outside of the bar is bedecked with green flags – two for Carlsberg Beer and three tricolours – and there is a large mural of children playing happily in the street. For those uncomfortable with the ‘language of the Brits’ – English – there is a Gaelic translation; it reads: Beârna Trâ.
The Red Hand Commandos (RHC) was formed in 1972 in Belfast’s Shankill area, recruiting from the Loyalist heartland itself and also from the Sandy Row area of the city. John McKeague and colleagues from the Shankill Defence Association such as William ‘Plum’ Smith were the ‘founding fathers.’ Membership was high in the Loyalist north of Belfast and also in Newtownabbey, as well as other parts of Co Down. McKeague was shot dead by the INLA in January, 1982. In 1972 the RHC agreed to become an integral part of the UVF and, although keeping its own structures in operational matters, agreed to take its lead from the UVF and share weapons and personnel. The RHC/UVF were interchangeable parts of the same Loyalist terrorist machine.
Some 20 minutes after the carnage on the Short Strand, the first sectarian reprisals started. Stafford Mateer (32) had been repairing TVs in the area immediately to the south of where the attack had just taken place. As he sat at traffic lights, no doubt hearing the screaming police and ambulance sirens and seeing an abnormal amount of Army traffic, an IRA unit spotted him. Mr Mateer was trapped in a queue of traffic and he was shot and fatally wounded; he died on the 14th in hospital. Just over four hours later, shortly after 1am, a Protestant merchant seaman was walking through the docks area of Belfast after drinking in a nearby club, when he was attacked by a Republican mob who battered him to death. Robert Kennedy (37) was the victim of a drunken attack which left his skull pulverised after being hit repeatedly with both house bricks and somewhat bizarrely, an artificial arm belonging to one of his murderers.
That weekend’s slaughter was not considered newsworthy enough for the front page of the Daily Express, with the Strand Bar attack appearing on page 2. Under a sub-headline of ‘Seven Die in New Violence,’ their reporter wrote: ‘Five people died when a bomb blasted a Catholic bar … Four women and a young man died in the blast and some of the 38 taken to hospital were rescue workers injured when a wall collapsed. Police said last night that 14 people were still in hospital. One was very seriously ill and another is believed to be a woman of 86. Ulster Supremo Merlyn Rees … condemned the men who have brought terror back to the Province. ‘Men and women of all ages are being killed and maimed just because they happen to be there,’ said Mr Rees. ‘Let no one claim these crimes are political. They are murder.’
Above the newspaper report is a photograph of a solitary British soldier gazing at the wreck of the Strand Bar; one wall is gone and the contents of two floors and an attic gape wide open to the skies. Bricks and torn wood and other burned remains lie at obscene angles and it is reminiscent of a bombed East End street after a German air raid on London in the 1940s.
An Army Dog Handler in Newry sniffing out explosives. (Mark ‘C’)
The Province was quiet, by the bloody standards of the Troubles at least, for the next four days but then on the 17th, the UVF proved that they could be as bloodily sickening as the Provisional IRA. The sectarian murders of Marion Bowen (21) and her brothers Seamus (23) and Michael Mckenna (30) at the hands of a UVF booby-trap is appalling enough, but given the fact that Mrs. Bowen was heavily pregnant (over eight months) demonstrates the heinous behaviour of the Loyalist terrorists. The Loyalists pledge their allegiance to the British Crown and yet they disgrace the names of those who are proud to be British. Mrs. Bowen and her two brothers were all Catholics and lived in Killyliss, Co Tyrone.
The tiny hamlet is situated some six miles east of Enniskillen and was not known as a place of potential danger. The brothers had been renovating an empty cottage in time for their married sister and her husband and new baby to move into. Given its geographical location and out of the way nature, the only way for the UVF – the bombing was claimed by the Protestant Action Force, a cover name for the UVF – to have been aware of the Catholic family was through local ‘intelligence.’ This author finds it simply too incredulous to believe that it was a random attack by Loyalist paramilitaries on Catholics; the information concerning the presence of the McKenna brothers and their pregnant sister could only have come from someone within that small community. That person has the blood of four innocents on their hands. An RUC spokesman described the killings as: ‘… brutal, vicious and ghastly….’ These were words which were certainly not over-used in the context of this terrible month of April; and it still wasn’t over.
PIRA were now looking for further reprisals against the Loyalist paramilitaries and they turned their attention to Portadown, Co Armagh. Portadown (from Irish: Port a’ Dúnáin meaning port of the small stronghold) sits on the River Bann in the north of the county, about 23 miles south-west of Belfast. Local UFF member Samuel Johnston (34) was shot and killed by a PIRA ASU after he had left a social club in order to walk home. He was en-route for his home on the Gloucester Road when a car pulled alongside him and he was hit three times, probably by rounds from a handgun. He died on the way to hospital.
After violence on the preceding weekends of 5/6 and 12/13 April, there had been no deaths on the weekend of 19/20 and when Saturday 26 passed without violence, the security forces must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. That dawn of hope was false, however, and on the Sunday, the murderous UVF targeted a Catholic Darts and Social club in Bleary, co Armagh, close to Portadown. A gang, allegedly and in all likelihood, led by Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson, burst into the club in the hitherto sleepy village and opened fire on the defenceless and largely Catholic clientele. Three men were shot and died at the scene, leaving a quite staggering 18 children fatherless. John Feeney (45), father of eight; Brendan O’Hara (38), father of four and Joseph Toman (48), father of six and a barman in the club were all killed and a fourth man badly wounde
d.
Based in the small village of Donaghcloney, Co Down, near Lurgan, Robin ‘the Jackal’ Jackson is alleged to have organised and committed at least 50 murders of the Catholic and Republican community. Like other ‘Teflon’ characters on both sides of the sectarian murder divide, he was never convicted in connection with any killing and never served any lengthy prison terms. It is always pleasing when mad dogs like Jackson die at the hands of a fellow mad dog, but the author regretfully reports that he died, prosaically, at the hands of lung cancer in 1998.
The Republican feud continued on the 28th when Liam ‘the wee man’ McMillen (48) the Official IRA’s (OIRA) top man in Belfast was shot dead in Spinner Street, just off the Falls Road. Somewhat ironically, he was on the verge of negotiating a ceasefire in the bloody internecine struggle between the OIRA and the INLA. He was shot by Gerard ‘Dr Death’ Steenson, called such by the RUC for the sheer number of murders in which he was involved. Steenson had shot and killed an officer from the Royal Anglians (Lieutenant Nicholas Hull in 1972) at the age of 13. He later joined and then left the INLA and was himself killed when he was shot along with a friend Tony McCarthy by INLA gunmen including Dessie O’Hare on 14 March 1987. When McMillen was killed, Steenson was by chance passing along the Falls Road in a taxi with another INLA member, Brendan McNamee. McNamee pulled a gun on the taxi driver and forced him to stop; as he did so, Steenson stepped out and walked across to where McMillen was just leaving Harden’s Hardware store. He shot the OIRA man and then shot him again as he struggled to get out and defend himself. A young woman who had just served him had heard the shots and came outside to see him fighting for breath for a few seconds before dying.
On the same day as the murder of the ‘wee man’ McMillen, one of the UVF bombers of Conway’s Bar on 13 March [see Chapter 3] George Brown (18) who had been badly injured in the bungled attack, died of his injuries. His passing is worthy of no further mention in the opinion of this author.
The final death of bloody April took place on the same day as the deaths of McMillen and Brown and took place close to Belfast City Hospital then situated near Donegal Road. Railway workmen were carrying out maintenance work on the line when two UFF gunmen approached two workers – both Catholics – and asked where the foreman was. They then approached Samuel Grierson (25) and, having singled him out, shot him dead. Their victim was a fellow Protestant and it can only be speculated that his ‘capital crime’ was to work with the hated Catholics. For good measure, just before they fled the scene of their crime, they shot and wounded one of the two Catholic workers. Another theory was put forward by RUC sources, and that was that Mr Grierson was not the intended target and that one of the aforementioned Catholic men was the object of their murderous mission.
April 1975 had finally ended and it had proven to be one of the bloodiest months of the Troubles for quite some time. In all, 39 people had died; of these, one was a British soldier, 28 were innocent civilians including Catholics, Protestants and a Hindu. Three Republicans had been killed, as a consequence of the feud and seven Loyalist paramilitaries also, of whom the Army killed one, the IRA killed three, two were a consequence of feuding and one was an ‘own goal.’
5
May
The first of the month fell on a Thursday which is traditionally the day of voting in the UK; whether it be a General, By, Local or Parish Election, Thursday is always the appointed day. This May Thursday in Northern Ireland was no different and the much vaunted, eagerly awaited Constitutional Convention was held in Northern Ireland. The election was based on proportional representation (PR) and candidates contested 78 seats. The United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) won 47 seats (with 54.8 per cent of the first preference vote); the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) won 17 seats (23.7%); The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) won 8 seats (9.8%); the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI) won 5 seats ((7.7%); and the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) won 1 seat (1.4%). Those elected to the Convention held their first meeting on 8 May 1975. As the UUUC opposed power-sharing the chance of the convention reaching agreement on a constitutional settlement were very remote from the outset. The convention eventually collapsed in the autumn.
Only one British soldier died during the month of May, but as with many cases surrounding the deaths of soldiers during the Troubles, there was some mystery in this instance also. Private Graham Hayes (20) of the Royal Pioneer Corps died on the day after the Constitutional Convention and the cause of death is listed, officially as ‘unknown’. The author ascertained that his service number was 24304279 and that his date of birth was 25 February, 1955; other than that and his date of death, nothing further is known.
The author in virtually every chapter deals with instances where soldiers died from ‘unknown’ causes. These causes are known to the MOD of course, and one is only permitted to use such euphemistic terms as ‘death by violent or unnatural causes,’ ‘cause of death unknown,’ or ‘accidental death.’ Death by violent or unnatural causes can, but not always, mean that the unfortunate soldier died at their own hands for reasons known only to them. The author has uncovered suicides as a consequence of bullying, relationship breakdown or caused by simply being in the pressure cauldron that was Northern Ireland. This author has also uncovered deaths by accidental shooting – negligent discharges – where fatigue, laziness or just general horseplay has cost the life of a comrade. The following is from a friend and a regular contributor to the author’s works.
NEGLIGENT DISCHARGES
Mike Sangster, Royal Artillery
When I was doing build up training in October 1973 prior to going to Londonderry, a member of the NITAT [Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Team] team told us that there had been 60+ deaths due to negligent discharges (NDs). If that was the score after four years, what was the final total so to speak? From another source, was told that the majority of RMP ‘cause of death unknown’ were NDs due to the fact that their personal weapons were Sterling Sub Machine Guns (SMG) and Browning pistols. When on plain clothes duty, the Browning was carried, made ready with the hammer at half cock. If the safety catch wasn’t applied as well, all it took was for the hammer to hook on something and ‘Bang!’ Same with the SMG; if the safety was not applied, all it took was for the cocking lever to be pulled back a couple of inches which when released, which would feed a round and fire it. I’m pretty sure that this not only applied to the RMPs but other support units as well.
Up till early 1971, the vast majority of NDs occurred at the unloading bays at night when the drill was magazine off, cock weapon, show clear and pull the trigger. The use of torches was obviously discouraged so either the sentry or patrol commander used to poke his finger up the breach to check it was cleared. The failure was, if it was not noticed that the magazine was still attached. Our unit in 1971 had loads of NDs for that reason. Tiredness kills although we were lucky in that aspect; nobody hit. I remember word coming down that the drill was now to be magazine off then cock the weapon at least three times. Obviously when rounds started ejecting, the said soldier had forgotten to take his mag off which usually cost him a good kick up the arse. Saw that a few times but overnight, NDs at the unloading bay with SLRs ceased. Unfortunately, with other weapons like the SMG and the pistol, they continued as did NDs out on the ground when bored or nervous soldiers would start fiddling with the safety when the weapon was made ready. Soldiers had a tendency to rest the muzzle of their weapon on the toecap of their boot. I wonder how many are nowadays missing toes for that reason.
Another reason for NDs surfaced in early 1973. From 1971 until then, troops left their base, especially if in a hard area, with the weapon made ready. Small indentations were starting to be found on the firing cap of the round. This was caused by the firing pin touching the cap. If you recall in those days, stripping the SLR for cleaning involved taking the working parts out but you were not allowed to remove the firing pin. All you did was depress the pin at the rear of the block to make sure the pin move
d forwards and back smoothly. If this wasn’t done on a daily basis, dirt and rust would cause the firing pin to stick and when the weapon was cocked, it would be like a fixed pin and would fire off the round. It also resulted in double taps [two rounds being fired one after the other in rapid succession] especially if the pin was damaged. I know of two NDs caused by that which resulted in two lads being shot by their own patrol member. One had the next bed to me in Musgrave Park Hospital. I think it was around then that we were allowed to remove the firing pin for inspection and cleaning and also the extractor mechanism which was a bit of a swine to put back and many a spring went missing.
With the introduction of the SA80 in 1986, only infantry units were initially issued with the weapon. However, if a support arms unit like the Royal Artillery were earmarked to deploy on Op Banner, they were temporarily issued with the SA80 for that tour. I was told that the instances of NDs took a jump because the soldiers were not overly familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the weapon. On the earlier SA80s, there were teething problems especially with the extractor. Quite often, when a weapon was made ready then the soldier went to unload it, instead of the extractor ejecting the live round, it held on to it and of course when checked, the breech would show clear. When the parts were released the bullet fed back into the chamber with the obvious result when the trigger was pulled. A three-way safety check was introduced but as you know, tired soldiers take short cuts with unfortunate results. I’d lay money that if we had access to the statistics on NDs, they would show a high jump around the time when the SA80 came into use over there.
NEGLIGENT DISCHARGES 2
Maggie Pridgen
I was working in Musgrave hospital kitchen, went to see a patient and asked what happened to him. He told me that his weapons instructor was showing them what not to do with a pistol and shot him by mistake!
