| Title: | Celt Notefile |
| Moderator: | TALLIS::DARCY |
| Created: | Wed Feb 19 1986 |
| Last Modified: | Tue Jun 03 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1632 |
| Total number of notes: | 20523 |
***********
DADDY, DON'T DIE;
Even if the IRA upholds a ceasefire, peace may come too late for many families
in Northern Ireland. On both sides of the sectarian divide, the children of
the dead live on with memories of bombs and slaughter. Half of them develop
symptoms of post-traumatic stress, including a fear of being alone, irritability
and restlessness, or cry for no apparent reason. Some of the Catholic children
who have witnessed the killings, like those pictured above, talked to Suzanne
Breen
The Guardian
December 17, 1993
The children's voices fall to a whisper as they recall the horrific
details of the night three months ago, when UDA gunmen sledgehammered their way
into the family's home. The six Edwards children have forgotten nothing: the
gunfire jolting them from sleep, their father sprawled across the bedroom floor,
the carpet crimson with his blood, and a big ugly bullet-hole scarring the bed.
"We just shouted 'Daddy, don't die, please don't die'," says Eileen, aged
15. "Mummy was crying and begging daddy to live," says Michael, aged 14. "I
heard the noise but I didn't know they'd shot my daddy," adds Emma, 4. "I
thought he was sick from eating too many sweets."
The children recount how they waited outside while medics battled to save
their father's life, how detectives ordered them not to touch anything in case
they destroyed forensic evidence, how they prayed that Mickey would live, and
how there were tears streaming down the face of the RUC officer who broke the
news that he had died.
Marie Edwards, aged 36, didn't hear the gunmen breaking down the front door
of her home in Finaghy, south Belfast, at midnight on August 31. "We just woke
up to find a masked man in the bedroom with a gun. He fired at Mickey, and
Mickey fell out of bed and he shot him again." The second attacker waited
on the landing.
Mickey Edwards was a working-class Catholic who had done well. He owned a
small shop on the Glen Road in west Belfast. He was not a member of any
paramilitary group or political party. He was killed simply because he was a
Catholic.
Emma was her father's blue-eyed girl. She knows he is dead but she can't
quite understand the implications. Curled up on her mother's knee, she
announces that she loves Mickey "more than anybody else in the world" and
that she needs to speak to him now.
"I saw a phone box when we were out shopping," she confides, "and I wanted
to ring my daddy in Heaven but mummy said I couldn't. God's a very bad man for
not letting me talk to my daddy." She pesters Marie for details about the
shooting which she has missed. "Was my daddy taken away in an ambulance? What
were the seats like? Did you hold his hand?" You can tell from the Communion
photograph on the mantelpiece that they were a happy family. Real warmth and
love shine through. And anyway, Emma lets the cat out of the bag. "My mummy and
daddy used to kiss each other in the back yard," she says, waving a stubby
finger in mock disapproval.
The children remember Mickey as a perfect father. "He'd work all day in the
shop but still sit up to 1am to help me with my maths homework," says Eileen.
The weekend before he died, he gave her money to go to the U2 concert in Dublin.
"Mummy complained a bit, but daddy just laughed and said: "Weren't we all young
once?" Michael and Katherine, aged 6, talk of trips to the seaside, learning to
play golf, camping holidays in Brittany, and plans for a visit to EuroDisney.
They cannot bear to think of Christmas.
They all have difficulty sleeping at night. Eileen has slept in her mother's
bedroom since the shooting. She keeps replaying the whole episode over and over
in her mind, "We all jump at the slightest sound at night," she says. "We know
that the gunmen probably won't come back, that bad things don't happen twice,
but the fear is always there, lurking at the back of our minds. No one has been
arrested for killing daddy."
Joseph, aged 13, has nightmares, and Marie often finds Michael crying alone
in his room. The children don't discuss the shooting with their friends, but
they do see a psychiatrist regularly. "The counselling doesn't really help much
though," says Michael. "Talking is too painful."
A few miles up the road from the Edwards' home, schoolgirls Frances and Aine
Armstrong conduct whirlwind tours of their house in Twinbrook. Visitors can see
the metal gate at the bottom of the staircase, the heavy reinforced doors into
every room, the thick iron drop-bars, and the laminated glass which will stop
grenades but not gunfire. A security camera is trained on the street outside.
Its monitor sits next to a Sacred Heart statue in the corner of the living room.
Frances and Aine munch toast as they show you around the prison they call home.
Their mother Annie is a Sinn Fein member of Lisburn Borough Council.
Aine, aged 9, holds up the curtains, riddled with bullet-holes from a UDA
attack four months ago. Frances, aged 11, points to the shattered skirting
board and the fireplace. "I was lying there, watching television seconds
beforehand," she says.
It was 11.15pm on July 27. Frances heard a car pull up outside the house.
Michael, aged 15, was upstairs with Aine. Frances pulled back the curtain and
looked out the window. "I saw a man wearing a baseball cap, coming up the
garden. It was pretty suspicious. The buzzer on the intercom went. Mummy and I
walked to the other side of the room to answer it. 'Is John there?' a voice
asked. 'There's no John here,' mummy said. And then the shooting started."
Frances huddled with her mother in the corner, screaming her head off,
while the room was raked with gunfire.
Aine was lucky. She was about to go downstairs when the first shots rang
out, but Michael hurled her into the bathroom. Thinking his mother had been
killed, he punched his fist through the wall in frustration and rage. He was
taken to hospital for sedation. He is still on tranquillisers.
Annie had feared for her family's safety after receiving 18 threatening
phone calls over one weekend, eight months earlier. A man with a Geordie accent,
who identified himself as a memeber of the First Paratroopers, claimed to have
passed on her details to loyalists and that "me and the kids were going to be
wiped out," Annie says. She taped some of the calls. Her children have been
receiving counselling since the shooting. Aine is plagued by nightmares. She
shows pictures of blood and bullets and "a bad man shooting my mummy". She finds
it difficult to settle at school.
FRANCES becomes hysterical when Annie heads off to a council meeting. She is
afraid to be alone downstairs at night. The fear with which the Armstrongs live
is obvious. They are sitting around the fire on a frosty December evening,
recounting the shooting, when the camera outside picks up the outline of a male
figure. The room falls silent as the buzzer rings. But then a familiar voice
comes over the intercom and there is an audible sigh of relief. It's only
Michael, back from band practice without his key. The bolts are unlocked
and the door heaved open.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1304.1 | KERNEL::BARTHUR | Mon Dec 20 1993 13:27 | 2 | ||
what's the point you trying to make by posting the article Mark?
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| 1304.2 | KOALA::HOLOHAN | Mon Dec 20 1993 14:40 | 12 | ||
re. 1
There is no point other than making the net community
aware of the kind of suffering that is reaped upon
the innocent by the British. Most importantly I find
myself questioning the British government, who
purport to want peace, yet at the same time have
their occupying troops actively collude with these
loyalist murder gangs (AI: report on collusion).
Mark
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| 1304.3 | NOVA::EASTLAND | Mon Dec 20 1993 14:56 | 4 | ||
Why not type in this famous AI report on collusion, in its entirety.
That should keep you busy for a bit. Then we can comment on it.
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| 1304.4 | AI report on collusion (Section 5 of AI report on UK Human Rights Concerns) | KOALA::HOLOHAN | Mon Dec 20 1993 15:11 | 170 | |
Amnesty International
United Kingdom Human Rights Concerns June 1991
Section 5: Collusion between security forces and armed groups
In September 1989 evidence emerged that in Northern Ireland, security
intelligence files on Republican suspects had been handed over by
members of the security forces to Loyalist armed groups, who had
allegedly used the files in some cases to target individuals and kill
them. These files had in the past been widely distributed to police and
soldiers for identification purposes. They included pictures, names,
addresses, car registration numbers and sometimes other details about
the suspects' movements.
The information emerged after the Loyalist armed group, the Ulster
Volunterr Force (UVF), killed Loughlin Maginn in August, saying that he
was a liaison officer of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). When the
family challenged the veracity of this claim, the UVF said that they had
obtained their information from police files. Loughlin Maginn's
solictor said he had documented the harassment of his client by the RUC
including death threats and regular photographing.
Security documents concerning suspects were subsequently found to be
missing from the Dunmurry RUC station in Belfast and the Ballykinlar
Ulser Defence Regiment (UDR) base in County Down. In response, the
Chief constable of the RUC appointed John Stevens, the Deputy Chief
Constable of Cambridgeshire, to investigate the sources of these security
leaks. This investigation commenced on 14 September 1989. By the end
of September John Stevens had a 19-person team to assist his inquiry.
The Stevens inquiry was not supervised by the Independent Commission for
Police Complaints(ICPC).
From the middle of September to the middle of October there was a steady
stream of security documents being sent to newspapers and politicians,
some by members of the security forces and some by members of the
Loyalist groups. By the end of September lists containing over 250
names had been leaked to the media.
Many people whose names appeared on the lists complained that they were
not immediately notified by the police, and that they were not told what
exact information may be in the hands of the Loyalist armed groups.
On 2 October 1989 the Irish News stated that it had received information
concerning the existence of an "Inner Circle" within the RUC which was
"pledged to eradicating republican terrorism, and to bringing down the
Anglo-Irish Agreement". It claimed to have members in 36 our of the 37
RUC subdivisions in Northern Ireland. The Inner Circle reportedly had
close links with the Ulster Resisistance Movement, a Loyalist group.
The journalist alleged that he had been shown very detailed files on 233
suspects. The Chief Constable dismissed the existence of such an inside
grouping as "arrant nonsense" but said that the Stevens inquiry would
investigate the allegation.
There were a number of arrests in connection with the inquiry, mainly of
members of the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Defence
Regiment (UDR, a regiment of the British Army). On one particular
occasion it was alleged that the targets of a police raid were informed
of it days before, allowing them to escape arrest.
Three men, including two UDR soldiers, were charged with Loughlin
Maginn's murder. Andrew Browne, one of the UDR soldiers, stated at the
bail hearing that he had passed on names of 14 suspects to the UDA, had
followed some of them and gathered information, and had passed on
ammunition. He targeted Loughlin Maginn on six occasions while on duty
- going to his home to identify him, checking the car outside the home
and noting his movements. This information was also given to the UDA.
Earlier in the year two members of the security forces had been given
18-month suspended sentences for passing confidential files and
photographs of IRA suspects to Loyalist organizations that carry out
sectarian killings. One of them remained in the British Army. Their
trial lasted 40 minutes - the Crown did not go into detail about what
the two had said during interrogation (that is, that they passed on
these documents knowing that they could be used for murder). Of the
people whose names had been in the documents, Adrian McDaid's brother,
Terence, had been killed and Patrick Fitzpatrick had been seriously
wounded. The Dublin-based Sunday Tribune on 5 November 1989 published a
long article, based on trial depositions which were not used in court.
The depositions showed the close and open nature of relationships
between a UDR member and UDA/UVF members.
In October 1989 the RUC announced that it had tightened up procedures
for signing out intelligence material. Reforms of the UDR were also
announced, including new procedures for recruitment screening and for
handling security material.
The Stevens inquiry was completed in March 1990, and the findings of the
inquiry were submitted to the Chief Constable the following month. A
summary of the report of the Stevens inquiry was released in May 1990
and set out many recommendations. As a result of the inquiry, 59
people were charged or reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Two UDR soldiers and one British soldier were charged with
responsibility for 59 of the 187 documents estimated to have gone
missing at the end of September. The other offences included the
unlawful possesion of documents and communicating them to others without
authorizations; firearms offences; and possessing documents, collecting
and recording security information. The overwhelming majority of those
arrested were civilians (32 were members of Loyalist organizations),
including Brian Nelson, who was charged with having documents which
contained information about IRA suspects likely to be of use to
terrorists. Reports that Brian Nelson had been both a British military
intelligence agent and the intelligence information officer for the
Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which has links with the UFF, gave
rise to claimis that the authorities had been aware for some years,
through him, of the extent of collusion between the security forces and
the UDA. Charges were dropped in October 1990 against five UDA men.
The Stevens inquiry report noted that "in the present climate" in
Northern Ireland leaks of official security information " may never be
completely eliminated". However, it stated that measures already taken
had reduced the opportunity for such leaks; and that "the passing of
information had been restricted to a small number of individuals". The
inquiry was limited in its scope and it had failed to identify members
of the security forces involved in passing on information to armed
Loyalist groups.
Amnesty International monitored these developments because it was
concerned that members of the security forces used their official status
to target suspected members of opposition groups for murder. For the
security forces to have the confidence of the public, they have to be
seen to be impartial. For the government to have the confidence of the
public, it has to be seen to ensure that its agents operate within the
law and are impartial. For this reason, the Stevens inquiry would have
been very important if the scope had been wide enougth to look at the
issue of collusion as a whole; unfortunately the inquiry was limited to
leaks of security documents at the time and other issues which had come
up and been referrred to it. It did not look at the evidence that
collusion had been going on for many years, and at what role the
authorities had played during this time, including bringing criminal
proceedings. Nor did it look into how the authorities dealt with
allegations of partiality, for example, soldiers shouting verbal abuse
at Catholics or writing graffiti on walls. Nor did it look into
allegations that RUC officers regularly drew detailed layouts of houses
during house searches.
Amnesty International was also concerned about allegations that the
security forces had targeted the lawyer Patrick Finucane, whose killing
was attributed to the UFF in Febuary 1989. The weapon that killed him
belonged to the UDR and was stolen by a member of the UDR from Palace
Barracks in 1987, who had passed it on to the UFF. The UDR member was
jailed for stealing weapons. The weapon was later found during a house
raid in Belfast and identified through ballistics tests as the murder
weapon. No one has been charged with the murder. A year before his
death Amnesty International had heard form a former detaineee that
during interrogation a Castlereagh the police had said his lawyer,
Patrick Finucane, would be killed. The organization had been told by
Patrick Finucane in the years preceding his death that police officers
often referred to him as an "IRA lawyer" and tried to dissuade detainees
from calling him. Loyalist sources claimed that prior to the killing
UDA members detained at Castlereagh had been told by detectives that Mr.
Finucane and a few other solicitors were IRA members and implied that
they should be shot. Although some of them were later arrested by the
Stevens team, apparently none of them had been questioned about these
allegations. Furthermore it was reported that Brian Nelson, the
alleged army and UDA intelligence officer questioned by the inquiry,
knew that Patrick Finucane would be shot, and indeed that he had been
involved in providing intelligence which led to the lawyer's killing.
The allegations about RUC collusion with Loyalist groups in the murder
were handed over to the Stevens inquiry to investigate. A police
witeness told the inquest that allegations about threats made by the RUC
against Patrick Finucane to his clients had been investigated and there
was "overwhelming evidence and intelligence to show quite the contrary".
Allegations of a similar nature were made by people detained at the
Castelreagh in October 1990. One person claimed that a detective said
his lawyere was a Provo, meaning an IRA member; and that threats were
made against himself and his lawyer. The lawyer said that " it was part
of an ongoing process to scandalise solicitors acting on behalf of
arrested persons".
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| 1304.5 | NOVA::EASTLAND | Mon Dec 20 1993 15:36 | 6 | ||
I don't see any evidence there that the " British government, who
purport to want peace, yet at the same time have their occupying
actively collude with these loyalist murder gangs (AI: report on
collusion)". It doesn't make that claim at all.
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| 1304.6 | KOALA::HOLOHAN | Mon Dec 20 1993 16:37 | 8 | ||
re. .5
Nope, I made that claim. AI documents collusion,
the Guardian documented the result of Loyalist
terrorism and I equate this to not being really
interested in peace.
Mark
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| 1304.7 | NOVA::EASTLAND | Mon Dec 20 1993 16:47 | 4 | ||
Oh well that counts for nothing then. However, your .2 and other notes
elsewhere certainly imply AI backs up your claim.
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| 1304.8 | KOALA::HOLOHAN | Mon Dec 20 1993 16:56 | 6 | ||
re. .7
AI documents collusion between the British forces
and the loyalist terrorist.
Mark
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| 1304.9 | NOVA::EASTLAND | Mon Dec 20 1993 17:01 | 6 | ||
Don't be coy. You made it sound like they documented collusion between
HMG and the loyalist terrorists. By the way, why are you calling them
terrorists and not freedom fighters. tsch tsch - not very er fair of
you.
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| 1304.10 | KERNEL::BARTHUR | Tue Dec 21 1993 07:21 | 9 | ||
I think the posting of the article is quite sick!
I also cannot imagine the harrowing effect of relatives having to
identify bodies lying in mortuarys that have been decapitated and had
their skin torn off by bomb blasts that were triggered by the "brave
freedom fighters".
You're a sick man Holohan
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| 1304.11 | KOALA::HOLOHAN | Tue Dec 21 1993 09:08 | 15 | ||
re. 10
Sure Bill, see no, hear no, speak no evil. If
you would rather not read the news, then hit
next unseen when you see a news article and let
yourself remain ignorant.
re. .9
Amnesty International has documented collusion
between British forces and loyalist terrorists.
Who controls the British Army? Why, HMG I would
suppose.
Mark
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| 1304.12 | YUPPY::MILLARB | Tue Dec 21 1993 09:30 | 25 | ||
re .11
Mark do you really believe that descriptions like this are news to
anybody over here. ??
ie. I had breakfast today. That is hardly news is it.
One thing that is curious Mark. None of your "news" ever seems to
happen to anybody other than Catholics or members of the IRA. I am
sure that you will of course have noticed this. So please try and
print some "news" that paints a representative picture.
Could I suggest that you read Tim Parry's fathers account of the events
before during and after your pals blew him and other civilians accross
a shopping centre as they shopped for Mothers day presents. Mr Parry
talks in great detail about his visits to NI and the US in an attempt
to understand how people like yourself can believe in the guff you put
in here. As mentioned in here before Mark why not mail Mr Parry some
of this "News".
Please don't bother replying with why don't I mail AI and all the
victims of the opressive British Goverments Facist forces. Read what I
have said and you may just start to comprehend.
Bruce
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| 1304.13 | KERNEL::BARTHUR | Tue Dec 21 1993 09:39 | 10 | ||
Yeh yeh Mark,
but you're a good example of one of them monkeys aren't you? You say
nothing when it suits you, see nothing when it suits you and say only
what suits your particular view point. You are a first class example of
why peace is costing so much human misery in NI.
Anyway, just so you don't miss the point as usual, we don't need
graphic accounts of the horrors of NI, it isn't one sided and never has
been.
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| 1304.14 | NOVA::EASTLAND | Tue Dec 21 1993 14:59 | 6 | ||
re .11, as the report itself implies, collusion can exist at lower
levels without it being a policy directive from above. The usual cheap,
simplistic and unsubstantiated calumnies that you seem to think do some
good for your cause.
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