Peter and Marie Dorrian, in their 50s, injured in west of city after refusing to give up son to ONH republican gunmen

A couple in their 50s have been shot in the legs at their west Belfast home because they refused to hand over their son to paramilitaries.

Republican sources in Belfast told the Guardian the dissident terrorist group Óglaigh na hÉireann (ONH) was responsible for shooting the couple on Thursday night.



It emerged on Friday that ONH intended to shoot the son but shot his parents instead after they fought off the gunmen while trying to protect their son. The victims were named locally as Peter and Marie Dorrian.

According to republican sources, the son is on an ONH “hit list” along with a number of other young men from the west of the city whom the group accuse of antisocial activities.



The Dorrians were each shot in both legs during the attack, which took place at about 6.15pm in their home in the Turf Lodge district of the city.



Two men forced their way into the property and shot the couple in their kitchen, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. PSNI said the victims were taken to the Royal Victoria hospital for treatment but their injuries were not believed to be life threatening.



Sinn Féin has said that over the last six to nine months a number of young men have been shot in paramilitary punishment attacks in the area. The party stressed that the family targeted last night were not involved in criminality.



Sinn Féin’s west Belfast assembly member, Pat Sheehan, condemned the shooting of the couple, who were part of a “respected family within the community”.



“There is no way this family is involved in criminality of any sort and whatever the motivation for this shooting, there is absolutely no justification for it,” he said. “The people in the street are now terrified as a result of this shooting.”



The west Belfast SDLP assembly member, Alex Attwood, said the attack was “an act of tyranny” against both the family and the community.



“The fact that a man and woman, both in their 50s, have been injured confirms that no one is off limits to those who are now using the gun,” Attwood said.



ONH is one of three republican dissident terror groups still active in Northern Ireland alongside the New IRA and Continuity IRA factions. The group has a base in the Ardoyne district of north Belfast and also a presence in the west of the city.

While the principal aim of all three armed paramilitary groups is to kill members of the security forces, the majority of their victims over the last two decades have been Catholic civilians. Dozens of people, in the main young men, have been targeted for shootings and beatings by all three terror organisations.



ONH, the New IRA and Continuity IRA accuse their victims within the Catholic/nationalist community of antisocial behaviour such as drug dealing and other criminality.



However, at times these terror groups have used this as cover to target those against whom they have a vendetta. In April last year, ONH shot Michael McGibbon three times in the leg and left him to bleed to death in an alleyway near his home in the Ardoyne district.

The 33-year-old was targeted simply because of an unfounded allegation made by a female relative of a senior dissident republican in the city. The murdered man’s wife later left the Ardoyne, saying she could no longer live in a district surrounded by those who had organised and carried out her husband’s murder.

The dissident republicans’ use of the punishment attacks strategy is copied from the Provisional IRA, which pioneered shootings, knee-cappings and beatings as a form of social control within their communities from the early 1970s onwards. They were also designed to portray PIRA as a policing alternative to the Royal Ulster Constabulary in those areas.



An expert on paramilitary forms of policing in these communities has claimed there were an estimated 6,000 shootings and beatings from 1973 to 2013.



Prof Liam Kennedy, the author of a study titled They Shoot Children, Don’t They?, has described the strategy as “forms of torture on a vast scale”.



Kennedy said the attacks were an “astonishing toll of human suffering, directed particularly at young, working-class males from loyalist and republican areas”.