Ballymurphy:
‘Entirely innocent’

In the space of 36 hours in August 1971, 10 people were shot dead on the streets of Belfast during an army operation.

Among them were a 44-year-old mother-of-eight, a former soldier who had lost his hand in the Second World War and a Catholic priest who had come to the aid of an injured man.

Their deaths, which took place in and around the Ballymurphy area in the west of the city in five separate incidents, have been cloaked in controversy in the decades since.

A number of the victims were portrayed as gunmen in the aftermath of the deaths. The Army maintained that soldiers fired only after perceiving that they were under threat.

Their families rejected this, maintaining that their loved ones were unarmed innocent civilians. One-day inquests into the deaths in 1972 recorded open verdicts.

In 2011, Northern Ireland’s attorney general ordered a fresh inquest into the deaths. It began in September 2018 and, after more than a year of hearings and another year-long delay due to Covid-19, the coroner has delivered her verdict.

The Ballymurphy shootings took place in west Belfast, but it was the spiralling sectarian conflict on streets across Northern Ireland that set the course for what happened in August 1971.

The Troubles had begun two years earlier, with violence continuing to escalate in the first half of 1971, particularly in the cities of Belfast and Londonderry. Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister Brian Faulkner was under pressure to take a tougher stance on paramilitaries, particularly the IRA.

The Stormont government ordered a crackdown which meant anyone who was suspected of being involved in violence could be detained without trial – or interned. Operation Demetrius was the military-backed operation that saw 342 people detained across Northern Ireland on 9 August.

But instead of stopping violence, internment only provoked it. In the four days of turmoil that followed, 25 people would die on the streets of Belfast. Thousands would flee their homes as whole areas were destroyed. While 30 people had lost their lives in 1971 before the introduction of internment, by the end of the year 141 would be killed.

The first Ballymurphy shootings took place in Springfield Park, where the ground rises to the hills overlooking Belfast.

In the early 1960s, before the Troubles began, the new development was considered by some to be a blueprint for Northern Ireland’s future.

Its modern homes – with three bedrooms, indoor plumbing, electricity, gardens front and back – were snapped up by young families and couples from both Catholic and Protestant communities, a dream opportunity for people accustomed to terraced houses with no mod cons.

Springfield Park wasn’t planned as an idyll of integration, it merely happened, because families were buying the best houses they could afford.

But on 9 August, rioting engulfed Springfield Park and the surrounding area when soldiers moved in as part of Operation Demetrius.

Internment lit the touch-paper on growing tensions in the Springfield Park area. While residents had continued to live in harmony in the street itself, they had been feeling the sectarian squeeze from the mainly Protestant Springmartin estate to the north and east and the Moyard and Ballymurphy, Catholic areas, to the south and west.

One resident later told documentary-makers Frank Martin and Seamus Kelters in ‘A million bricks’ that that Springfield Park was the “jam in the sandwich”.

It was a community that had been transcending the usual tribal boundaries. But as Bobby Clarke, a man wounded on 9 August, told the same documentary, “one night destroyed it”.

The rioting and sectarian violence of August 1971 formed the backdrop for the bloodshed at Ballymurphy.

At the inquest, residents, backed by evidence from soldiers and police officers, spoke of attacks coming from the Springmartin estate by an angry crowd determined to make them leave their homes.

As the clear August evening drew on, rival crowds gathered, facing each other from Springmartin Road and Springfield Park.

That's when the gunfire started.

Gerry McCaffrey, a Springfield Park resident and footballer, was carrying his young daughter from his home when he was shot in the back with a shotgun.

Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and Queen's Regiment were there in numbers too. The air soon rang out with the crack and thump of their self-loading rifles (SLRs).

The inquest heard evidence that IRA members had fired handguns in the area and there were also claims that a sniper from the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force had shot at some of the victims. The coroner accepted that there was "at least a small presence" of gunmen in the area at the time of the incident.

It was at this point that frantic families on Springfield Park, trying to leave the area, were faced with a choice – stay or escape across the exposed area of waste ground.

Father Hugh Mullan, 38, who lived directly opposite the waste ground, heard the gunshots ring out and was making phone calls to local army commanders he knew, pleading with them to stop the soldiers from firing.

Bobby Clarke, whose house was also near the waste ground, was among the first to take action. He ran across the open ground with a child, aiming for safety in Moyard Park. As he ran back towards his home, he was shot in the back and fell to the ground. He was unarmed.

People ran to his aid, including Fr Mullan, who rushed to administer the last rites. Frank Quinn, 19, ran over to help too. Bobby told the inquest he wasn’t dying and rejected the rites, but Fr Mullan proceeded anyway as they “would give them strength”.

Speaking in 1999, Bobby Clarke said that Fr Mullan then left him to ring for an ambulance.

“He went out with this lad towards the phone, the lad was upright, Fr Mullan was down on one knee with a white hanky. He went 20, 30 yards and there was a burst of gunfire and a scream.

"The screams got lower, I would say within 15 minutes there was no more sound. I reckon he was dead at that time.”

Bobby Clarke remained prone in the dirt as gunfire continued to erupt around him.

“I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say the very ground we were lying on was trembling with bullets that were flying about, coming at us.

“A lad beside me who had put a shirt on my back jerked up in the air and down again – I knew from the expression on his face that lad was dead. Turned out to be a lad called Frank Quinn.”

Mr Quinn, a husband and a father, worked as a window cleaner. Those who knew him described him fondly as a practical joker.

The loss of Fr Mullan, who had pleaded for an end to the hostilities in the hours before he died, a priest who was well-known and liked among those who knew him in the Army, brought shock and grief to his parishioners and the wider community.

Most of the people who fled their homes in Springfield Park on 9 August 1971 never returned. Over the next two days, there would be four more shooting incidents in the area.

Ten people died and with them the dream of Northern Ireland’s blueprint community.

The coroner said Frank Quinn and Fr Mullan were shot by the Army. Mrs Justice Keegan found neither were armed; acting in any way that posed a threat; that the state had not justified their shooting and that the use of force was disproportionate. She also said there was no proper investigation into their deaths.

The third shooting incident took place the next day – 10 August 1971 – and led to the death of Eddie Doherty, 31, who himself was a former Territorial Army soldier.

The married father-of-four was shot by the only soldier who admitted to the inquest that they had killed someone.

Following the carnage of the day before, many of Belfast’s streets had been barricaded. One barricade was formed on the Whiterock Road, on the edge of the Ballymurphy estate.

The soldier, who was given the cipher M3, gave a TV interview at the time. He later told the inquest his vehicle came under attack after he was ordered to clear the barricade using a military tractor. He described an explosion of some kind, which buckled the wheel of the vehicle. He said he kicked open the cab door and fired at a man who had thrown a petrol bomb at him and was preparing to throw another.

Eyewitnesses testified Mr Doherty was not from the area and was standing 30 yards from the barricade, asking if anyone could help him find a new route so he could get home.

The pathologist who examined his body told the inquest there was no smell of petrol on the body, which could be expected of an individual who had been handling petrol bombs.

The family testified that during his funeral, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) lined the road and saluted him as the coffin passed.

His sister, Kathleen McCarry, said he was a family man who had sent his wife and children to County Down when rumours about internment began to spread. She said her family was torn apart by grief. “My mummy went to pieces, we all went to pieces, it was like a nightmare you were never wakening from.”

The inquest found Soldier M3 was under threat from a petrol bomber and, as a result, was in fear of his life. The coroner said he was justified in taking action against the petrol bomber. However, Mr Doherty was not the petrol bomber and was not acting in a manner that could be perceived as a threat or justify a violent attack on him. The coroner said the soldier's firing of his weapon was not sufficiently controlled for a number of reasons, including that he did not issue a warning.

John Laverty, 20, and Joseph Corr, 43, were killed on the morning of 11 August, 1971 by the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (1 Para).

On this August morning, members of the regiment were making their way to the edge of Ballymurphy via a small, country backroad known as the Mountain Loney or Mountain Road.

Eyewitnesses told the inquest there were concerns, heightened by the tension of the previous days, that loyalist gangs from the Protestant community would attempt a sectarian attack on the Catholic area from the same route. Residents were on the alert for anyone who would try to come into Ballymurphy from the Mountain Road. Some said it never occurred to them that the Army would try to come into the area by force.

Witnesses testified that residents were alerted to the early-morning approach by the banging of bin lids, a common signal used in Northern Ireland’s Catholic communities to alert residents to an incoming threat. Word got around that an attack was happening and some men had gathered, ready to run up the road to defend their area. But instead of loyalists, they met paratroopers.

The soldiers opened fire – Mr Laverty died at the scene; Mr Corr was shot in the chest and died two weeks later in hospital.

Mr Laverty’s youngest sister, Carmel Quinn, said he was a “young fella that had so much life in him to live”. She said her sister Rita recalled their father “cry out in the chapel, ‘ah God, my son’ and breaking down” following his death. “We’d never seen our daddy cry before,” she said.

The family of Mr Corr was in the process of emigrating to Australia when he was killed. His daughter, Eileen McKeown, said his death devastated her family. “The soldiers who did this, they don’t realise the after-effects. I mean, I used to have four brothers and now I’ve none.

"With all the boys, they resented the fact that they lost their daddy and they never had a father figure around. Their dependence on alcohol and early deaths are a direct result of losing my daddy.”

Mr Corr worked for the manufacturer Shorts as a machinist. It was one of Belfast's biggest employers and the vast majority of its workforce was Protestant. After being labelled as an IRA gunman following his death, the Corr family said they received hate mail from former co-workers.

Journalists at the time were told 1 Para had killed two IRA gunmen by an army captain assigned to press relations.

The inquest found there was no evidence either Mr Corr or Mr Laverty were armed or acting in a manner that could be perceived as posing as a threat. It found no valid justification had been provided for the soldiers opening fire and the circumstances of their death was not adequately investigated.

The final death took place later on 11 August.

John McKerr, 49, was a joiner and former British soldier who lost his right hand during World War Two in North Africa. On that August day, the father-of-eight and grandfather-of-four was sent to the newly completed Corpus Christi Catholic Church to work through a snag list of defects.

The church was also preparing for the funeral of a local teenager, who had accidentally drowned two days earlier. Mr McKerr was outside the building when he was shot behind the right ear, the bullet exiting his head further forward. He died in hospital nine days later.

Some witnesses told the inquest they heard an officer tell a paratrooper to shoot him.

Some described soldiers pointing in Mr McKerr’s direction, perhaps mistaking his prosthetic lower arm for a weapon.

The inquest heard evidence from Maureen Heath that she was one of those to rush to Mr McKerr’s aid. Before her death, she told researchers that after cradling him, a paratrooper pointed a gun at her and threatened to shoot.

Mrs Heath, a friend of Fr Mullan, said she told them: “Go ahead and shoot.” She added: “They’d shot our priest, so what was my life worth?”

Mr McKerr's family found out he had been shot from an inaccurate newspaper report the day after it happened. His eldest daughter, Anne Ferguson, said one newspaper report said Mr McKerr had been attending an IRA funeral when he was shot, a detail that was particularly upsetting for his family. She said reports “about daddy being in the IRA were terrible lies which only made matters worse".

Mrs Ferguson added that her mother "was very practical and when my father died his war pension stopped and she was struggling to bring the family up so she did not pursue an investigation".

The inquest said Mr McKerr was not doing anything that could have caused someone to think of him as a threat or which justified the use of lethal force. It found he was clearly unarmed.

However, the coroner said she could not determine who had shot Mr McKerr. She said it was "shocking that there was no real investigation" into his death at the time. There were no military statements taken, the scene was not sealed and the bullet went unrecovered.

She described this as "an abject failing by the authorities" that had hampered her greatly and that it was the "striking feature of this case that I record in the strongest possible terms".