Conference tallis::celt

1051.0. "British Misinformation -- Deceiving the Public" by EPIK::HOLOHAN () Thu May 07 1992 13:35

   British Misinformation -- Deceiving the Public
        by Stephanie Finucane

 20 years ago one of the worst bombings in northern Ireland occurred in a
nationalist bar in Belfast called McGurk's.  How the British government
and media blindly pinned responsibility on the IRA, while disregarding
the UVF's (Ulster Volunteer Force) numerous calls to newsrooms to claim
responsibility, is just another example of Britain's efforts to
purposely mislead the public around the world.

 It was an early evening in December 1971 when people from the area
gathered in McGurk's bar on North Queen's Street.  In one of the small
rooms above the bar, the bar owner's son and two other teenage boys
played a bar football game.  In the attached rooms of the family's flat,
Mrs. Philomena McGurk and 13-year old daughter Maria sat in the living
room.  At that time, Joseph McClory, and 8-year old newspaper boy,
approached the pub in order to sell his last few papers and saw a big
black car with 4 men inside pull up outside the bar.  One man got out
and carried a brown grocery box.

 "I saw that there was a wire sticking out of the box ... and he placed
(the box) at the front of the bar and got back into the car,"  McClory
later said (Andersonstown News, 14/12/91).

 This grocery box exploded at 8:40 that night, killing fifteen people in
the bar,  including one of the boys playing bar football, and Philomena
and Maria McGurk.  Two other people in the bar died shortly afterwards
due to injuries received from the bombing.

 Although the loyalist group, the UVF, openly claimed responsibility for
the bombing, the morning newspapers "carried the official RUC line - one
that was to be maintained right up to the jailing of a UVF man for the
killings in 1978: 'The bar - possibly without knowledge of the
proprietor - was a known pick-up point for bombers who planned a
wrecking expedition that night" (Andersonstown News, 14/12/91). In other
words, the public was purposely being mislead to believe that the bomb
was and IRA bomb that accidently went off in transit.  How else could
the RUC maintain that the IRA would bomb their own?

 Even at Stormont UVF responsibility was denied: The Minister of State
for Home Affairs, John Taylor, threw out the argument that the UVF was
behind the bombing.  

 Sadly enough, while the British state and media coldly protected the
real bombers, mourners attended fifteen funerals over that Tuesday and
Wednesday, doubtful that the truth would ever get out.