LIFE AFTER DEATH
A dad beaten by RUC officers, a mum killed in an INLA disco bombing, a soldier brother shot dead by the IRA, a son stabbed to death... how families were changed forever by violence
A new documentary to be screened this week, The Life After, talks to a number of those bereaved during the Troubles and exploresthelong-termdevastatingimpactoflosingalovedone
Fifty years after the death of her father Sammy Devenny, who’s widely regarded as one of the first victims of the Troubles, Colette O’Connor is still craving justice, still demanding the truth. Her dad’s name continues to resonate with people of a certain age. But the chord it strikes is fading.
The 43-year-old father-of-nine from the Bogside in Londonderry died three months after he was beaten by RUC officers during a riot in his street in April 1969.
But no one was ever charged and an investigation by an English police chief said there had been a whitewash.
Now in a new documentary, The Life After, about the legacy of the Troubles, Mrs O’Connor is calling for the police to tell the truth about her father’s death, insisting that her family want and need answers.
The Devennys are one of a number of families featured in the 90-minute documentary which was made by Brian Hill and Niamh Kennedy from Century Films in London.
The film screens at the Irish Film Institute’s documentary festival in Dublin this week and will be broadcast by BBC Two next month.
Other killings featured in the documentary include the IRA murder of an Army recruit and his friend; the death of a single mum in an INLA bomb attack on a disco in Ballykelly; and the sectarian slayings of two Catholics by loyalists.
Brian Hill says his research shows that 3,532 people died and 47,541 were injured as a result of the Troubles. The programme is interspersed with poetry written by local poet Nick Laird and read by the relatives. One of the most striking lines is that behind each headline lies a broken heart.
Mr Hill says that many of the murders featured in the film have never been solved. The award-winning documentary and drama director explains: “I’d been thinking for a long time that I would like to make something about the Troubles because it’s an important subject which has been poorly served by British documentary makers.”
Controversy has always raged about the death of Sammy Devenny, described by Mrs O’Connor as a “quiet, innocent” man.
She says it seemed there were riots every Saturday in 1969 and they ended up in her street but on that fateful April afternoon, rioters ran into the Devenny house and were chased by police who beat her father and her siblings with batons.
She thought Mr Devenny was dead and her sister Ann later told John Hume in front of the TV cameras that her father had had 22 stitches in his head and had facial injuries.
Mrs O’Connor says that after his passing “the State protected the police that killed him” but didn’t protect her family and left them to their own devices.
She adds: “It’s very important that people know the story of what really happened. I think we all suffer mentally because of it, even the very fact some of us don’t even want to talk about it anymore.
“It has to be told and I would like it dealt with now and put to bed now so that my children or grandchildren don’t have to do it.”
The Metropolitan Police in England have confirmed they have two files relating to Mr Devenny’s death but they were reclassified in 2012 in order to keep them closed for a further 10 years.
Mrs O’Connor says that just because her father’s death hasn’t been dealt with does not mean it will ever go away. “It won’t,” she says. “It’ll keep raising its head.”
The documentary includes a TV interview from the archives with Mr Devenny’s wife Ann, who says: “Hatred doesn’t harm the person that you hate. It just harms you. It’s you that’s going to get all twisted up.”
Mrs O’Connor says that her mother always believed that the people responsible for Mr Devenny’s death would come forward because they wouldn’t be able to live with their consciences, but they never did.
She also tells the documentary team that on Bloody Sunday she was initially at the head of the civil rights march in Derry but she and her mother became scared and went home, where they heard the shooting by Parachute Regiment soldiers who killed 13 people.
Mrs O’Connor says: “It was terrible, it really was. Everybody knew about the Paras. You know, they didn’t come anywhere unless they were coming in to do something bad, like. They were like the death squad.”
Another interviewee in the documentary is Virtue Dixon, whose daughter Ruth was among 17 people who died in the INLA bombing at the Droppin’ Well disco in Ballykelly in December 1982. Eleven of the victims were soldiers.
Single mother Ruth was celebrating her 24th birthday. After hearing about the explosion, her family waited in the vain hope she would return home.
But later, despairing family members went to Altnagelvin Hospital and found Ruth in the morgue.
Mrs Dixon says she was lying beside a soldier on the floor and the staff hadn’t had time to put “the bits and the bodies all up together”.
Mrs Dixon didn’t see Ruth and says she’s glad she didn’t.
The bomb was brought into the crowded disco by a woman and her daughter and Mrs Dixon says: “I went to the court to see them, it was like Ruth and me and her and her daughter. How could they do that? They were put in jail, but they’re out now. I don’t know how I’d feel if I met them.
“I could talk to them but it would make me sorrowful really, you know, it would make me sad looking at them. I’d probably cry if I met them. I wouldn’t bother fighting with them or nothing like that, but... How they changed so many lives. I couldn’t, I don’t know how I would face it. I might even meet them some time. I don’t know.”
Mrs Dixon says her daughter’s death lives on with her. “You wake to it each morning,” she adds.
And her son Timothy says he doesn’t have a living memory of Ruth, adding: “When I think of her I just see her there in the morgue.”
He says his life was happy and joyful up until the Droppin’ Well bomb. But everything changed after the massacre.
Another relative who is interviewed in the documentary is Sharon Austin, from Derry, whose brother Winston Cross was murdered by the IRA in the city in November 1974.
He had just signed up to join the British Army and went for a drink with a friend, Joseph Slater. Their bodies were found three days later on a mountain and the IRA first said they were spies, then that they were in the UDR and then that the killings were a mistake. Mrs Austin says: “I cried every night of my life from when I was 11 years old until I was a very big grown woman. I hated life. I hated it.”
She also reveals that her mother set fire to her own bedroom when she was in it.
“She wanted to die. To her it didn’t matter that there were four other children. Winston was dead and that’s all she cared about.”
The widow of another victim, John Toland, says she collapsed after hearing that he’d been shot dead by the UDA at his pub in Eglinton on November 22, 1976.
Marie Newton, who is now in her 70s and has remarried, says she was on the verge of suicide after the murder. She adds: “I arranged to take tablets and I thought ‘Tonight’s the night I have to end it.’ And I took the tablets into my bedroom — by the way my children don’t know this — and I thought I’ll go in all the rooms and make sure they’re all sleeping and they’re happy.”
But seeing her children stopped their mother from taking her life.
She burnt the tablets and she says now: “I never looked back after that.”
Another grieving woman, Linda Molloy, tells the documentary makers that she and her husband Pat decided to move to what was considered a safer place in Belfast after her son John said he’d had “great fun” throwing stones at soldiers.
In their new home in north Belfast, John and his siblings grew up mixing with both sides of the community.
But John was murdered just a few hundred yards from his home in August 1996.
He had gone out for the night but Mrs Molloy says the doorbell rang at 2am and neighbours were asking families if their children were at home because a body had been found at the top of the Lansdowne Road. The Molloys thought John was staying with friends but it was established that he was the victim of a vicious stabbing. Mr Molloy said a prayer over his dead son, who even had wounds to the head. Waiting for news back at home was, says Mrs Molloy, the longest hour of her life and when her husband returned she “just looked at his face and just knew”.
Mrs Molloy, who says she doesn’t have hate in her heart for the killers, couldn’t sleep after the murder. She adds: “Every time I closed my eyes I could just see John’s face. It just took ages to realise that he was never coming back.”
Her husband says: “I went to the cemetery every other day, maybe as many as three or four times a week. In the early days of John’s murder I went up so that I could just cry, because I didn’t like crying in front of my kids. I had to be strong for them.”
Mrs Molloy says she was riled by the police saying John was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was 200 yards from his own front door.
She says: “How could he be in the wrong place? And he’s all of 18 years old. What’s a wrong time for him to come home?”
She says she has a strong faith but doesn’t have much hope of receiving justice. “People get away with stuff they shouldn’t be getting away with… Oh, I could give you details, I could name names.
“The person who has killed my son is out there living his life, walking the streets, doing whatever he wants to do, and we’ve had no justice and no closure.”
Mr Molloy says: “I know the murderer of John Molloy and the police know the murderer of John Molloy too, and he’s still out there.”
The grieving father says the killer was never arrested and he cannot forgive him or his friends who watched the killing.
He wonders if they now have children of their own.
In a message to them he asks: “How would you feel if this was done to one of them? How could you not have tried to help a dying man? How could you not have got help or rang someone? Just to leave him lying there on the pavement bleeding.
“I hope you never know what it is to lose a son.
“There’s not a day goes past that I don’t think of John. There’s not a day goes past that I don’t miss him.”
The Life After by Century Films will be screened at the IFI documentary festival in Dublin on Thursday night. For more details go to www.ifi.ie/docfest