Two decades after a heinous attack, the massacre survivors demanding justice
Emma Rogan lost her dad and Aidan O’Toole was shot in the Loughinisland attack in which six innocent people were killed in 1994. They believe police know the chief suspects – so why have none of them ever been charged?
EMMA Rogan is sitting in the poolroom of The Heights pub, in Loughinisland, inches from the very spot where her father Adrian was shot in the back and killed. As Adrian and 15 other patrons sat watching Ireland play Italy in the 1994 World Cup, a masked gunman burst in the door of the tiny bar and sprayed them with bullets. When the horror was unfolding, eight-year-old Emma was at home playing with the dolly her daddy had bought her that morning.
‘It was our first holiday abroad and on the flight home from Spain, Daddy let us pick out what we wanted so I picked a doll and my brother Tony got a digger,’ remembers Emma, now 32.
‘I never played with it afterwards. It was in my room in a box and I never played it or let anyone touch it — I’d say: “My Daddy gave me that”. I don’t think I’ll ever take it out of the box.’
Adrian, a dedicated GAA fan, had dropped into the pub to pick up tickets to the Down v Monaghan game the next day and stayed on with the tight-knit group of friends to watch the soccer match. The next morning, Emma’s mother Claire woke her to tell her ‘Daddy is dead’, as the nation awoke to front pages dominated, not by Ireland’s historic victory over Italy, but by one of the most brutal and callous sectarian attacks of the Troubles.
Six innocent men were murdered and five seriously injured in what became known as the Loughinisland Massacre.
As we sit in the main lounge of The Heights, in rolling countryside about ten miles from Downpatrick, there’s a dozen locals in the bar. I’m sitting with Emma and Aidan O’Toole — whose father Hugh owns the pub — in the quiet, recently-refurbished pool room next to the main bar.
Behind us there’s now a wall and a door leading into the outside hall but it used to be the main pub entrance — and the doors through which the gunmen burst that fateful night.
Beaming down on us, from a beautiful black marble wall-mounted plaque, are the smiling faces of the men who were slaughtered in the massacre on June 18, 1994 — Emma’s father, Adrian ‘Frosty’ Rogan, then just 34, 87-year-old Barney Green, Malcolm Jenkinson, 53, Eamon Byrne, 39, Patsy O’Hare, 35, and Dan McCreanor, 59.
Aidan, now 50, was 26 back then and a young father to 11-month-old Amy and six-week-old Damhain. On the night of the massacre, Aidan was pouring pints, enjoying the chat, with one eye on the match.
Sitting across from Emma, Aidan relives the horror of that night — as he has done in his mind, every single day since.
‘I was standing talking to Brennie Valentine, having a wee chat,’ he says. ‘I didn’t see anyone come in, I could just hear the cracks and I felt a stinging pain — I just knew it was a shooting.
‘I ran up the bar to get away and next I heard the screeching car outside and I saw all the blood and the carnage. The phone was at the end of the bar so I dialled 999 and said, “Get an ambulance, there’s been a shooting”.’
Aidan had been shot in the kidneys. Minutes later, Emma’s mother Claire unwittingly arrived in the front door to confront the hellish scene of her husband’s body and those of her friends, slumped on top of one another in a bloody pile. Seconds earlier, and she might have been among the victims.
Minutes after the mass slaying, the police arrived, followed by paramedics some 20 minutes later. By then all hell had broken loose as news swept through the sleepy village of the brutal massacre that had just unfolded on their doorsteps.
Six men died instantly, five were seriously injured, while four escaped physically unscathed — although emotionally and mentally scarred beyond measure.
Miraculously, among those who escaped physical injury was Willie O’Hare, whose son Patsy died that night. Willie crawled out the door after the gunman, who callously turned his gun on him at point blank range, but there were no bullets left.
Not so lucky was Brian McLeigh, also in the pub tonight, drinking a pint of Tennent’s in the main bar. He spent nine months in intensive care after the shooting. The gunman shot half his right foot off and his legs and body were riddled with bullets.
Brian pulls up the leg of his trousers to show me his calf, pockmarked with lumps and bumps, where the bullets punctured him. He places my hand on his right thigh, which is hard and lumpy and explains it’s held together with 200 metal pins.
The bullet is still lodged in Aidan O’Toole’s kidney. He remembers watching the funerals of his friends on the TV from his hospital bed. He says with a wry smile and displaying the humour that has kept this community soldered together: ‘I remember they let us smoke in the ward — nobody else, just us.’
He adds, shaking his head: ‘I still can’t get it out of my head. You’re always thinking about it. Yet it still doesn’t seem like it happened. It’s as if it happened to someone else.’
Aidan was discharged from hospital one week later. ‘I didn’t sleep for three months.
‘Joe Rice, my next door neighbour, who was one of the first ones on the scene, sat with me every night. I’d phone him and he’d say: “I’ll be into you now”, and we’d sit, chat and drink tea all night. I was scared of them coming after me at home.’
Aidan takes medication for depression and anxiety to this day and, like many survivors and families who lost their loved ones, he also attended counselling.
‘Guilt was a big thing for me,’ he says. ‘I was behind the bar so I felt guilty, like I should have been in charge. I couldn’t do anything and you know that but in the back of your head, it’s there. Why did I survive?’
Yet, a defiant Aidan refused to let the killers win. Six weeks after the massacre, he was back behind the bar. ‘Canon Bernard McGee came to my da and said, “We have to open again, this pub was the heart of our community”. My dad didn’t want to, he was devastated. I said to him, “When we open again, I want to get back in behind the bar”. We had to open to show they couldn’t beat us.
‘I served the first pint. It was one evening, a Friday, no big announcement, we just opened and I served a pint to Matt Shanks, a wee Protestant man — the pub was always a mix of Protestants and Catholics.’
It’s this titanium community spirit that has not only kept the families
‘I heard the cracks and felt a stinging pain’ His legs and body were riddled with bullets
and survivors going, but growing stronger.
‘If we closed down the pub, there might have been no justice group. People may have gone their separate ways. But we are stronger than that and at our best when we’re together. I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t get back in working behind the bar.’
But didn’t the constant reminders and flashbacks not serve to deepen Aidan’s trauma? ‘For years it was all we spoke about in the bar but it’s so important to talk about these things and not let them eat you up,’ he says.
‘It ripped the community apart. It’s still hard to get over it but you try to live with it. It’s only the strength of the justice group and all the family members that makes you stronger. We’ve sat here and at times have thought: “What’s the point in going on?” But there’s a good fighting spirit. We’re not going to let them win.
‘We all want to keep these men alive in people’s minds. What happened here should never be forgotten. We have to get justice for the six — we can’t forget these six wonderful men.’
The entirely random sectarian attack was claimed by the Ulster Volunteer Force, in retaliation for the killing of three of their own in previous weeks.
In the immediate aftermath of the murders, families believed the RUC’s promises to leave no stone unturned in their bid to track down their loved ones’ killers. But as the years went by with nobody brought to justice, information emerged about police-protected informers being linked to the massacre.
The families rallied to form the Loughinisland Justice Group, along with formidable solicitor Niall Murphy, to demand answers and push for an inquiry into what they believed was a compromised investigation.
In 2011, the Police Ombudsman launched an investigation but concluded there were no major failings in the RUC’s investigation and no evidence of collusion. Enraged families branded the report a whitewash. The courts agreed and it was quashed. In 2016, ombudsman Dr Michael Maguire concluded there had been collusion between the RUC and the UVF. Yet still, no arrests were made.
‘Why?’ has been the dominant question from the families since. It was also the question on everyone’s lips at the New York Film Festival in October, the night Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney premiered his film No Stone Unturned, about the families’ dogged fight for justice. And it’s the question the minds of everyone who sees the meticulously detailed and compelling documentary, which has made the long list for an Academy Award.
Two weeks ago there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when it was screened to 200 family and friends of those killed and injured in Loughinisland GAA Club and last week it opened in cinemas here.
Gibney, journalist Barry McCaffrey and their production team spent five years uncovering unseen police reports and interviewed families, former police officers and experts on the case.
In the film Gibney names, for the first time, those that police evidence — uncovered by the filmmaking team — point to as being responsible for the massacre, although no arrests have been made.
In The Heights, and elsewhere in this tight-knit community. Emma has grown up listening to stories about her father and the others.
To this day, Emma says when a stranger comes into the bar it sets everyone on edge.
Yet being constantly involved in the fight for justice has shaped Emma in ways she could never have imagined. In June this year, she was co-opted to replace Chris Hazzard as South Down Sinn Féin assembly member. ‘It’s been a very steep learning curve,’ she smiles. ‘The long road for justice has definitely impacted our lives but we’re all the stronger for it. If we can give hope to other families, it’s worth it. The film has renewed our sense of determination. For years, nobody gave us any answers, we were fobbed off, they wanted to sweep us under the carpet.
‘We want to see people arrested, charged and convicted of these murders — that’s what we want to see the PSNI doing. It took an investigating journalist, brave filmmakers and families to do this, when the police had this information all along.’
‘We’ll never let it lay down. My nephew is 13 and he’s taught that if you do something wrong you’re punished, but what about the man who shot Grandad in the back? Why is he still running around? My granny and grandad were dignified, quiet people of the generation where you took the hand you were dealt, you say your prayers and trusted the powers that be but our generation is different.
‘We’re not afraid to talk truth to power,’ she says defiantly. ‘We know what’s right and aren’t afraid to stand up. That was my Daddy.
‘We said we will never give up and we will get justice.’
‘We won’t give up until we get justice’