Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Details of Troubles deaths remain grimly relevant

Fionnuala O Connor
Fionnuala O Connor Fionnuala O Connor

"During a remand hearing, the accused man wept. He was said to have told police: ‘I was just made to drive the motor, that is all'.’’

As we come out of a fortnight-long carnival of celebrity, with some touching reflection, the detail of deaths inflicted for supposedly political cause is grimly relevant. It has left marks that few see, and even fewer want to remember.

The ‘accused man’ admitted manslaughter after a murder charge was dropped.

The ‘manslaughter’ was of a 65-year-old Protestant woman, in the mainly Protestant small town near his home in the predominantly Catholic surrounding countryside.

The 65-year-old was unable to escape her upstairs flat before an IRA van-bomb exploded outside a shop, starting a fire. The flat was above the shop.

After a phone warning, police led the woman’s husband to safety but hadn’t time to help her. Her body was found in the charred ruins of the building. At her funeral she was said to have spent her life working at the local hospital.

This was 51 years ago, in April 1972, the year of the highest number of Troubles deaths, when Conservative prime minister Ted Heath closed Stormont down because the unionist government refused to give up control of law and order.

The man who wept also pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of a reserve policeman. He was jailed for 10 years.

In the spirit of Lost Lives from which I take details of Troubles deaths, I haven’t named the woman who died because noting that the small town and the countryside around it were respectively largely Protestant and largely Catholic is my doing.

It led in my head to an angry question. What did the Provos think they were doing, leaving that bomb? How could the anger and grief that explosion caused, and others like it, do anything other than feed bitterness?

Couldn’t they see it only increased the furious unionist determination that the IRA would not bomb them into a united Ireland? (These were people from my community, who justified violence because politics was skewed against them. As a journalist from 1973 onwards I asked these questions, often, to little effect.)

And what did the violence do to those who shot and bombed?

No, I don’t think I did ask that last question. It was only as the decades went by that damage to the ‘volunteers’ became too obvious to stay hidden within the republican ‘base’.

The pace of killing in 1972 quickened, Lost Lives recorded, because of political activity and confusion. "Both republican and loyalist paramilitaries believed they sensed a British will to disengage from Northern Ireland, and consequently increased their violence."

Britain did not disengage. Instead a British government, at a loss for what to do, shut down Stormont and imposed direct rule.

The late Éamon Phoenix also chronicled the Troubles day by day from Irish News files. His summary of the week that the Provos bombed Ballymoney said: "The no-warning shooting of leading Official IRA man Joe McCann by Paras heralded a week of tragic events. As both wings of the IRA came under enormous pressure to stand down, the Provisionals responded by intensifying their bombing..."

Gunmen in Newry wounded a security man "before planting a bomb which severely damaged the rural council offices. In Ballymoney a 65-year-old woman died..."

Then the headline: Paisley calls for Total Integration. 'Rev Ian Paisley blamed attitudes and actions of Unionist MPs at Stormont and Westminster for the introduction of direct rule. Stormont had gone, not because of anything their enemies had done but because of the hypocrisy of the Unionist Party. It had totally failed the loyalists.'

"Stormont will never be back as it was and our only hope is total and absolute integration in the UK.’

Inside two months he became Westminster MP for North Antrim, the seat bequeathed to his son. The Troubles were good to some.