by Ken Wharton
Paul Anthony Donaghey
Was stationed at Belfast GCH and met a segment gate guard from the Royal Anglian Regiment. He had shot off his 9mm pistol into his gut through his Flak Jacket. It was not known if it was a ND or an attempt for a short tour; he survived.
Michael Sangster
Prior to going to Londonderry, our beloved, not, CO threatened to jail anyone for 14 days if they had an ND. So, we’re about a week into the tour, and one fine morning the CO’s Rover group visits the Saracen factory. Out he gets, walks up to the unloading bay, takes out the mag from his pistol, pulls back and locks the working parts to show ‘clear’ to one of his escorts. Fine so far; then the stupid bastard puts the mag back in, releases the working parts and BANG!!!!! Lucky it was still pointed at the sand. It’s times like that when you wish you had a camera handy because the expression on his face was a classic ‘What the fuck?’ The Brigadier fined him two week’s pay and that became the standard punishment from then on. We had a few NDs but nobody hurt and half of them were not reported. ‘Spare’ rounds saw to that.
Dave Judge, Royal Green Jackets
Soldiers are thought to be very highly trained; it’s true, they are! However there is no accounting for stupidity or a lack of scientific understanding! Or physics! Two soldiers from a Royal Green Jacket battalion were discussing the finer points involved in ballistics! The premise was that should you put your finger over the barrel of a 9mm pistol, if you then fire that pistol, surely the trapped air in the barrel of the gun between your finger and the bullet head would be compressed! Compressed so much in fact, that it would blow your finger out of the way before the bullet could hit your finger: Bang! Nee, naw; nee naw; nee naw went the ambulance!
Did you know that if you place a pencil on the barrel of an EMPTY pistol which has been cocked and you then fire the action the hammer hits the firing pin and the firing pin hits the pencil! Lo and behold the pencil leaves the barrel of the gun and causes great amusement!! However IF you cock a loaded pistol and then put a pencil down the barrel and fire the action, all of the above will happen. However the pencil will leave the barrel much, much quicker, as two Einsteins found out when one of them was shot, firstly by a pencil which was being chased rapidly by a 9mm round!! These incidents are thankfully rare and many a soldier has fallen victim to tomfoolery with a deadly weapon. Sadly some have died!
Mystery also surrounds the death of a senior officer in the UDA/UFF on the same day as the death of Private Hayes; his cause of death and why he was shot is not a mystery, however his killers are not yet known to this day. Alexander Millar (54) was described as a ‘Captain’ in the UDA and these titles are almost comical when one reads the words of Kevin Myers (Watching The Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast Atlantic Books, 2008) in relation to their ‘ranks.’ It was not uncommon to hear pronunciations such as ‘Lootenant’ and ‘Loo-tenant General.’
Alexander Millar was also an employee of a Belfast bus company and was based, as an Inspector, at the bus depot in the Ardoyne. On the morning in question, two men confronted him in his office and asked him if he was Alexander Millar and when he confirmed this, they shot him three times at very close range. He died later in hospital and the ‘usual suspects’ were the UVF who were still involved in an internecine struggle with the UFF or the Provisional IRA. Given the location of the bus depot in the Ardoyne and the ease at which a PIRA ASU could move about such an area, the probabilities are that they were involved.
One of the multitudes of factors which produced the latest Troubles was the discrimination employed by the Protestant majority against the Catholic minority. It was not uncommon in the 1960s for employers to advertise vacancies with the rider that ‘No Catholics need apply!’ Sometimes a more subtle barrier to the employment of Catholics was used and the ‘no’ decision was made easy by the applicant’s address. For example, a Catholic job-seeker was not compelled to put his religion on the application form, but an address in the Ballymurphy, Turf Lodge, Andersonstown or the aforementioned Ardoyne was sufficient to end his or her chances. To this end, the Fair Employment (NI) Bill was introduced in the House of Lords, having passed its first hurdle in the House of Commons. The resulting Fair Employment Act came into effect on 1 December the following year.
On Friday 9 May, in a statement at Westminster Merlyn Rees, in answer to a Commons question, said that recent violence in the region was as a result of feuding between Republican groups and had no connection with the IRA truce. One thinks that the late Mr Rees had obviously not read his daily briefings which would have informed him of nearly 30 sectarian killings in as many days!
The Nationalist Ardoyne area. (Author’s photo)
Scottish troops; possibly in Flax Street, Ardoyne. (Mark ‘C’)
The following day, there was absolutely no doubt about the motive and the perpetrators of the killers of a young RUC officer. Constable Paul Gray (20) and a colleague were helping keep a group of youths in check on the city walls in Londonderry. A nearby shop had been taken over by an IRA ASU and the members of staff were held hostage. Two shots were fired from an American Armalite and the policeman fell mortally wounded; he died at the scene and there was the customary jeering from the subhuman DYH (Derry Young Hooligans) as his lifeless body was removed. PIRA immediately claimed responsibility and a spokesman piously stated that the policeman was killed because of ‘… breaches of the cessation …’ and blamed searches and arrests by the security forces as their justification for the murder.
Eight days later, a UVF murder gang killed a PIRA member Francis Rice (17) in Rathfriland, Co Down as he walked in the direction of Castlewellan. At first it was thought that the killing was an act of random sectarian violence but it later transpired that the UVF (although the killing was claimed by the PAF) had known and had held him captive for a while before stabbing him to death. The statement by the PAF claimed that the killing was in direct retaliation for the shooting of Constable Gray in Londonderry. The families of both men were united in their grief and both exchanged letters of condolence. Francis Rice was only claimed as one of their own by PIRA some years after his death. Quite why they should delay adding his name to their roll of honour is beyond one’s comprehension.
Bomb blast in Belfast City Centre. (Mark ‘C’)
Three Catholic workers died at the hands of the UVF over a 48-hour period, in Belfast on 22/23 May as the Loyalists made separate attacks on their places of work or close to them. In the first incident, a UVF gang had clandestinely left a booby-trapped device on a building site at Glengormley in the northern suburbs of the city. The device, inside a vacuum flask had been left untouched on a pile of rubble for several days and then finally, curiosity got the better of one man, Gerald De-ath (31) a father of four children. He picked up the flask and, as he unscrewed the lid it exploded, killing him instantly.
The very next day, a UVF gang burst into a flat on Shore Road as workmen took a break from work. The men – a mixture of Catholics and Protestants – worked at a meat-packaging plant, in the Mount Vernon area, close to Belfast Lough and the Belfast-Larne/Belfast – Isle of Man ferry terminal. The armed gang singled out two Catholic workers, both brothers. John (29) and Thomas McEarlane (19) were both shot and died very quickly afterwards. The Protestant workers were left unharmed, but warned to keep quiet. One of the killers was William Hunter, a known UVF hitman; he was tried and convicted of the killing and released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. On 24 August, 2012, he went to Millisle, Co Down, doused himself in petrol and burned himself to death. The following is from the Belfast Telegraph of 30 August 2012: ‘More than 100 bouquets of flowers, tributes and passionate messages of grief have begun to wilt outside William Hunter’s workplace. But people still gathered on Tuesday to read the faded handwritten notes dedicated to ‘a true gentleman’, ‘a true friend’ and ‘a diamond in the rough’ that were pinned among the flags outside the gates of Asda supermarket on Belfast’s Shore Road. Newspapers have been inundated with sympathy noti
ces from people declaring how much they loved and will miss the 55-year-old father-of-one. The only reference to his past among these tributes is a message stating ‘Here lies a soldier’. Another reads: ‘Let he without sin cast the first stone.’
From the vast tributes, it would appear that there were two William Hunters. There was the UVF double killer who in May 1975 gunned down Catholic brothers John (21) and Thomas (19) McErlane in cold blood. And then there was the supermarket checkout worker and Linfield supporter whose horrific death evoked such a great outpouring of grief. In 1979 Hunter, then a notorious armed robber, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering the McErlanes. A judge described the murders as a ‘… dastardly attack …’ The young brothers were shot twice in the back of the head while playing cards with Protestant work colleagues at a flat in Mount Vernon.’
The INLA, despite the inclusion of the former PIRA psychopath Gerard ‘Dr Death’ Steenson in its ranks had, prior to 24 May, not attacked the security forces. That changed with a bombing attack at Maghera, Co Londonderry. A car which had been hijacked in the northern part of the county was abandoned at a club in Ballinahone, at Maghera. The town sits astride the junctions for the A6 from Londonderry to Belfast which later becomes the notorious Antrim Road and the A29 Coleraine road. An RUC patrol of two officers examined the car, and finding nothing suspicious, decided that Constable Noel Saunderson Davies (22) would drive the car to the local police station. As the car was started, a hidden explosive booby-trap was triggered and the resulting explosion killed the young policeman instantly. The young officer left his wife of only two months, an equally young widow; he was the first member of the SF to be killed by the INLA or PLA as the IRSP was still claiming.
The terrorist attack was at first considered a PIRA action, but the device was actually the handiwork of INLA. Its parent group, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) had not officially admitted the existence of INLA and indeed, it would be around the turn of the New Year before it claimed responsibility for the murder of the newly married Constable.
The killing of Albert Ballentine (19), albeit tragic had a bizarre ring to it, as the victim had actually diarised his fears that he would be killed and named his eventual killers. Mr Ballentine lived at Gortin, Co Tyrone and knew both of his killers, who were members of the UVF and suspected that they would try to kill him because of his tenuous connection with the UDA. On the 25th, the two UVF men drove him to Newtownstewart and forced him to lie on the ground. Despite a plea that he not be shot, he was hit in the head at very close range and died at the scene. His killers were jailed, not only for the cowardly murder of Ballentine but also for another attempted sectarian murder the previous week.
Two days later, the UVF continued their apparent quest to kill every single Catholic in the Province when they targeted a Catholic building contractor, Patrick O’Reilly (53) as he worked on a road-widening scheme in Co Fermanagh. Mr O’Reilly who had no Republican or other paramilitary ties was working at a spot close to Irvinestown when a UVF murder gang sprayed his lorry with machine-gun fire, killing him instantly.
The month ended with the death from wounds of Gerard McClenaghan (36) who was badly wounded by the UVF when they bungled an assassination attempt on OIRA Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding in a bar on Leeson Street, Belfast, back in March.
May had ended, and although not as bloody as the previous month of April, the UVF had been to the fore of the killing as the senseless, obscene sectarian killings continued, seemingly unabated. In all, 11 people had died; of these, one was a British soldier, two were RUC, both killed by Republicans. Six were innocent civilians including five Catholics, and one Protestant. One Republican had been killed and one Loyalist paramilitary. The UVF were responsible for six of the 11 deaths that month.
6
June
On the first day of the month, the IRA – supposedly on a ceasefire – tried to kill a part-time member of the UDR and planted an explosive booby-trap at what their Int section believed to be his address. The house at Garrison, Co Fermanagh had been vacated some weeks previously and the new occupant, Margaret Kilfedder (60) was killed when a delayed-action device exploded as Mrs. Kilfedder and her husband slept, shortly after moving in. With a tragic irony, they had left Belfast to escape the Troubles.
Forty eight hours later, PIRA killed three men who had been across the border to a dog show; one of the three men was an off-duty UDR soldier and the other two were ordinary civilians, albeit Protestants who may have been the victims of a sectarian attack. Sergeant Alfie Doyle (24) an 11UDR soldier from Portadown, a father-to-be and two friends, neither of whom were military, had just crossed the Irish border in the Newry, Co Down area. It is thought that they were waved down at an IRA VCP – another motorist had been waved through and he was convinced that it wasn’t the British Army – and then sprayed with indiscriminate machine gun. Around 60 shots were fired at the three men and two were killed instantly with a third dying in hospital. Sergeant Doyle’s friends were John Preshaw (34) and David Thompson (also 34) and were known dog enthusiasts in the Armagh area. The IRA murder unit may have targeted Sergeant Doyle and killed the others, either mistakenly because they thought that they might be fellow UDR, or simply to eliminate any witnesses.
On 5 June, the ongoing feud between the IRSP/INLA and the Official IRA (OIRA) claimed its fifth victim, when Brendan McNamee (24) was shot and killed at Stewartstown Road, Belfast. McNamee was a member of INLA and as he stood outside a mobile shop, he was shot several times by an OIRA gunman and died at the scene. He was a known associate of ‘Dr Death’ Steenson and it is thought that he may have been present when Steenson killed OIRA Chief Of Staff, Billy McMillen. [See Chapter 4] Apparently, the OIRA man’s murder was unauthorised and was condemned by the INLA/IRSP leader Seamus Costello. Despite this, the OIRA tried to kill Costello on 9 May 1975 and eventually killed him two years later, in Dublin. [See Chapter 34]
On the very same day, a PIRA unit made what was undisputedly a sectarian attack on a Protestant-owned pub with an exclusively Protestant-clientele at Bessbrook, Co Armagh. Before describing the death which occurred here at Bessbrook and another attack by PIRA, five days later, the author invites the reader to fully peruse the following statement by the same organisation. ‘The Republican movement has never embarked on a course of tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations. It has never engaged in killing people solely as a result of their religion.’ (Source: Republican News, June 14, 1975).
When one examines the deaths which involved PIRA from 5-10 June, one is simply staggered by the hypocritical cant of this organisation.
In the early evening of the day in question, a PIRA ASU – still on ceasefire – made a bomb attack on the ‘Pit Bar’ at Bessbrook, close to the Army/RUC base at Bessbrook Mill. Francis Jordan (21) threw a bomb at the pub from a car which then roared off; unluckily for him, a passing mobile Army patrol observed the incident and attempted to stop the fleeing car. The two occupants opened fire at the soldiers who, under ROE, returned fire and hit the car several times. The car raced off but crashed shortly afterwards and the two IRA men ran off in separate directions. Soldiers opened fire and hit Jordan, fatally wounding him. The other man disappeared into the Armagh countryside. Described in Sinn Fein obituaries as a ‘Staff Captain’ the bomber died later that day in hospital. It is indeed remarkable that having been hit several times by 7.62mm rounds that he was still alive when the soldiers found him wounded. Soldiers at the scene gave him medical aid and one wonders how many times PIRA/INLA did the same for a wounded soldier?
Cumann na mBan (women’s IRA) mural, Crocus Street, Belfast. (Author’s photo)
Cumann na mBan (women’s IRA) mural, Ballymurphy Estate. (Author’s photo)
On the 9th, in what was an openly sectarian attack, a car hijacked in a Republican stronghold and driven by a PIRA murder gang entered the Protestant area of Woodvale in North Belfast. Woodvale is to the west of the Loyalist Shankill and is the interface with the New Barnsley
and Ballymurphy areas; both fiercely Republican. Kenneth Conway (20) was thought to have been waiting for a lift as he stood on the corner of Woodvale Road and Glendale Street, close to Ballygomartin Road which leads directly to New Barnsley/Ballymurphy. In short, a quick drive in and then back out of the Loyalist area for a PIRA murder gang. Mr Conway was an innocent Protestant and he was gunned down and mortally wounded; he died in hospital two days later.
On the 10th, in what was a third sectarian attack by the pious Provisionals, gunmen entered a shop on the Upper Crumlin Road, owned by a Protestant family. In front of his 16 year-old daughter, the gunmen forced Robert Suitters – who had no paramilitary links – to kneel on the floor. Mr Suitters was known to be a pigeon fancier and had no strong sectarian views; according to his daughter who survived, her father thought that he was about to be robbed and asked them to take the money and not to hurt his daughter. Instead they shot him three times and then fired a final round into his head from close range before fleeing the shop. The murderers roared off in a stolen car which had earlier been hijacked in the Republican Ardoyne and was later dumped there after the killing. If the reader will indulge the author, please re-read the statement made in the Republican News and consider the hypocrisy and hollowness of the following words: The Republican movement has never embarked on a course of tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations. It has never engaged in killing people solely as a result of their religion.’
In between the three sectarian attacks by the non-sectarian PIRA (author’s own italics) a British soldier was involved in an RTA in the Province on the 9th. Gunner Geoffrey Jones (20) who was from the Wirral, Merseyside died in the accident. His funeral was held at Landican Crematorium in Merseyside. The author can find no other details.
