Terror at graveside

THE FUNERAL MURDERS BBC2, 11.15pm

“WORDS mean everything over here. Terminology is vital.”

Acclaimed filmmaker Vanessa Engle is in Northern Ireland and has been told quite firmly that she can get into quite a bit of trouble if she uses the wrong words.

She has been told some people even object to the term Northern Ireland – it’s the north of Ireland. This is a place charged with a turbulent history and many years of conflict.

And at one of the worst moments, violence erupted at two successive Republican funerals in Belfast within days of each other.

It started at the funeral of three IRA members, shot by the SAS in Gibraltar.

Loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone killed three mourners, including IRA member Kevin Brady, and injured 60 others.

At Brady’s funeral three days later, two British Army corporals drove into the cortege and nd were beaten and killed by some members of the crowd. It is only now – 30 years after the horrifying events in March 1988 during which hand grenades were thrown in a cemetery and soldiers s were dragged from a car to their deaths – that anyone has agreed to talk about it.

This is a rather bleak documentary, which looks back at those catastrophic days, hearing from republicans, loyalists, security forces and victims’ families, and gaining very different perspectives. The news footage is not easy to watch but it’s a compelling insight into the human side of the tragedies, as people intimately connected to what happened share their moving stories for the first time.