Ballymurphy: what really happened in Northern Ireland’s hidden massacre? It was a massacre every bit as shameful as the Bloody Sunday killings. Ten Catholics, including a priest and a […]

It was a massacre every bit as shameful as the Bloody Sunday killings. Ten Catholics, including a priest and a 45-year-old mother of eight, were gunned down by the British Army in Bally­murphy, Belfast, over three days in ­August 1971.

The shootings were carried out by the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who five months later were sent to Londonderry to quell sectarian disturbances but ended in the killing of 13 more Catholics, plunging the region into its 30-year Troubles.

Yet if the lessons of Ballymurphy had been learnt, many believe the recent history of Northern Ireland need not have been so bloody. Had the UK government properly investigated the terrible mistakes that had been made in the summer of 1971 in Belfast and acted to pull back the soldiers, Bloody Sunday could have been avoided.

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For the families of those killed by the British Army in the west Belfast estate of Ballymurphy 47 years ago there are more pressing questions about how and why their innocent brothers, sons, priest and a mother came to lose their lives.

This month an inquest will begin considering some of these questions and throw light on one of the most pivotal moments in Northern Ireland’s history. The incident is also the subject of a new documentary film, The Bally­murphy Precedent, which will be shown by Channel 4 on Sunday.

The trailer for ‘The Ballymurphy Precedent’:

For Rita Bonner, who lost a brother, while another brother was tortured by the soldiers, the next few weeks will be critical in getting to the truth about what really happened in Ballymurphy.

“It needn’t have been like this,” Ms Bonner, then aged 12, who had friends on both sides of the religious divide, tells i. “When the soldiers first arrived in 1969 we welcomed them with cups of tea because we thought they were going to protect us from the Protestant attacks.”

Fiery times

Towards the end of the 1960s the segregated Catholic communities, inspired by the American civil rights movement, began campaigning for fairer treatment, staging peaceful placard-waving marches through the streets of Belfast. These attracted Protestant counter-protests which soon spiralled into ­violence. In the Falls Road, Catholic families were being burnt out of their homes and many sought refuge in Ballymurphy.

Ms Bonner, now a Belfast nursery school caretaker and mother of three, says: “I remember going to the school and seeing families sleeping on mattresses. I would look after the little children, push the prams, to give the mummies some respite. We hoped the soldiers had come to help us to stop the violence.”

Indeed relations between the Catholic community and the Army had begun so well that some of the girls married British soldiers.

But in 1971 the political situation suddenly changed and the soldiers were ordered to arrest Republican activists operating in the area.

“The Army wasn’t friendly any more,” says Ms Bonner. “We’d be at the local disco and the soldiers would burst in and search all the young boys.”

Soon afterwards, the British government decided to impose internment. It was a decision that would have disastrous ramifications for the future of Northern Ireland. For the Catholic community of Ballymurphy the impact was immediate and deadly.

The British Army commander Brigadier Frank Kitson was commander of 39 Airportable Brigade from September 1970 to April 1972. He had been decorated for his service during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and the Malayan Emergency, in which thousands of local people had been killed while Britain tried to hold on to its Empire. Kitson was the author of the book Low-intensity Operations, which would become a British Army manual on counter-insurgency. It was Kitson’s methods and policy on tackling civil disobedience and sectarian violence that have been questioned following the Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday massacres.

Three days of horror

At 5am on 9 August around 600 soldiers of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment entered the estate from different directions. They began booting in doors looking for suspects, many of whom were dragged from their beds.

Later that evening gunfire broke out and a local man, Bobby Clarke, who had been trying to carry children to safety, was shot and wounded in Springfield Park.

Ballymurphy priest Father Hugh Mullan telephoned the Henry Taggart army post to tell them he was going to help the injured man and he entered the field, waving a white baby grow. He found Bobby Clarke, badly wounded, but as the priest administered the last rites and attempted to leave the field he was fatally shot in the back When 19-year-old Frank Quinn went to help Father Mullan and Clarke, he was shot in the back of the head.

Clarke was the only one of the trio to survive his wounds. But the killings had provoked the community into reaction. Local youths tried to resist the soldiers while families fled their homes after coming under attack from loyalist mobs.

Without warning, the British Army opened fire from the direction of the Henry ­Taggart army base. In the melee, Noel Phillips was shot in the backside. As he lay crying for help, Joan Connolly, a mother of eight, went to his aid. But in her attempt to help, Mrs Connolly was shot in the face. She bled to death where she had first fallen.

Another victim, Daniel Teggart, a father of 13, had been shot 14 times.

At this point witnesses accuse the Army of atrocities, saying that soldiers executed the already wounded Noel Phillips by shooting him in the head with a handgun.

Further testimony alleges that Joseph Murphy was shot at close range with a rubber ­bullet into his open wound and he died three weeks later from his injuries.

Ten of the 11 victims of Ballymuphy died from bullet wounds. The 11th victim, Paddy McCarthy, 44, died from a heart attack after allegedly being put through the ordeal of a mock execution when he was stopped in the street.

‘I just hoped they had made a mistake’

The next day Ms Bonner’s brother, John Laverty, 20, escorted her and his two other sisters to the community centre where buses were ferrying families to the Republic of Ireland to escape the violence.

Ms Bonner recalls: “He carried our bags and waited with us until the bus left. I remember him waving us goodbye.”

It was the last time Rita would see her brother alive. The following morning, during a lull in the shooting, John and his brother Terry, 18, left their home. John didn’t get very far before he was shot in the back by soldiers who were descending Black Mountain, which dominates the landscape of Ballymurphy. A second bullet fatally damaged his vital organs.

Terry Laverty was later arrested by the soldiers and taken to a barracks where he was allegedly badly beaten and tortured.

It was the Red Cross who broke the news to Rita that one brother was dead and another was being held by the Army.

She returned from Ireland on 13 August for her brother’s funeral. “As we were travelling back I just hoped they had made a mistake,” she says now. But there was no error about the number of dead.

A new battle for the truth

The events of August 1971 shattered the lives of Ms Bonner and her family and many others affected by the shootings.

The British Army responded by claiming that the soldiers had come under sustained fire from Republican gunmen and that all those shot were armed or involved in unlawful resistance.

Yet no forensic evidence has been provided which proves any one of the victims fired a weapon that day or was indeed part of the Republican armed resistance.

One man’s fight for justice In 2015 Terry Laverty, 64, finally won his fight for justice to have his name cleared 44 years after he was convicted for riotous behaviour and sentenced to six months in prison. Mr Laverty had been stopped and arrested by soldiers around the same time as his brother John was killed in the shooting. He claims he was badly beaten and tortured before being released and then put on trial for rioting. Mr Laverty’s case was referred back to Belfast county court by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which quashed the conviction after hearing that the sole evidence against Mr Laverty was a soldier’s statement which was later retracted. At the time Mr Laverty accused the Army of “murdering” his brother John. “As he lay in the street bleeding to death I was being arrested, just yards away,” he said. “It was two days before I knew he was dead and almost two days before my parents knew that I was not.” Mr Laverty said his wrongful conviction and imprisonment was based on the word of a soldier who has admitted, more than 40 years later, that he lied. “He lied in his statement and he lied in court. I was not rioting. There was no riot.”

What now?

Filmmaker Callum Macrae, the director of The Ballymurphy Precedent, has spent four years painstakingly researching the events that took place in Belfast during the summer of 1971.

His finished film is not only a powerful account of what happened but it has also uncovered new perspectives on the killings.

Testimonies from a number of witnesses, including British soldiers, indicate that amid the confusion members of the 1st Battalion may have come under fire from their own soldiers, holding ground at opposing locations in the estate. This, Macrae believes, may have falsely led the Army to believe there were gunmen firing at them.

The film also examines the reputation of the 1st Battalion and senior British Army officers like Frank Kitson, a veteran of counter-insurgencies in Malaya and Cyprus, who had used the Paras as shock troops against so-called no-go Catholic areas.

“Ballymurphy raises real questions about the government’s role in turning Northern Ireland’s civil rights marches, very similar to those led by Martin Luther King in America, into the terrible 30 years’ violence which has characterised the Troubles,” says Macrae.

The Ballymurphy massacre has been “hidden from public knowledge and focus,” according to the justice campaign. Unlike Bloody Sunday, no journalists were present, no camera crews captured the events, and there was no international condemnation of the killings.

That is about to change.

‘The Ballymurphy Precedent’ is screening at selected cinemas and a shortened version will be show on Channel 4, Saturday 9pm