Two weeks of terror
‘WORDS mean everything over here. Terminology is vital.” Acclaimed filmmaker Vanessa Engle is in Northern Ireland and has been told quite firmly – she can get into quite a bit of trouble if she uses the wrong words.
She has even been told that some people object to the term Northern Ireland – it’s the north of Ireland.
It’s a place charged with a turbulent history and many years of conflict.
At one of the worst moments, the violence erupted at two successive Republican funerals in Belfast.
It started at the funeral of three IRA members, shot by the SAS in Gibraltar, when 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 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 were dragged to their deaths, that anyone has agreed to talk about it.
This is a bleak documentary, about that catastrophic fortnight, hearing from Republicans, Loyalists, security forces and victims’ families, 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.