‘I still regret persuading mybrotherto return to the barracks, his death broke up the family’
This Friday marks the end of the Government’s public consultation into addressing the legacy of the Troubles. Each day this week the Belfast Telegraph is publishing thought-provoking interviews highlighting how victims have been affected by violence
“I’VE lived my entire adult life regretting that I persuaded my younger soldier brother to return to the Army just hours before he was murdered on the M62 motorway.”
Albert Walsh talks through tears as he recalls how his 17-year-old sibling Les died after a Provisional IRA bomb exploded in a coach carrying off-duty British Armed Forces personnel and their family members.
Twelve people — nine soldiers and three civilians, including Leslie David Walsh and a family of four — were killed by the blast in northern England on February 4, 1974, while 38 others suffered non-fatal injures.
Although 44 years have now passed, it still seems like yesterday for 64-year-old Albert, who dropped his brother and best friend off in Manchester where he boarded a bus bound for Catterick military base.
“Les had been home for the weekend and had to go back to camp that Sunday,” Mr Walsh said. “They’d put on coaches because of a railway strike and I took him from our house in Tyldesley to Piccadilly Station.
“We were really close. He honestly didn’t want to go back. He was so happy. I think he’d met a young girl.”
Albert added: “I told Les that he had to go back, as otherwise he’d be put on a charge and subsequently have his leave cancelled. Les eventually accepted this fact — and I’ve lived with that regret ever since.”
The Burnley-based retired car dealer said Les loved being in the Army and had made great mates prior to his untimely death, which had a devastating impact on those he left behind, especially parents Jack and Doris, now deceased.
“Les was born very unwell and doctors initially didn’t think he’d make it,” said Mr Walsh, who has another brother, Johnny (72) and two sisters, Lola (74) and Pat (69).
“When he died it broke up the family. My mum took it the hardest. She was broken-hearted and never got over it; my dad turned to drink. Before that we were a happy family but that was the catalyst to it falling apart.”
Recalling his refusal to visit the funeral parlour, preferring to remember Les as he was, Mr Walsh said: “I was the last person in our family to see him and have a conversation with him. That’s how I wanted to remember Les.”
The father-of-two added: “I coped with Les’s death by immersing myself in work, but a big part of my life had gone. To this day it still feels as though a part of me is missing and I always wonder how his life would have turned out if he were here.”
The Northern Ireland Office has asked for views on how a Historical Investigations Unit (HIU) — comprising a caseload of about 1,700 Troubles-related deaths and aiming to complete its work in five years — would operate.
But the Walsh family will be excluded from the process because Les’s murder took place in England. He said: “We never got justice for Les. We feel cheated because we don’t have access to HIU.”
Kenny Donaldson of Innocent Victims United said there were 129 Troubles-related deaths in Great Britain, with at least 120 of the victims not involved in terrorist organisations.
He said there were also “515 members of Regular Army Regiments, with the vast majority of surviving families living across Great Britain”.
Mr Donaldson said that innocent victims in Great Britain have been denied truth and accountability redress and have been prevented from obtaining practical support accessed by their Northern Irish counterparts.
“After campaigning vociferously for over five years, South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF) became the first victims’ group to have a base in Great Britain (London) where it now highlights and campaigns for redress for such individuals,” he said.
“The current proposals mean that the families of the Harrods bomb, Deal Barracks, Regent’s Park and so many other atrocities will not have access to the proposed new investigation-based legacy structure — HIU.
“It is untenable that victims and survivors will be further discriminated against because of their geographical location.
“The effects of the Northern Ireland Troubles stretched way beyond the six counties of this region of the United Kingdom and so too must the legacy response from Government.”
The word “legacy” has dominated the news in recent weeks, with the latest attempt at dealing with our Troubles past. For those who were, mercifully, untouched by that evil, October is just another month. But for many families, the past and what happened to our loved ones is, unfortunately, with us every month and will continue to invade our daily lives far into the future. The pain never stops. That’s the real legacy of our Troubles.
Mine is only one of many such stories of lingering loss and heartache. It’s 30 years this month since two IRA gunmen walked into my family-run ice cream parlour, Barnam’s World of Ice Cream in Belfast, pretending to be customers. Two men with an unquenchable thirst, not for ice cream, but for revenge and a callous desire to honour their comrades killed in Gibraltar just months earlier.
I’ve spent those 30 years seeking the truth about the unsolved murder of my brother, John, whom the gunmen brutally shot and killed that night — an off-duty police officer, who had nothing to do with what happened in Gibraltar.
But, in the gunmen’s eyes, even off-duty, unarmed and vulnerable, while serving ice cream to children, he was a “legitimate target”.
That was all the excuse they needed for killing him: any target would do to satisfy their hunger for revenge.
Two men so filled with blind, bloodthirsty hatred that they considered two teenage customers equally guilty and they shot them as well in their lust for retaliation; to “even the score” in their tit-for-tat mentality.
Thankfully, those teenagers survived.
Over those 30 years, I have listened as politicians and chief constables continually said victims and their families were important and that the legacy of the past must be dealt with, but did nothing worthwhile to achieve that hollow promise.
So, 30 years after John’s cold-blooded murder, I still wait for someone to tell me the complete truth. The unpalatable truth — that Special Branch members probably listened and recorded in an IRA safe house my brother’s murder being plotted. A safe house that, unknown to the IRA, had already been bugged by Special Branch with sophisticated listening devices.
Instead of preventing John’s murder, did some members of Special Branch spend time preparing their persuasive 30 pieces of silver to put before the godfather as part of their plan to recruit him as a new informant?
Did they continue to listen as the godfather and the gunmen rejoiced after they murdered John?
How many more 30 pieces of silver changed hands over the past 30 years to Special Branch/MI5-controlled killer/ informants with their approval and guidance?
Sadly, truth and justice for victims and survivors have been forever tarnished, along with all those corrupt and grubby 30 pieces of silver.
I often wonder if the gunmen are still proud of killing the ice cream man. As they celebrated their many Christmas days and birthdays with their own families over the past 30 years, did they ever remember all the other anniversaries they created for so many broken-hearted, grief-stricken victims’ families, whose loved ones they had murdered?
After New York’s mayor ludicrously renamed St Patrick’s Day “Gerry Adams’ Day” earlier this year, Adams, when asked by a journalist if violence was a legitimate means to achieve political aims, answered yes, violence could be considered legitimate, in “given circumstances”. A shameful answer, revealing he is still willing to spill out his bitter, poisonous, apologist-for-violence venom and teach more impressionable young people that violence is okay — under “given circumstances”.
I presume Adams includes the brutal killing of innocent people, such as Joanne Mathers, a young mother collecting census forms, or Mary Travers, a young schoolteacher coming home from Sunday Mass, or 12-year-old Tim Parry and three-year-old Jonathan Ball in Warrington in his catch-all “given circumstances” justification.
You can never rewrite those sorts of wrongs, Mr Adams. They weren’t legitimate acts then, under any circumstances, and they are not justifiable today, or in the future. There are no “given circumstances” when violence is ever legitimate.
All violence and all murders are wrong — no matter what organisation is responsible. There is always a better way to achieve one’s aims.
I sincerely hope, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, that our politicians — from all parties — learn something from the mistakes and rhetoric of the past and choose their eulogising words more carefully in the future.
Victims and survivors have grown weary and understandably frustrated and angry waiting for answers. Many have died never knowing the truth and others will continue to do so. A shameful situation.
As I remember my brother John, 30 years after his name was added to the long list of Lost Lives of our Troubles past, and review the latest legacy consultation scheme that puts the onus on the thousands of long-suffering survivors and victims’ families to hold out their Oliver Twist begging bowls and plead for more false promises, I hope it doesn’t turn out to be yet another costly and lengthy academic talking shop.
It shouldn’t have needed a questionnaire and consultation to tell those in authority what victims and survivors want; we’ve been telling them for years, summed up in two simple words — justice and truth — that will, hopefully, not remain hidden, callously swept under the Troubles’ bloodsoaked carpet of deceit for another
30 years.
Thirty years after John’s cold-blooded murder, I wait for someone to tell me the complete truth
❝ I do hope that this doesn’t turn out to be yet another costly, lengthy academic talking shop