Opinion

Truth at last for Ballymurphy families

It has taken fifty long, painful and frustrating years but finally, a judge has declared - loudly and publicly - that the ten people shot dead in Ballymurphy over a bloody 36 hour period in 1971 were `entirely innocent of wrongdoing'.

The findings of presiding coroner Mrs Justice Siobhan Keegan yesterday provided full vindication for the families of the dead. They knew their loved ones had done nothing wrong. Now the world knows.

It was not just the fact that British paratroopers had opened fire on these fathers, sons and brothers, a mother of eight and a Catholic priest, taking their lives and devastating their families.

It was that they had also taken their good names, their reputations besmirched by the false smear that they were in the IRA or carrying guns and ammunition.

For years, some of the families felt unable to talk about their loss.

Eileen McKeown, daughter of Joseph Corr, said: ''People just presumed that they were guilty because of what was put out in the media and what the Army said."

Maura McGee, daughter of Joan Connolly, said the family often said her mother had died in a car crash due to the unfounded allegation that she was a gun woman.

This was an unimaginable and completely unjustified burden on the relatives of the dead.

The trauma of that terrible period in August 1971 was widely felt. In all, 57 children lost a parent in Ballymurphy over those dreadful three days.

For decades, the families suffered in silence, huddled in their own grief.

It was only in 1998, at a conference on the forgotten victims of the troubles in St Mary's University College, that relatives of the Ballymurphy victims found each other, almost by chance, and the campaign for the truth began.

More than 20 difficult years later, they have the truth although it has come too late for the family members who have sadly passed away in the past five decades.

The truth about what happened in Ballymurphy has come out thanks to the legacy inquests which have been too long delayed but which provide a legally-based means of hearing evidence.

Those in the British government who wish to draw a line under legacy cases and the prosecution of soldiers, should listen to the stories of the Ballymurphy families, people denied an investigation or criminal process and realise what it means to have a court clear the names of innocent victims.

That they had to wait fifty years is an absolute scandal.