by Ken Wharton
It was now late on in the month – winter was approaching and the nights were drawing in as the temperatures began to plummet. Four Catholics had been slain by Loyalists in the six days since the Frizzell’s outrage; more were about to die, although they were to be joined in the mortuaries by more Protestants. Friday evening arrived in the Slopes area of Co. Armagh, some 12 miles away from Portadown. Gerard Cairns (22) and his younger brother Rory (18) lived in Bleary, not far from Lough Neagh; it is in the middle of what was known as ‘the murder triangle’. This was the area in which Robin ‘The Jackal’ Jackson’s Mid-Ulster Brigade of the UVF killed so many members of the Catholic faith. On the evening of the 29th, a murder gang arrived in a stolen car outside the home that the Cairns brothers shared with their family, including a younger sister, Roisin, aged 11. It was 20.00 hours, already dark, as the brothers were helping their sister celebrate her birthday, when the murder gang entered the rear of the house through an unlocked door.
Andersonstown cleansing depot, site of a UFF attack on Catholic workmen in 1993.
The boys – watching television – were taken completely by surprise as the masked men entered the living room, barging the little girl out of the way, weapons pointing directly at the two young men. It was a hallmark of both the UVF and the UFF that few if any words were spoken at the moment of attack, with killers such as ‘Top Gun’ McKeag preferring to keep his mouth closed until after the shooting, singing and chatting his head off only after he made his exit. Wordlessly, the gunmen opened fire, hitting both boys in the head and chest; they died at the scene. The gunmen escaped in the direction of Portadown; their deed done, now the next bloody step was down to their ‘sister’ organisation, the UFF.
GREYSTEEL MASSACRE
Greysteel is a township that nestles on Co. Londonderry’s coastline at the bottom of Lough Foyle, close to the city of Londonderry itself. Set back a little from the main A2 road is Killylane Road; today there sits an empty grey-coloured one-storey building. Its colour is matched by the mood that prevails over this once bustling pub that faces obliquely towards the cold waters of the Foyle; beyond that are only the unwelcoming waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. When the author visited several years ago, the atmosphere was sombre and quiet, but back on one fateful Saturday evening in October 1993, it rang with laughter, with music and the clink of beer glasses. That is until it echoed with the crash of a Czech-manufactured VZ-58 (like the AK-47, firing a high-velocity 7.62mm round at a chilling muzzle velocity of 2,313ft per second) and the screams of the innocents. At first, as the festivities got under way, the guests were celebrating Halloween as well as the engagement of Karen Thompson (19) from Limavady and her fiancé, Steven Mullan (20). Soon the only sounds would be the crunch of broken glass and the low moans of the shocked and wounded patrons; the dead and dying made no sounds whatsoever.
That grey, empty building was the Rising Sun pub and restaurant, a Catholic-frequented inn in a Catholic community, although several Protestants were, as usual, drinking there that fateful night. The author was told by a survivor, who did not wish to be named: ‘The pub was rocking on its foundations with laughter and music and dancing. There must have been at least a couple of hundred people in there that night, when these two fellows walked in, dressed in masks, carrying guns.’ The men were Stephen Irwin and Geoffrey Deeney from the North Antrim UFF; another man, Torrens Knight, stood at the door armed with a double-barrelled shotgun; a fourth man waited outside in a stolen Opel Kadett. Irwin called out, ‘Trick or treat?’ Some of the revellers thought that it was funny – that the guns were fake – but bride-to-be Karen Thompson thought it inappropriate, telling them so. Irwin aimed the VZ-58 directly into the young woman’s face, before unleashing a burst of several rounds travelling at 705m per second; she was killed instantly. He then shot her fiancé, Steven. Irwin continued firing, aiming at the mass of panicked partygoers to kill or maim as many of them as possible.
The plan involved him emptying the thirty-round magazine before Deeney would then take up the attack with his 9mm Browning automatic, continuing the carnage. Irwin moved around the two bars, spraying the Czech weapon with a total indiscrimination, the staccato rattle being drowned out by the screams of the dying and those desperately seeking self-preservation. Suddenly the magazine was empty, prompting Deeney to then open fire; however, after just one round he had a stoppage. This setback did not deter Irwin, who calmly inserted another thirty-round magazine, re-cocking as Deeney attempted to clear his weapon. John Moyne (81), father of the pub’s owner, threw his wife to the floor but he was hit, fatally, protecting his wife from Irwin’s bullets; he died where he fell. John Burns (54), a former soldier, was on his way to the toilet when the shooting started, causing him to turn to face the gunmen; he was hit in the stomach and mortally wounded, dying shortly afterwards. His wife was also shot and badly wounded. Moira Duddy (59) was blasted in the legs before being killed with shots to her heart. John Moyne (50) was shot and killed as he too protected his wife. Joseph McDermott (60) was hit, dying almost immediately. Samuel Montgomery (76) was badly wounded, although he did not die from those wounds until the following April. Knight, meanwhile, was standing at the front door with a double-barrelled shotgun, which he was unable to use; indeed, had no need to use. Almost as soon as the firing had started, it suddenly stopped; as the echoes of the gunshots died down, the three killers ran outside, laughing and joking before speeding away in the stolen Opel.
Seven people were dead, with an eighth dying sometime later; six of the dead were Catholics, with the sole Protestant death being that of John Burns; Mr Montgomery was also a Protestant. A total of nineteen people had been hit that night from the forty-seven rounds that were fired by Irwin and Deeney. Only eleven would survive the carnage that left the pub’s floor slippery with blood and scattered with broken glass and wrecked furniture. One of the wounded women who was shot and injured along with her mother in the Greysteel massacre was still being treated for her injuries at the time of writing, in 2018, some twenty-five years after the attack. Lorraine Murray was shot in the arm and her mother, Mary McKeever, in the stomach. In the meantime, the gang escaped in the Opel, meeting another UFF member, Brian McNeill, at nearby Eglington, where the Kadett was set alight as they escaped southwards in a second stolen car.
On the Monday morning, the Daily Express front page had a poignant photograph of Karen Thompson and her fiancé Steven Gerard, both killed in the Rising Sun attack. The headlines were: ‘Couple who planned to Marry will now be buried together after Massacre at Pub.’ The headline also included the words of a young woman who had left a card among the floral tributes outside the pub: ‘God Might Forgive. We Cannot.’ The report read:
They were a devoted young couple with everything to live for. Now they are set to be buried together. [They] were among the seven victims of Ulster’s Hallowe’en massacre. Karen’s father found her bullet-riddled body when he stopped to help in the carnage of the Rising Sun pub at Greysteel, Co. Londonderry. Her weeping mother is a Protestant like the killers. The tragic sweethearts had planned to marry next April. A spokesman for the RUC referred to the UFF gang as ‘... scum of the earth,’ stating also: ‘They have a bloodlust and appear to be psychotic killers.’
One survivor also told the newspaper: ‘It was pandemonium, everybody was screaming. It was all over in two minutes, just two minutes, four bursts of machine-gun fire, all over, seven people dead, two minutes is all it took.’ Jim Moore, the bar’s owner, said, ‘I thought it was a few bangers being let off because it was Halloween. It was carnage and panic. People were lying dead all over the place. I saw my father first, then a young girl, then all the others. I know my father is dead, but I want no revenge for it. I am not bitter. I was never a bitter person.’ Fourteen children were left without a parent because of the attack.
The UDA/UFF swiftly made a statement about the handiwork of Irwin, Knight and Deeney: ‘This is the continuation of our threats against the Nationalist electorate that they wou
ld pay a heavy price for last Saturday’s slaughter of nine Protestants.’ The killers were caught: Torrens Knight was convicted – along with three others – for the killings, he served seven years in the Maze Prison before his release in 2000 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. Stephen Irwin pleaded guilty to the killings and was given eight life sentences but was also later released under the Good Friday Agreement; in 2005 he was jailed again for four years for knifing a football fan. Jeffrey Deeney also received a life sentence for his part in the shootings but he too was released from prison under the same terms. Deeney has since publicly stated that he ‘... felt dejected that his gun had jammed ...’ during the shootings in which seven people were killed while enjoying a Halloween party in the Greysteel pub. Deeney, one of two gunmen who opened fire in the bar, said he did not believe the attack was right but that it ‘... had to be done ...’ in retaliation for the bombing of a Shankill fish shop a week earlier which killed ten people including the IRA bomber.* The day after, the Provisionals shot and fatally wounded an RUC officer in Newry, Co. Down. A snap VCP was set up in Upper Edward Street, close to Monaghan Row and the Royal Mail depot. It was also close to the overworked Daisy Hill Hospital but, equally, only a short ten-minute walk away from the belligerent and fiercely Nationalist Derrybeg estate. As the final remnants of an interdenominational service for peace in Market Square were fading away, a PIRA gunman, lying full stretch in a hatchback car, fired a single shot with a high-velocity rifle that hit RUCR Constable Brian Woods (30) in his neck while he was on traffic duty. He fell, fatally wounded, as his comrades tried to return fire at the gunman; he was rushed to the nearby hospital, where medical teams fought for almost two days to save his life. He sadly died from his injuries on 2 November.
October 1993 was one of the worst months of the Troubles; while it was not on the scale of July 1972, when the Provisionals’ blood lust and killing rage reached a never-to-be-repeated zenith, it stands out for the carnage at Frizzell’s, West Belfast cleansing department and the Rising Sun in Greysteel. Deaths would only once more surpass the levels of this month when twenty-nine people were killed, with 93 per cent of them (twenty-seven) being overtly sectarian in nature. During this month, the Provisional IRA killed twelve of the victims; the Loyalists killed seventeen. The death toll from the Omagh bomb in August 1998 equalled the October 1993 fatalities.
There were several other tragic incidents before the fighting was over, such as the World Cup massacre at Loughinisland in 1994, and the Omagh bomb in 1998, but this violent period of late 1993 was never repeated with such frequency. Sectarian murders continued and would do so right until the end, and at times it did appear that the violence had been put on hold, suspended even, ready to spark back into life at a given signal. Over the course of the next five or so years, only three more soldiers would die as a direct cause of terrorist action. However, a surprisingly high number of RUC officers would die in this period; nine officers were killed by paramilitaries. There was a period of internal squabbling, score-settling and several drugs-related deaths, which were related in the sense that it was the demarcation lines between dealers that caused most of the deaths. In the period 1994–98, of 110 civilians killed by paramilitaries, Loyalists killed sixty-three and Republicans forty-seven. It was business as usual up until the end.
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* www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/greysteel-gunman-speaks-of-regret-that-more-didnt-die-28332020.html.
CHAPTER 15
FIFTY YEARS ON
The author was a young soldier when Northern Ireland first began to feature nightly on the BBC and ITV news programmes – an innocent boy of 18, with only a year or so of peacetime soldiering under his belt. Suddenly, places such as Belfast and Londonderry, names from barely remembered geography lessons at East Ardsley Secondary Modern School, were being mentioned regularly, with terms such as Catholic civil rights, sectarianism, violence and ambushes being the buzz words of the summer of 1968. Indeed, the author recalls having to look up the word ‘sectarian’ to fully understand that there was religious prejudice, not dissimilar to that I faced as a child when my parents made the unpopular and personally regrettable decision to become Jehovah’s Witnesses. From being a popular young boy, who loved Christmases and birthdays, I became a social pariah, able only to mix within the ‘faith’ and thus having my friends and contemporaries chosen for me, in a sort of ‘arranged marriage’. In 1968, the author was ‘all grown up’, listening to news interviews with Protestants and Catholics alike in Northern Ireland, both complaining of sectarian prejudice. All through the summer and the rest of the year, on into 1969, the news from this country over the Irish Sea, of which most people on the mainland had never heard, was thrusting itself onto a stage the size of the entire United Kingdom. People were dying, the police were under attack, violent rioting was tearing the entire country apart.
In early August, rumours were rife in the military community that the Labour Government would have no choice but to send us to reinforce the small garrisons that existed in Northern Ireland. Some said it would happen; others said that it couldn’t, and there were those who, like two previous generations – those of 1914 and 1939 – said that if it happened, ‘... it would be all over by Christmas’. Then, on 14/15 August, almost sixty years after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler’s Germany, British soldiers were on the streets of Belfast. As posterity has recorded, it wasn’t over by Christmas. Indeed, a further twenty-nine Christmases would elapse before the Good Friday Agreement made the country marginally at peace. In total, thirty-nine festivals of ‘peace and goodwill to all men’ would have passed before Operation Banner was declared over.
In 2008, the author went back to Northern Ireland for the first time since 1973; the years had passed so quickly: two divorces, another six children to add to my little girl at the time and three – now twelve – grandchildren to whom Northern Ireland probably meant as much to them as it did to me back in 1968 – absolutely nothing. I flew the short flight via EasyJet from Leeds Bradford airport over England’s north-west – Lancashire, the ‘dark side’ as I called it – and over the Isle of Man, then suddenly on the right was the constantly green fields of Ulster. My eyes filled with tears and I thanked God that I had a seat to myself and that no one could see them; how could I possibly explain them to someone who hadn’t a clue of just how emotional I was feeling? The Falls, Divis Street, New Lodge, Ardoyne, Tiger’s Bay and Short Strand – those traditional, terraced workers’ houses were still there. As were the Ballymurphy estate, Turf Lodge, Andersonstown and Twinbrook, the contrasting modern, post-war council housing estates. I do not profess to have intimate knowledge of every suburb in every mainland UK city, but trust that the following analogies will suffice for even the reader outside of my hometown of Leeds. I grew up in the terraced slums of Hunslet, a mirror image of the Falls, Ardoyne and New Lodge, etc.; I was then nurtured in the late 1950s council housing of the sprawling Swarcliffe and Seacroft estates, which in turn, were mirrors of the Turf Lodge and the ’Murph. Can the non-military reader now imagine that soldiers and policemen were being shot and blown up in their dozens in Sidey Street, Hunslet, or Dennil Road, Swarcliffe? Imagine soldiers being machine-gunned to death on the York Road, Leeds, as the three Green Jackets were on Crocus Street in 1982. When I look around Leeds or occasionally around Manchester, York, Liverpool and Newcastle, I find it so difficult to imagine a terrorist organisation, armed with largely American-financed weapons, being able to kill both police and soldiers with the same apparent impunity.
Can an Australian walking down Whiting Street on the Gold Coast, a Canadian strolling along Dominion Avenue in Midland, Ontario, or an American, jogging along East Seventh Street in Boston, Massachusetts, begin to comprehend what life was like in Northern Ireland during the Troubles? Perhaps that question is more germane to the residents of East Seventh Street, given that NORAID were very prominent among the vast Irish American community of
that city. A former Greenfinch wrote to me as I was finishing this book; she said, ‘Sadly, the brainwashed Americans unwittingly gave freely to this organisation in which Edward Kennedy had a big input. I also find it very sad and disturbing that these Americans still invite Adams and cronies to their St Patrick’s Day celebrations each year, whilst completely ignoring the fact that they were convicted terrorists.’
To explain to the citizens of the rest of the world what happened over at least twenty-nine of the last fifty years in that tiny country of 1.5 million people is impossible; for God’s sake, I have had great difficulty in explaining to the people of England, Scotland and Wales, let alone to the people of the USA or Australia. Can anyone not there even begin to comprehend what it is like for the former British serviceman or woman returning to that place of pain? One cannot even begin to imagine what it is like for these former UDR, Royal Irish or even RUC personnel who still have to live in these communities, seeing their former enemies on a possibly daily basis. Those who served and remain in Northern Ireland still live an uneasy life, looking over their shoulders and carrying out the embedded personal security checks; for some of them it never ends.