One of the bloodiest weeks of the Troubles
Reporter Ivan Little was at the scene of the Frizzell’s fish shop massacre 25 years ago today, in which nine innocent people were murdered. By the time the week was out, 14 more lay dead
One man told the Tele he later discovered that one of the injured people he helped was the second bomber, Sean Kelly
It was a massacre waiting to happen. Everyone in Northern Ireland knew that loyalist killers would take revenge for the nine Protestant victims of the IRA’s horrific Shankill bombing with a bloodbath of their own. The only imponderable, 25 years ago today, was where and when the UDA/UFF would unleash their vengeance after warning that “Gerry Adams, John Hume and the nationalist electorate will pay a heavy, heavy price” for the Shankill atrocity.
Most people believed that Johnny Adair’s vicious ‘C’ Company wing of the terrorist organisation, who were based in the Shankill, would be the ones to take the savage initiative and slaughter Catholics in Belfast.
But as people in the city held their collective breath — and stayed resolutely indoors at night, spurning anywhere that might be a potential target for a ruthless reprisal — the UFF in Belfast ordered killers from their north Antrim and Londonderry brigade into merciless action.
After rehearsing their brutal attack in an office in the Waterside area, two of the gunmen strolled into the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, a tiny village which was a 15-minute drive from Derry, and with a macabre mocking of the Halloween greeting shouted “Trick or treat” before opening up on revellers in the lounge with an AK-47 and a handgun.
Eight of the 19 people who were hit on Saturday, October 30, 1993 died from their injuries.
The slaying was the bookend of a week of barbarism that started on the Shankill, where I’d been almost frozen in disbelief and horror as I watched civilians and security forces digging frantically among the collapsed ruins of Frizzell’s fish shop for any survivors of the IRA bomb.
Once in a while, there were calls for quiet as rescuers with sniffer dogs and heat-seeking equipment thought they’d heard a cry for help. They hadn’t.
Several people, including a policeman, were injured by falling masonry.
They wiped away the blood and resumed the hopeless search for life amid the devastation. The fury on the road was such that one seasoned journalist fled in fear and a community worker later wrote in a book that I didn’t realise how close I’d come to a “hiding” from people who wanted to take their anger out on someone. Anyone.
I heard ordinary men and women talking about getting guns and going into the Falls Road.
But wiser counsel prevailed.
The IRA admitted responsibility for the Shankill carnage and said their aim had been to kill UDA/UFF leaders meeting in one of their offices above the fish shop, but the loyalists had left their headquarters earlier in the day. The bomb was on an 11-second fuse and IRA man Thomas Begley was among the
people who were killed instantly.
One man, Alfie McCrory, told the Belfast Telegraph that he later discovered that one of the injured people he’d helped that fateful Saturday afternoon was the second bomber, Sean Kelly.
Mr McCrory said if people had known who Kelly was, then they would have killed him.
As the names of the nine Protestant victims were released, it emerged that two children were among the dead.
Seven-year-old Michelle Baird was killed, along with her parents Evelyn Baird and Michael Morrison, who had taken her to Frizzell’s to buy her the crab sticks she loved.
Thirteen-year-old Leanne Murray was in the shop to buy whelks and her mum, Gina, who’d been next door, talked of clawing through the rubble for her daughter.
In the wake of the bombing, Church leaders and politicians pleaded for calm and no retaliation.
Even they knew they were wasting their breath.
What’s forgotten, however, is that Greysteel wasn’t the only response from loyalism in the aftermath of the Shankill.
Six other people were also murdered. Twenty-two-year-old Catholic Martin Moran, the father of a five-week- old baby, was shot just hours after the Shankill bombing by the UDA/UFF as he delivered a Chinese meal to a house off Belfast’s Donegall Pass.
He died two days later.
On the Monday, October 25, a 72-year-old Catholic widower, Sean Fox, was killed by the UVF at his home in Harmin Park, Glengormley.
And, on the Tuesday, I went to a Belfast City Council cleaning depot in Kennedy Way to follow up initial reports of a gun attack there.
Police said a number of men had been shot as the UDA/UFF sprayed the yard with 60 bullets.
Two Catholic council workers, James Cameron and Mark Rodgers, died, but it was obvious the terrorists had been trying to kill many more men.
And it was just as clear that the terrorists wanted to — in the words of one loyalist who spoke to me at the time — “even up the score” for the Shankill with a similarly high death toll.
Security chiefs knew the killings weren’t over and extra troops were ordered onto the streets and police overtime was extended, but the RUC must have known there was no hope of heading off the violence.
I interviewed Chief Constable Hugh Annesley at Woodburn police station after the Kennedy Way murders and he denied the situation was spiralling out of control and insisted that it wasn’t “an Armageddon”.
On the Wednesday, I was reporting from the Ballymac restaurant at Stoneyford, where the night before the UFF had aimed an automatic weapon at patrons. Only a gun jam saved their lives.
In the middle of the mayhem, a British soldier was charged with attempting to murder prominent republican Eddie Copeland at the Begley wake-house in the Ardoyne area.
As funeral followed funeral of the week’s victims, tensions rose even further after Gerry Adams was seen on news bulletins, carrying Begley’s coffin.
Johnny Adair, who said he thought he was the prime target of the Shankill bombers, was said to have brazenly told a policeman who stopped him that he was on his way to plan a mass murder.
But the UVF were upping the relentless ante as well. On the Friday, I reported on how they shot dead Catholic brothers Rory and Gerard Cairns at their home in Bleary, Co Down, where the killers had pushed past their sister, who was celebrating her 11th birthday.
But still no one believed for a second that the loyalists’ hunger for revenge had been satiated. A mass murder was still seen as almost inevitable.
After the stresses of the week that had been in it, I decided I couldn’t face a weekend of the unbearable pressure-cooker atmosphere that was gripping Belfast.
I did a grotesque tour of Northern Ireland in my mind, trying to rule out anywhere that I thought the terrorists might strike again. I chose Enniskillen and, on the Saturday night, my wife and I relaxed over dinner in an Italian restaurant until a pager message from my news editor had me driving to Greysteel early the next morning.
I’d never heard of the place, but people were already starting to lay flowers outside the Rising Sun pub at breakfast time.
Unsurprisingly, the sense of despair on the Shankill just days earlier was mirrored at Greysteel, where it was revealed that while the UDA/UFF had Catholics in their sights, they also murdered two Protestants, one of them, John Burns, who had served with the UDR.
Just like the Shankill, the funerals were huge and even though there was talk of a peace process in the air, the sense of despondency was unmistakeable.
I watched in a Greysteel graveyard as the SDLP’S John Hume, who had been criticised for talking to Gerry Adams and trying to nudge the IRA along the road to peace, cried uncontrollably at the funerals of the Rising Sun victims.
Four of the killers were later jailed for life. After his first court appearance in Limavady, one of them, a snarling, manic Torrens Knight, was filmed laughing and screaming abuse at victims’ relatives.
Along with photographs of the Shankill victims, the faces of the Greysteel killer and the Greysteel mourner were to become the abiding images of a time that Northern Ireland would never forget.