The Troubles’ unhealed wounds
Almost 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the violent legacy of sectarian warfare still haunts Northern Ireland, said Caitlin Thompson in Coda Story. The peace remains tenuous.
ON JAN. 3 in 1976, two Catholic brothers—John Michael and Brian Reavey—and two Protestant brothers—Reggie and Walter Chapman—were playing pool at a pub in a small town in South Armagh, Northern Ireland.
The men, all in their early 20s, had been friendly for years. They played soccer together. Amicable relationships between Catholics and Protestants had become increasingly rare, even in a small rural town. The Reavey brothers went by fake names in the soccer league because they also played sports with the Gaelic Athletic Association, an Irish cultural group that prohibited its members from playing non-Gaelic sports until 1971.
The Troubles had been raging for several years, and this area, south of Belfast and a short distance from the border with the Republic of Ireland, had been especially hard-hit. About 400 people in South Armagh were killed over 30 years—a higher death toll than in any other part of Northern Ireland aside from Belfast.
It’s hard to imagine the violence that plagued South Armagh during the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s until peace was brokered by the Clinton administration in 1998. Northern Ireland is still segregated. Only 7 percent of children go to schools attended by both Catholics and Protestants. In Belfast, gates in towering walls topped with barbed wire close every evening. The deep wounds left on society by the Troubles still fester, represented by neatly kept memorials on roadsides. If you know where to look, each turn in a narrow country road, each old farmhouse at the top of a rolling hill tells the story of a dark moment in a traumatic history.
On that night in January 1976, the Reavey brothers were having a drink at the local pub when they bumped into the Chapman brothers. At one point, a bomb rolled into the bar, but it failed to go off. So once the police and the army had removed the threat, the men carried on with their game of pool.
Within 48 hours, all four of them were murdered.
THE NEXT DAY, on Jan. 4, John Michael and Brian Reavey were at their farmhouse watching the comedy game show Celebrity Square with their 17-yearold brother, Anthony. A gunman barged through the front door and opened fire. John Michael was nearly cut in two by a spray of bullets from a machine gun. Brian was shot in the back trying to get upstairs to hide. The bullet came out through his heart. Anthony hid under the bed, but the gunman found him and filled his abdomen with 17 bullets.
Somehow, Anthony managed to drag himself up the street to a nearby farmhouse. When the neighbor saw the boy, she called for the ambulance, the police, and the priest. Anthony was making a miraculous recovery when he died suddenly 26 days later on January 30 in what the family maintains were suspicious circumstances.
The murder was meticulously planned. Gunmen drove from a farmhouse a mile away. Army checkpoints at both ends of the road ensured nobody saw them coming. After firing off the fatal rounds from a 9mm Luger pistol, a .455 Webley revolver, a 9 mm Parabellum, and a Sterling submachine gun, the gunmen sped away, switching cars, handing off the guns, and burning the vehicle they drove to the attack. It took 12 minutes.
In pursuit of justice for his brothers, Eugene has taken investigators on this route several times in recent years. The gunmen “traveled these roads with impunity. They were never going to be stopped. Because it’s all Protestant country here. So the police would have recognized all these people, and they just waved them on,” Eugene said, pointing across the fields to the road where an officer would have been standing, shining a light to give the gunmen the go-ahead.
Nobody has ever been held accountable. Eugene has dedicated his life to changing that. It has put him on the front lines in a fight between survivors who want the truth and those who have something to lose from it coming out.
Eugene Reavey, who was 28 in 1976, is now in his mid-70s. “I want the truth, if I can get it. Then I want justice, but there’s no such thing,” said Eugene.
The small community was still reeling from the violence at the Reaveys’ when tragedy struck again the next day. On Jan. 5, 1976, Walter and Reggie Chapman were on their way home from work at the Kingsmill plant when their bus stopped suddenly on a secluded country road. Armed men forced the brothers and 10 others off the bus.
The gunmen asked if there were any Catholics among them, and as one man went to step forward, the others pulled him back, thinking he was the target. The Catholic man was allowed to walk away. Eleven Protestants, including Walter and Reggie, were shot in their tracks, left to die on the pavement. Only one man survived.
The South Armagh Republican Action Force, found to be a cover name for the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility for the fatal ambush. Many believed it was retaliation for the murders the day before of the Reavey brothers and members of another Catholic family—the O’Dowds— who lived about half an hour away.
EVERYBODY IN NORTHERN Ireland has their own version of what happened during the Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement ended the bloodshed. But it did not offer a way to grapple with the history of violence. No one was appointed to look into the killings. Later, there were attempts to create a framework to get at the truth of what happened and hold people accountable for their violence. All have failed.
For days after the murder of his brothers, Eugene Reavey waited for the police to come talk to the family, but nobody did.
“I was expecting something. We got nothing,” he told me.
Decades went by, and the Reavey family tried their best to heal. Along the way, a picture started to form of a secretive murder squad in South Armagh operating in the 1970s. International investigators started to look into evidence that security forces in the army and police had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Glenanne Gang, they were responsible for more than 120 murders.
The murder of the Reavey brothers, as well as investigations into other events such as the 1971 torture by the British Army of 14 Catholics known as the “Hooded Men,” get at one of the most contentious features of the bloody conflict: the role security forces played during the Troubles. Were the army and police keeping the peace, protecting society from terrorists? Or were they active participants?
Being a policeman or a soldier in Northern Ireland was a dangerous job. In all, 1,441 members of the British armed forces, including 197 serving Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers, were killed during Operation Banner, the deployment that lasted from 1969 to 2007. Another 319 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary were also killed. Many others still live with the scars, either physical or psychological.
But there is a growing body of evidence that there was collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the police ombudsman, the watchdog body tasked with investigating police killings, has found that RUC officers protected members of loyalist paramilitaries and turned a blind eye as those groups armed themselves with weapons later used in sectarian killings.
EUGENE REAVEY WAS on his way to the hospital to pick up the bodies of his brothers, John Michael and Brian, on Jan. 5, 1976, the day after their murder at the family’s home. “And I was coming up that hill. There was a fellow waving his arms frantically,” Eugene told me as we retraced his steps one morning this May.
“I put the window down and he says, ‘Come on up here, quick. There’s been an awful slaughter.’”
Eugene got out of his car and started walking up the hill when he saw it. At first, he thought there had been an accident and a neighbor’s cows were lying on the street. “There was steam rising out of these bodies, you know,” he said. “It was raining.” It was as if Eugene could see the bloodied street in his mind’s eye as he described “the smell of death” to me. “It haunts me to this day. And such carnage.”
Almost immediately, the accusations started flying. None of the Reaveys were involved in any paramilitary. But police told people the IRA shot the Reavey brothers because they wouldn’t go along with a plot to kill security forces. Or that Eugene was responsible for the murders at Kingsmill. Northern Ireland’s failure to address its contested history has left room for what some historians call permissible lies. In the absence of truth, people fill in their own narratives.
For Eugene, things got worse. For four days after his brothers’ death, police stopped him driving to work, pulled him out of his car and down into a field where they held him on his knees in the river at gunpoint. “And the water was up to there,” he said, pointing to his chin. “And the big guy takes out a gun and puts it to my head and he says, ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ I say, ‘I don’t f---ing know, you needn’t be asking me.’ ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ And that went on five times.”
The rumor that Eugene Reavey was responsible for killing Walter and Reggie Chapman persisted for decades. Twentyfive years later, he was driving home from work when he heard on the radio that the militant Protestant leader Ian Paisley was going to reveal the killers at Kingsmill on the floor of the House of Commons. Eugene didn’t think much of it until he learned that Paisley had named him as the mastermind of the attack.
“I nearly died. And my wife, God help her, she was nuts.”
It was later proved, after a lengthy legal battle and an investigation by the Historical Enquiries Team at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that Eugene Reavey had had nothing to do with the murders at Kingsmill.
But the damage had been done. “People I had known for years just turned their back, walked away. Neighbors wouldn’t speak to me,” Eugene said. “Because no matter where you went. See that man, that’s the man that shot the people at Kingsmill. That went on for years and years and years.”
THE AREA ALONG the Shankill Road in North Belfast, just a few blocks from a peace wall gate that closes at 6 p.m., is unmistakably Protestant. You don’t have to look hard before you spot the red hand of Ulster, red poppies, the Union Jack.
On one corner, behind a black metal gate, there’s a memorial that has a very different tone from the others that dot the city. It’s not about tradition, history, or the bravery of those who fought on one side or another. It’s just angry.
On the walls, there are photos of young children with captions like “murdered by Sinn Fein/IRA for being Protestant,” or “Sinn Fein/IRA’s slaughter of the innocents.” Violent images of carnage caused by bombings are intermixed with photos of IRA members who are now in government. I can’t pull my eyes away from one block of photos of terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and an IRA bombing in London: “IRA—Sinn Fein— ISIS no difference,” reads the caption.
The monument is graphic, inflammatory.
But it’s only one symbol of the embers of the Troubles that are still burning today. In Derry, there are indications of the same anger coming from the opposite side. In one mural, two men wearing balaclavas point machine guns. “Unfinished revolution” is written across the top. Around the city, there are symbols of modern-day paramilitaries, like a sign for the fringe republican group Saoradh with the slogan “Salute the men and women of violence.”
These memorials represent the margins. The vast majority in Northern Ireland support the Good Friday Agreement and do not want a return to violence. But these symbols contribute to an ever-present uneasiness in the air, a fear that peace is tenuous.
Failing to grapple with the past has kept this anger alive. “It’s still raw. Every fifth person you stop on that road will know somebody who died, possibly a relative. And that still hurts people,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican political prisoner and former Sinn Fein director of publicity.
“We are, in a sense, captives of the dead.”