‘I just remember my mammy saying to us that bad men had come into the pub and they had guns and had shot six people. And daddy was dead.’ No Stone Unturned: Massacre at Loughinisland, daughter, 2017
‘Brutal, inhuman, barbaric, callous slaughter. Just some of the words used today to describe last night’s atrocity by loyalist terrorists in a pub in County Down.’ ibid. television news
More than twenty years after the massacre the Heights Bar is still in business. ibid.
For nearly 50 years Northern Ireland has been haunted by what is known simply as The Troubles. ibid.
The car wasn’t the only [forensic] thing that disappeared. All of the transcripts of the initial interviews with the suspects were also destroyed. ibid.
None of the members of the gang were ever charged for committing any of the murders. ibid.
The danger of running highly placed informants came when those agents under the protection of the state started killing people. ibid.
It turned out that the people named as the killers in the anonymous letter were also key suspects named in the leaked report. ibid.
‘Collusion was a significant element in relation to the killings at Loughinisland.’ ibid. report
A foggy day in a small town in Northern Ireland, a town awaiting the arrival of five thousand civil rights marchers. Such visits usually have one ending – the marchers attacked by their enemies, the Protestant extremists and the police intervening. World in Action: All Change at Newry! ITV 1969
Gusty Spence, leader of the outlawed Protestant extremist organisation the Ulster Volunteer Force, was kidnapped [by UVF] a week ago. He was out in parole … World in Action go in search of Gusty Spence. World in Action: In Search of Gusty Spence, ITV 1972
Spence had served six years when last weekend he was paroled for forty-eight hours to attend his daughter’s wedding. On his way back to jail he was kidnapped. ibid.
On Sunday January 30th 1972, 26 people were shot when British soldiers re-rooted a civil rights march in Northern Ireland. Bloody Sunday as it’s now called shocked the world. It was the one event that set the agenda for the next 20 years of violence in the community. The shooting took place in one of the most sensitive parts of this territory. Secret History: Bloody Sunday, Channel 4 1991
But it they [paras] were shot at first, why were the eye-witnesses so certain the soldiers just opened up without reason? ibid.
Between the two Irelands, dividing the island north and south … No watchtowers here, no minefields, no barbed wire fences, just an occasional British patrol and tension. A Tale of Two Irelands, CBS Reports 1975
‘Let’s get to the real heart of this matter … Will we maintain the union? Will we stand for what our fathers stood for? Or will we for the price of a patched-up peace submit ourselves to what ultimately will be a Trojan horse that will destroy the people of Northern Ireland?’ ibid. Reverend Ian Paisley
In Northern Ireland the Protestants have the jobs and they kill Catholics to keep it this way. ibid.
Separate churches, separate schools, separate values, always emphasising differences, not similarities. ibid.
‘To hell with the future, long live the past; may God in his mercy look down on Belfast.’ ibid.
No people, wrote the Irish poet Yates, hate as we do, in whom the past is always alive. ibid.
And the presence of British troops on Catholic streets was enough to awaken an enemy who had scarcely existed for fifty years, the IRA. ibid.
The worse a situation gets, the more the rights and wrongs of that situation tend to get lost … Rather like those of a kid growing up in Northern Ireland since the Troubles started, a keen sense of values remains. Acceptable Levels, filmmaker, 1983
I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen. But you know, there’s good people living in Belfast as well. ibid. priest
Let’s face it this place is a scandal. You’ve got soldiers creeping around with guns out there, you have got joyriders that must make the place an absolute death trap for kids, I mean there are no job, there are the most pifling amenities … ibid. female documentary maker
There is a moment in which the union of nations and the creation of Britain was almost stopped before it had begun. It began one night in the winter of 1605 when a man was arrested in London and taken to the Tower … Guy Fawkes. Union with David Olusoga I, BBC 2023
A vast social experiment was under way. Ireland was another kingdom ruled by King James. But it was overwhelmingly a Catholic country. In 1610 a new project was launched to colonise the northern province of Ulster. ibid.
The legacy of the plantation of Ulster continues today. ibid.
The Glorious Revolution … was anything but bloodless in Ireland. ibid.
The belief that the United Kingdom was a nation that was now reconciled with its history ... was to prove over-optimistic. David Olusoga IV: Union and Disunion
Britain has never been an easy country to define or understand. ibid.
By the power of faith, by the wealth of empire, by the threat of invasion.
1912: The Home Rule Bill: The story of what happened in Ireland in the years after 1912 is a story that has the city of Belfast at its centre. ibid.
Irish independence meant that at a stroke the land mass of the United Kingdom shrank by 20%. ibid.
In the 1960s another conflict erupted. The Troubles left over 3,500 people dead and led to the deployment of the British army on to the streets of British cities. That conflict officially ended in 1998. ibid.
What emerged from the Second World War was a new national mythology. ibid.
The Rock of Gibraltar: the last outpost for the British empire … In 1987 British Intelligence learned that the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, was planning a terrorist attack on the parade. Its target – the band. Its weapon – Semtex explosives. Its method – a car bomb. Army spotters had observed an IRA woman mingling with the crowd on several occasions. By early 1988 the British authorities were ready and waiting. On March 6th a suspicious car had been parked. Mairead: The Life and Death of an IRA Martyr aka Death of a Terrorist, 1989
The three members of this active service unit were passing a gas station on Winston Churchill Avenue when the British made their move. ibid.
The last body to be driven away was that of the young woman called Mairead Farrell … The story of her life is the story of Northern Ireland’s twenty years of violence. And of the political and moral dilemmas posed to Britain. ibid.
In 1971 the Army began rounding up some 10,000 alleged Republicans. ibid.
So I wasn’t to tell Philip [O’Donnell] anything. I was told to take him in a taxi. I was to take him to a certain place to get him shot that night. I dropped him off. A Mother Brings Her Son to be Shot, TL 2017
The Good Friday Agreement led to the cessation of IRA violence but not all Republicans accepted it. They are known as dissident Republicans. Some have continued to bear arms with groups such as the Real IRA, Oglaigh na hEireann and RAAD. Membership is illegal. Locally, they are often known as The IRA or The RA. ibid.
I was investigating punishment shootings in Northern Ireland … how is something like resolved within a community and within a family. ibid.
A police officer encouraged them not to make a complaint. ibid. community mediator
They got lost something. I never realised how much drugs but mephedrone, cocaine … Diazepam, Valium … ibid. mother
The suicide rate in Northern Ireland has doubled since the Good Friday Agreement. More people have died by suicide than were killed during the Troubles over the same people of time. ibid.