Troubles revelations
The truth behind secret executions
THEY were horror stories whispered throughout Troubles-era Northern Ireland. Tales of extra-judicial executions, state-sanctioned assassinations and sadistic torture rooms. The rumours were scarcely believable because of their brutal, bloody nature. However, Martin Dillon, a young Belfast journalist, made a startling discovery – the stories were true, in every hideous detail. Dillon turned appalling conspiracy theory into ghoulish, gruesome reality. Through his investigative journalism, and with little regard to personal safety, Dillon kept digging when many – from Republican and Loyalist terrorists right up to UK prime ministers – would rather he didn’t. In his memoir, Crossing The Line: My Life On The Edge – extracts of which the Sunday Herald runs exclusively today – Dillon takes us from pre-Troubles history through the nationalist uprising, British shoot-to-kill policy and into the horrors of the loyalist ‘Romper Rooms’.
LIFE BEFORE THE TROUBLES
GROWING up in 1950s West Belfast, it was natural to feel trapped by the physical contours of the city and stories of its troubled past. In the Falls area, Black Mountain rose above the narrow, intersecting streets of Protestant and Catholic enclaves. A few years before I came into the world, the mountain offered nightly shelter for families hiding from German bombers pounding Belfast. The city, being an industrial hub for the British war effort, suffered terribly during the Blitz whereas the Nazis spared Dublin because it was neutral territory.
My grandfather, Patrick Dillon, and his brother, John, fought bravely on the Normandy beaches, yet their sacrifice was somehow diminished in Protestants’ eyes because many Catholics throughout Ireland were branded as anti-British.
That perception of Catholics was not entirely true but, like so much history in Ireland, myths trump facts.
Interestingly, more Catholics than Protestants on the island fought and died in the ranks of the British Army in the Second World War.
It is equally the case that there was profound anti-Britishness throughout Ire- land, which Republicans transformed into a pro-Nazi mentality. It was manifested in the refusal of the Dublin government to cede important ports to Britain to make it easier to defend Allied shipping in the Atlantic from German gunboats and submarines. Members of the IRA even met leading German military figures, convinced if Germany won the war the IRA would be considered a friend and ally. The most egregious example of pro-Nazi sentiment was the decision by Irish leader, Éamon de Valera, to open a condolences book at the German Legation in Dublin so people could express their regret at the death of Adolf Hitler.
In my youth, I knew little of the intricacies of the war period as they related to Ireland, yet I was familiar with my tribe’s attachment to Irish history. In Belfast, you learned history sitting on your grandmother’s knee, or in my case from the De La Salle Brothers in St Finian’s primary school on the Falls Road, where my fellow pupils included Gerry Adams, a future IRA leader.
In St Finian’s, the past was a potent recounting of Ireland’s brutal colonisation by the British. Tales of the slaughter of men, women and children, ordered by English generals like Oliver Cromwell, made Irish rebels of old and IRA gunmen of the 20th century seem god-like and heroic.
Built into the narrative was an understanding that the Northern Ireland state was illegal, and its institutions, especially the judiciary, as well as the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its paramilitary force, the B-Specials, were mechanisms for oppression. Our eyes were directed towards “The South” as the finest example of how people lived in freedom. As a child, I imagined the border separating the two parts of the country had to be so high no-one could see over it.
THE TINDERBOX
ON June 2, 1969, I turned 20 and officially became a reporter with the Irish News (a Catholic Nationalist daily paper in Belfast). In June and July 1969, the rhetoric on the streets was shrill and threatening. For those of us who lived through the Troubles, four days of August 1969 symbolised much of what was wrong with our society. In that short time span, sectarianism opened up festering wounds, vigilantism became the norm, paranoia spread like a virus, and British troops marched into the Lower Falls, somewhat bemused and bewildered.
Most of them had probably no understanding of the Ireland issue, and some might have thought Northern Ireland was a far-flung colony of the United Kingdom.
Violence erupted in Derry on August 12. It began, as it always did, in the traditional way when thousands of Apprentice Boys arrived from across the Province to commemorate the defence of the city against the forces of the Catholic English King James in 1689. Community leaders on both sides should have realised calmer heads were needed that August day and holding a parade might invite a riot. Trouble erupted when Apprentice Boys on the ramparts began hurling coins into the Bogside. A short
time later, the main Apprentice Boys’ parade snaked towards Waterloo Place on the edge of the Bogside where a large Catholic crowd, hemmed in by lines of policemen, met it.
Leading Catholic Nationalist figures like John Hume tried to calm the Catholics, but most had little appetite for sanity, including the police. In Waterloo Place, insults exchanged between the two camps failed to increase the tempo. It appeared the situation might be contained until someone on the Catholic side threw a handful of nails at the police lines. It was enough for all hell to break loose. Acting on orders, the police cleared Waterloo Place and charged the Catholics. Apprentice Boys joined the police in what would quickly become known as the “Battle of the Bogside”.
By the morning of August 13, the police in Derry had been fought to a standstill, their lines severely weakened by scores of injured. Nevertheless, Bogsiders called to Catholics elsewhere in Northern Ireland to open up fronts to take the heat off them. They responded with impromptu rioting. In Belfast, Catholic mobs attacked police stations in the Falls area and shots rang out.
The Irish prime minister, Jack Lynch, warned his government would “not stand idly by”. It was an incendiary threat, which led many Protestants to fear an invasion from the South was imminent. When James Callaghan, the British prime minister, heard Lynch’s warning, he told his advisers the Irish premier “had lost his mind”. On the evening of August 14, Protestants unleashed a backlash. Not surprisingly, the thrust of the counter-attack came in the area where I was born but no longer lived: the Lower Falls.
It was vicious and well-orchestrated, involving extreme Loyalists, as well as members of the RUC and B-Specials, some of whom were out of uniform. Protestant mobs swept towards the Falls, systematically set- ting alight Catholic homes in Cupar Street, Dover Street, Percy Street and Conway Street. Catholics in those streets piled what belongings they could on carts and fled. In the Clonard area, fire claimed houses alongside Clonard Monastery, and there was a real fear the monastery would be overrun and its priests slaughtered.
Cathal Goulding’s IRA was unprepared since there were probably only six or seven weapons in the hands of the Falls area IRA.
Strolling through the Falls on the afternoon of August 15, I was shocked at the scale of the devastation. Rows of homes were still smouldering, and people wandered aimlessly, as if in a daze.
At the corner of Clonard and Bombay Streets, a young man with a shotgun brushed past me. I recognised him from my primary schooldays in St Finian’s. Within minutes, he vanished into an alleyway, accompanied by a second gunman carrying a Winchester rifle. RUC documents later presented to the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the events of August 1969, claimed 21 Protestants in the area behind the monastery were treated for non-life-threatening gunshot wounds from two weapons – a shotgun and a rifle.
In the aftermath of the attacks in the Falls and Bogside, barricades appeared in Catholic and Protestant districts and vigilantism took hold of Belfast and Derry. After the communal horrors of August, a new phase of the conflict took shape, exposing even deeper sectarian tensions. It began with the rise of vigilantism.
THE RISE OF THE VIGILANTE
BELFAST was quickly transformed into a surreal and dangerous place. Parts of the Falls and Shankill were all but sealed off from the outside world, and young men manning the blockades were members of hastily formed citizens’ defence committees or new paramilitary recruits. They tended to be unpredictable and therefore dangerous and unpleasant.
For many of them, protecting their own people was considered a badge of honour. So they often displayed arrogance and swaggered through the streets like they were in a wild west show. Scores of pubs across Belfast were looted and razed to the ground during the August mayhem. They were replaced by illegal drinking clubs, known on the Catholic side as “sheebeens”. They became the focus of the social life of each community, providing cheap booze and in many instances live music.
Before long, they fell under the control of paramilitaries, who used their profits to pay their staff salaries and to buy weapons. Criminal elements also ran some clubs and shared their profits with gunmen. The club phenomenon mirrored life in the speakeasies of 1920s Prohibition America. Behind the revelry and entertainment, terror and criminal scams arose from smoke-filled back rooms.
In Catholic neighbourhoods, people exchanged rumours, talked politics, listened to revolutionary tunes and drank excessively in them. The violence had suddenly created an alternative universe in which everyone seemed to be drinking heavily or popping pills to stop hyperventilating. As time passed, a National Health centre, which treated aggressive psychopaths, closed for lack of patients being referred. Society was dysfunctional at its core, lacking a mental health focus, which would traditionally have been applied to those with dangerous personality traits. Prior to the Troubles, men with very violent tendencies were shunned or filtered out of society and placed into restricted care. The explosion of naked anger and tribalism had the opposite effect.
The sadistic Shankill Butchers and others like them were often glorified because they directed their sadism at “the enemy”. It should be noted, though, that psychopaths of this kind were feared by the people they lived among.
Neither community was spared the phenomenon, but Loyalist paramilitaries carried out most of the grisly murders involving torture. It could be argued their crimes reflected a religious, tribal war, but they were also part of the inhumanity that found expression in an atmosphere of lawlessness. In a society in conflict, humanity and many social norms frequently do not apply.
People can find it difficult to distinguish between true ideologues and individuals living out bizarre fantasies.
As widespread sectarian violence engulfed the society in the early 1970s, Loyalist paramilitaries, including the Shankill Butchers, used some of the illegal drinking clubs in the Shankill and in East Belfast as killing sites. It was not uncommon for gangs to abduct Catholics off the streets late at night and take them to clubs to be beaten and tortured in front of revellers. Some of the most notorious murders I documented in my books The Shankill Butchers and Political Murder In Northern Ireland, happened in clubs.
My friend, James Nesbitt, the detective who eventually brought most of the Shankill Butchers to justice, once shared with me the story of how he raided a club in the Shankill on a Saturday morning. He concluded from the blood-spattered walls and ceiling that someone had been beaten and killed there the previous evening, more likely than not in front of a drunken, cheering audience.
He was stunned by the fact no-one had felt compelled to clean up the blood.
TORTURE AND ‘ROMPER ROOMS’
IESTABLISHED excellent contacts with some Belfast detectives, and they helped me recognise familiar patterns in many of the sectarian killings, as well as the suspected loyalties of the likely culprits. An incident, however, encouraged me to think I was not getting to the heart of the killing phenomenon.
One morning when I got to the Belfast Telegraph newsroom (where I now worked), I received an assignment to report on the discovery of a body in an entry in East Belfast. I arrived around eight o’clock and because I was dressed in a raincoat and carrying a notepad, a policeman assumed I was a member of a forensic team and allowed me into the entry.
The sight before me was horrifying: the tortured body of 23-year-old Patrick Benstead, a Catholic from the Short Strand area. He had been missing since the previous afternoon when his mother sent him on a shopping errand. He was known to behave immaturely, and people said his speech confirmed his low intelligence. His killers had subjected him to the most terrible torture. A bullet to the head had ended his life, but the palms of his hands and feet were burned, and a cross was branded into his back with the number four.
The killing occurred in a part of the city where several Protestants were subjected to similar treatment by the IRA. In those cases, as in the case of Benstead, authorities denied the victims had been tortured.
When I saw the torture marks on Patrick Benstead’s body, I rushed to a nearby funeral parlour – the only place I was likely to find a phone. Right away, I dictated my story to the newsdesk only to be told an hour later it could not be published as written. The RUC press office had denied my torture claims. With this rejection, I suspected they might have created a policy to withhold information from the public. Even now, I know of no reports of killings at the time in which the RUC confirmed torture, yet it was a prominent feature of many of them.
For example, in July 1972, two Protestant men in their early 30s, David Fisher and Hugh Clawson, were abducted by Catholic vigilantes as they walked past The Bone area. They were returning to the River Streets late at night after drinking heavily in an illegal drinking club run by the UDA in the Alliance district, a 10-minute walk from The Bone. They were abducted as they strolled home along the Oldpark Road. Vigilantes guarding The Bone knew the two men were strangers. When they learned they were also Protestants, this sealed their fate.
They were beaten, interrogated and at least one, if not both, was burned with cigarettes. In the early hours of the following day, the vigilantes led the victims to the grounds of Cliftonville Cricket Club opposite Chestnut Gardens and shot each man in the head and neck at close range with an automatic rifle. Fisher took three bullets and Clawson five, a number that suggested overkill. The torture wounds confirmed the high levels of revenge and anger in the minds of those who carried out the double killing. In that case, as in others, the RUC made no mention of the manner in which the victims were brutalised.
Had denial of torture in the Benstead murder been an uncommon occurrence, I might have dismissed it as an example of someone in the police press office not doing his job. But I detected a pattern in the way the RUC responded to requests for detailed information about a growing number of grisly murders. I grew highly sceptical of the dissemination of information from official sources from 1972 onwards, especially when it originated from British Army HQ and its press operations. My instinct was to personally undertake detailed background work on certain stories, particularly on the increasing numbers of political assassinations. I spoke to detectives, paramilitaries and their contacts, and to ordinary people in Republican and Loyalist districts. By researching in that fashion, I learned about “Romper Rooms”, which were essentially killing rooms used by murder gangs.
Romper Rooms were basically Loyalist paramilitary drinking dens where victims, randomly snatched off the streets, were beaten and tortured in front of revellers and paramilitary members. The Romper Rooms came into being in 1972 and were bizarrely named after a local children’s television programme hosted by Helen Madden, whom I later worked with in the BBC. As Miss Helen on Romper Room, she entertained young children with songs, poems and toys. Loyalist killers subsequently adopted the term “rompering” to denote the savagery meted out in their illegal clubs. Ironically, Loyalist paramilitaries caught up in feuds or judged to have been informers were also “rompered” by their own people. In order to give the reader a sense of what happened during a rompering, the following is a description of some of the events that took place when Lenny Murphy, the leader of the Shankill Butchers, decided to romper Nogi Shaw, a member of a rival UDA team with whom he was feuding. He chose the Lawnbrook Social Club, a UVF hangout, as the venue for the rompering. Murphy sent some of his murderous buddies to fetch Shaw, and they brought him to the club where Murphy and 20 others were drinking.
The following passage is from my 1989 book, The Shankill Butchers: As Shaw was dragged into the club, drinks were abandoned and he was set upon, kicked and beaten by those who fought to get closest to him. After several minutes, Murphy and Mr A (name withheld for legal reasons) intervened and requested Shaw be carried to the front of a small wooden stage normally reserved for musicians. Murphy placed a chair on the stage and Shaw was strapped to it. The stage overlooked the whole of the club and its drinking environs and while Shaw was being tied to the chair Murphy summoned his men to leave the bar and move closer to the stage. Most of the 20 or so men did so, taking their drinks with them. Murphy left the stage for several minutes and returned brandishing a Browning pistol. While the others waited in anticipation, he walked to the front of the stage and to within a few feet of Shaw. Murphy said it was time to interrogate Shaw and began striking him several times across the head and face with the pistol butt. He continued beating Shaw to a background chorus of “kill the bastard”.
Murphy told 18-year-old Shaw he was going to die and the young man cried out in fear and pain. Murphy then discussed with Mr A, in front of the victim, whether they should draw straws to find out who should have the honour of killing him. Straws were drawn but the young man selected to undertake the killing refused to do it. Murphy decided to do it himself. He first shot Shaw through the wrist and then several times through the head. When Shaw’s dead body fell to the floor Murphy turned to his men and said, “Clean up the f*****g mess!”
Had denial of torture in the Patrick Benstead murder been an uncommon occurrence, I might have dismissed it as an example of someone in the police press office not doing his job. But I detected a pattern in the way the RUC responded to requests for detailed information about a growing number of grisly murders