Casting new light on little-known Troubles massacre
MORE than half of the 3500 people who died in “The Troubles”, the harmless-sounding expression we use to cover the civil war in Northern Ireland that lasted almost 30 years, were innocent civilians.
Each and every death – civilian, military, paramilitary – was an awful, bloody trauma for the relatives of the victims.
But how many of these needless deaths could have been avoided if lessons had been learned early on in the conflict?
We all know about Bloody Sunday, when Britain’s elite Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed people in Derry’s Bogside in January 1972.
It was a turning point that escalated the cycle of violence.
We know how the Saville inquiry, held decades later, found all the victims of the killings that day were innocent.
But before Bloody Sunday, there was the Ballymurphy Massacre.
Less known, but equally startling, it involved the Parachute Regiment and foreshadowed all that was to come.
In Ballymurphy, a Belfast housing estate, in August 1971, 11 civilians were killed by the Army.
The victims included a priest, Father Hugh Mullan, 40, who attended a man who had been shot, as well as a mother of eight children.
The Parachute Regiment stated, just as they later did on Bloody Sunday, that they were shot at by Republicans and described the victims as gunmen and terrorists.
Several of the dead were shot repeatedly and no credible evidence has ever been presented suggesting they were armed.
In a powerful new documentary, Scottish journalist Callum Macrae has told the story and allowed the relatives of survivors to give their testimony, some of them for the first time.
The Ballymurphy Precedent is showing at the Glasgow Film Theatre this weekend.
It will be also be broadcast on Channel 4 next month.
On September 10, a renewed inquest begins into the Ballymurphy deaths. It cannot establish criminal responsibility, but can be a step, like Callum’s film, towards establishing the truth.