The relationship was very volatile, reflecting the times in Belfast then. Their lives were chaotic. One time, Sean took me and Billy out and we broke into a sports shop, stealing a load of sports equipment and other bits and pieces that we planned to sell and raise some funds for glue and beer. We stashed this in Sean’s place along Manor Street and thought we’d got clean away with it – that is, until the police turned up about an hour after we’d arrived home. We heard later that an undercover army surveillance team was keeping watch on a noted ‘Provie’ in a house nearby and, seeing us bringing home our loot, had immediately called the cops. We were lucky to get off with a warning.
A small damp terraced house in the middle of a conflict zone was hardly the place to raise a child and so Lizzy eventually came back to Glencairn, where a council flat was provided for her. Despite the warnings, Sean’s visits to the estate continued and soon the UDA found out. Lizzy received a personal message that spelled out, in no uncertain terms, that there would be trouble if Sean was seen around the estate again. You’d have thought that a paramilitary threat would’ve been enough to put anyone off visiting enemy territory, but it didn’t seem to stop Sean – hence the knock at the door.
He opened it, and on the step stood a group of five lads, no older than about eighteen or nineteen. A hard-faced boy with an evil-looking scar running down his cheek was at the front of the group, announcing himself as the boss. We knew who he was, of course: Macky, the unofficial leader of the younger UDA members across the estate, and he had close contact with more senior commanders.
‘Hi, Sean,’ he said. ‘We heard you were here . . . again. We want a word.’
Pushing Sean back through the hall, the gang entered the maisonette and slammed the door shut.
‘Ach, come on fellas,’ Lizzy protested, ‘he’s only after seein’ the we’an. He’s making no trouble. Let him off, and I’ll promise he won’t come back again.’
‘I’m sorry, Lizzy,’ Macky said, looking guilty, ‘but you can’t say you wasn’t warned. We’re gonna give him a bit of a kicking, like it or not. Maybe you should go in the kitchen.’
We did as we were told. We shut the door and sat at the rickety kitchen table and, silently, listened to Sean getting the hiding of his life. Luckily for him, they’d come with no weapons: no baseball bats, sticks, knuckledusters or nunchakus. No firearms, either. Yet it could easily have come to that had the senior UDA men wished it.
Even so, the sound of fists and boots connecting with flesh was nauseating. Sean seemed to be pinging off every badly constructed wall. I hoped he wouldn’t try to resist, because if he did it would be much worse for him. We could hear sectarian insults raining upon him as heavily as the blows he was taking.
‘Fuckin’ Taig!’
‘Bog-trotter bastard!’
‘Fenian cunt!’
After fifteen long minutes the violence stopped. The kitchen door opened and Macky’s head popped round it. ‘We’re done,’ he said. ‘Sorry about the mess, Lizzy. And sorry about Sean. You know, he’s probably the best thing that ever happened to you . . .’
We stood open-mouthed. Did Macky just say that? Yes he did, and meant it too. But such was the state of Northern Ireland that any personal feelings had to be put aside in pursuit of the war. It was a brutal country, with no room for empathy of any sort, and Catholics were our mortal enemies.
The attackers left and we watched out of the kitchen window as a battered Sean fled down the hill, across a field and out of the estate, his yellow puffa jacket now streaked red with his own blood.
‘I guess that’s the end of him,’ said Lizzy. ‘Hopefully he’s not dumb enough to come back again.’
‘Hope not,’ I replied. ‘Because next time he’s a dead man, for sure.’
It was just another night on a bleak Belfast estate. Beatings were nothing new; I’d heard and seen enough of them already to last me a lifetime. Most people hated the thought of it – though there were plenty of psychopaths in both camps who relished violence for violence’s sake – but it was just part of everyday existence, along with everything else. We endured, not enjoyed, the situation.
CHAPTER 10
M
id-November 1982: I sat bolt up in bed, jerked out of a deep sleep by the fusillade of cracks that had just sounded a few yards from where I was staying in Glencairn. We were used to hearing gunshots, of course, but they’d only ever come from the various boundaries between the Shankill and Falls roads, unless it was a local punishment shooting.
Instinct told me not to look out of the bedroom window immediately. The gunman, or gunmen, might still be around and take a pot-shot at you for being nosey. You might also get fingered as a witness, leading to unwelcome visits from the RUC or army. The worst thing would be to be known as a ‘tout’, or an informer, which would put you in severe danger of a beating or of death at the hands of the paramilitaries.
Within thirty seconds of the shots I heard the squeal of tyres as a getaway vehicle left the estate at high speed. Now it was safe to look. I ran to the window and peered round the edge of my thin curtains. Already, people were leaving their homes and running towards a white Rover car that had stopped at the back of some homes on Forthriver Road, a couple of streets across from my flat. Its engine was running and the car’s headlights were on. Even at fifty yards I could see that its windows were shattered and bullets had torn through the bodywork. Instinctively, I knew that in the car were the bloodied remains of some poor individual targeted for whatever reason – a Catholic, a Protestant, a policeman or a soldier, or just an innocent civilian caught up in the kind of inter-paramilitary feuds that happened all the time around here.
Without hesitation I threw on a T-shirt, jeans and a coat, and ran out of the back door to join the rest of the mob now milling around the car. Incidents like this always provoked a ghoulish fascination among those living close by, myself included, and like the others I’d never think twice about getting a closer look. It was just part and parcel of the horrific obsession with terrorism, death and destruction that was a living nightmare for everyone in Northern Ireland, particularly those of us trapped in the estates around Belfast and Londonderry.
As I got nearer the car, I could see the form of a dark-haired figure slumped half-in, half-out of the driver’s door. He (I assumed it was a ‘he’, but at that moment it was hard to tell) was covered in blood, which was pouring from his body on to the pavement. The distant wail of sirens coming our way heralded the fact that someone had called the emergency services. Within minutes they would surround the place, forcing us all back behind the barriers as they carried out their investigations before removing body and vehicle.
For now, though, we were free to get up as close as we liked. I’d seen bodies before but nothing ever prepares you for the sight of a freshly murdered man shot to death by high-velocity weapons. His head hung low and the blood that was flowing from his nose and mouth made him look like he was weeping thick red tears. I recognised a couple of leading UDA men who were milling around the Rover. They looked extremely serious as they muttered among themselves. Here and there, a bystander would come up to the men, have a word, take a look at the body and walk away. There seemed to be no anger, no outrage – the atmosphere was weirdly calm, in a way you wouldn’t expect from something that had all the hallmarks of a Provie ‘hit’. I knew one of the younger lads now engaged in conversation with a paramilitary and when he’d finished I sidled over to him and led him to a quiet spot out of earshot of anyone else.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ I said. ‘Who’s the dead man? Why’s everyone acting so normal?’
The lad looked around to see if anyone was listening to us. ‘Promise to shut yer hole,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell ye . . .’
I nodded, and he leant his mouth toward my right ear. ‘It’s Murphy,’ he said. ‘You know . . . the Butcher?’
My eyes widened and I turned around to look at the dead man in the car. The black curly hair, the slight frame, the flashy
gold necklace. It was him, all right. I’d seen him many times around the Shankill and Glencairn . . . Lenny Murphy, the leader of the notorious Shankill Butchers, who’d kidnapped and tortured both Catholics and Protestants and regularly dumped the bodies by our house and the community centre. The gang that invaded my nightmares as a young boy and were forever only spoken of in whispers. We all knew that Murphy had been released from jail earlier in the year. The paramilitary bosses expected him to be a good boy from then on, but rumour had it that he’d resumed his campaign of torture and death. Now he was the victim and there was a long list of people who wanted him dead, Republican and Loyalists.
‘What the f—? How the fuck did . . .?’
Again, my pal leant in close to my ear. ‘The Provies done him,’ he said.
‘Dead on,’ I said with sarcasm. ‘How could they get up here and away without being spotted?’
The lad shrugged before melting away into the crowd. Clearly, he wanted to say more but didn’t dare. I was amazed. Paramilitaries were constantly posted on lookout right across Glencairn. In the old days my dad had been one of those doing this job for the UDA. No one came into and left this estate without their knowledge. If the IRA had done it, they were either suicidally brave or those lookouts had, for some reason, not been required to do their job this night. I’d heard mutterings of Murphy being a ‘bad animal’ and bringing shame on the Loyalist paramilitaries, especially when he made the mistake of killing Protestants. For years, Glencairn had been associated with the aftermath of the Butchers’ murders and although it wasn’t exactly the most salubrious place in Belfast, this kind of reputation brought dishonour on us all.
As the hours went by the story began to be pieced together. Lenny Murphy’s girlfriend lived on Glencairn and he regularly visited her. Glencairn being wholly Protestant, Murphy would’ve assumed he was safe, but clearly someone was watching his movements carefully. A day or so after the murder the IRA issued this statement:
‘Lenny Murphy (master butcher) has been responsible for the horrific murders of over twenty innocent nationalists in the Belfast area and a number of Protestants. The IRA has been aware for some time that since his release recently from prison, Murphy was attempting to re-establish a similar murder gang to which he led in the mid-seventies and, in fact, he was responsible for a number of the recent sectarian murders in the Belfast area. The IRA takes this opportunity to restate its policy of non-sectarian attacks, while retaining its right to take unequivocal action against those who direct or motivate sectarian slaughter against the nationalist population.’
We all knew that an IRA ‘hit’ like this couldn’t have happened without help from the other side. No one would confirm that, of course. But neither did anyone deny it. Exactly what had gone on between Republicans and Loyalists was never fully explained, but it seemed very clear that the UDA and/ or UVF had wanted rid of Murphy and hadn’t wanted to do it themselves. Rumours circulated about the Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries joining forces to get rid of a mutual problem, and the rumours persist to this day.
All I could think was ‘good riddance’.
Meanwhile, the authorities were hoping that us Protestant kids would find ways of meeting and collaborating with our Catholic counterparts in a far less violent way. The powers that be felt that if Us and Them worked together, we would find that we were all the same under the skin. As ever, it was a typically simplistic government approach to a very complicated problem and those of us who’d left school without any qualifications were to be the guinea pigs.
Anyone who was a teen in the early 1980s will remember the dreaded YTS – the Youth Training Scheme. If you weren’t going to college and hadn’t got a full-time job, you were forced to go on one of these things. They weren’t much more than cheap labour in low-skilled occupations, and in Northern Ireland we had the added pleasure of being forced to work alongside the enemy in the hope that we’d all put down the bricks, bottles and bullets and become best friends forever. As if . . .
Reluctantly, I signed up for such a scheme based on the Crumlin Road, just down from the Ardoyne. I was told that Catholic boys would be attending this too, but I had no choice – it was either this or go without money. By now I’d had a few non-violent brushes with Catholics – Fiona in the hospital and Lizzy’s ex-boyfriend Sean – and they hadn’t turned out to be as bad as I’d been led to believe, or have horns and be smelly. True, I was still going down to the Crumlin Road/Ardoyne interface and enjoying a good riot. But this was kids’ stuff, even though we young rioters from either side didn’t quite realise that, little by little, we were being groomed into the clutches of the paramilitary organisations who ran most of the local youth clubs and discos.
Ironically, one of the YTS instructors was Davy Payne, a legendary leading UDA commander. By this time he’d left the UDA, the result of some feud or other, and had set himself up as a community worker advocating cooperation between Protestants and Catholics. However, his reputation as a hard man who’d allegedly tortured and killed a number of people went before him. It’s hard to believe that he was put in charge of a bunch of Catholics, given his deep-rooted hatred of them, but those were the crazy times we all lived in. I used to think he was an easy target for an IRA hit squad from Ardoyne bent on revenge and I’m sure it must have crossed his mind too.
My job involved painting various places, including the Maze racecourse and a Catholic chapel up near Ardoyne. Us Prods found it weird being in there and some wrote Loyalist graffiti on the walls. Given it was wintertime, the cold and rain seeped into my bones and each day felt like eight hours of sheer misery. A bus took us, Protestants and Catholics, out to the workplace and we were all pissed off by the work and the freezing conditions. One time we drove past a group of Catholic lads standing on a street corner, who immediately began to hurl stones at the bus when we stopped at a traffic light. Maybe they’d spotted my Union Jack shirt, which I wore constantly as part of my new identity as a Mod. In any case, the Catholics on the bus took immediate offence, shouting and screaming for the lads on the corner to pack it in. We Protestants had a laugh that our Catholic colleagues were getting a wee taste of their own medicine.
We got on with the Catholics on a superficial level but deeper down there was still a huge amount of suspicion, fear and downright hatred on both sides. One of my Catholic colleagues was a lad by the name of Begley, and many years later I learned he was the brother of Thomas Begley, the IRA man who in 1993 walked into Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road carrying a bomb. It exploded, killing him, a UDA member and eight members of the public, injuring dozens of others – an outrage that still causes pain on the Shankill. I knew many of those victims from Glencairn, school and the surrounding areas.
I also knew that not all these Catholic boys were bad. I knew they weren’t all terrorists or at least supporters of the IRA. There were many good kids among us. Although I still didn’t dare speak a word about it, the idea that I was part-Catholic wasn’t as terrible to me as it once had been. I could see that all of us living in West and North Belfast, Catholics and Protestants alike, were just trying to exist amid brutal and dangerous conditions. We were all human. I realised I didn’t hate Catholics – I just hated the paramilitaries who acted in their name and killed innocent Protestant and Catholic people alike. And for that reason, plus my family’s UDA links, it was inevitable that I would get swept into the tide of active sectarianism. At seventeen, I was exactly the right age to be groomed, and one incident convinced me that I should lay my cards on the table and do what I saw as the right thing by Loyalism.
One night, as usual, I was in the nearby park with Billy, glue-sniffing our heads off. A gang of boys our age were hanging about nearby, some of whom were junior members of the UVF. This must have been during one of the frequent feuding periods with the UDA because the boys wandered over, making threatening gestures and accusing us of being from the rival group. Within seconds this turned to a scuffle; blows and insults were exchanged
but the fight dissipated as quickly as it had started.
That wasn’t the end. Billy had taken a blow to the nose and no way were we going to let that go. Discreetly, we observed the gang mooch off, the leader now with a similarly aged girl in tow. We followed them, then diverted off the path and sneaked behind a tree, waiting for him to come past. When he did, we jumped out and gave him a digging he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. The girl ran off squealing as we piled into her boyfriend. Leaving him in a heap we ran off laughing. I went home, locked the door and cracked open a can of lager and a new bag of glue, pleased that I’d got one up on that little UVF piece of shite.
My triumph wasn’t to last. A couple of hours later there were a series of loud bangs on the door. I tried to ignore it, reassuring myself that it was locked. But I knew that wouldn’t stop them. If I didn’t answer they’d kick it through.
‘Don’t even think o’ fighting back, you wee fucker,’ snarled the leader as the gang pushed their way in. They forced me back into my living room and, with fists, feet and baseball bats, gave me the hiding of my life. I knew them all, and they were good Loyalist boys just like me. I’d been to school with most of them. That didn’t stop them smashing my arm and leaving me feeling that every other bone in my body was broken too. I was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital in town, the place I’d spent so much time in during my childhood, to be fixed up by doctors who treated similar paramilitary-related injuries on a daily basis.
I was in for a few days, and during my stay I had a visit from a male relative with close connections to the UDA.
‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘What have ye learned from this?’
‘That I shouldn’t pick on UVF boys?’
He laughed. ‘Aye, maybe. But more than that – do you not think it’s time you had some protection?’
‘Huh?’
A Belfast Child Page 12