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The People of the New Lodge
It was early evening. Belfast was Belfast. A fella came into a café on York Road. February 3rd, 1973.
Where were you? Not even born?
This happened.
The café was owned by Alfred Fusco, an Italian Catholic. People thought the customer was drunk. He produced a sub-machine gun and sprayed the owner who was fifty years of age and married with four children. He was killed. Upon hearing the shots a Protestant pensioner, Samuel Reynolds, died from a heart attack.
At half ten that night, six nationalists from North Belfast were still alive. They might have heard the news. Who knows. They went about their short lives.
Two of them, Jim Sloan, aged 19, and Jim McCann, aged 18, were about to leave Lynch’s Bar at the top of the New Lodge Road.
19 and 18.
A car drew up and a passenger opened fire and the two lost their lives.
A Catholic passer-by heard the shooting, but could not place it, saw the getaway car, thought it was the IRA, had seen British military vehicles in a side street, parked in the way of the getaway car, and was convinced they were going to be caught. The car sailed through and was later found.
It was found outside Tennents Street RUC/British army barracks.
Such a long runback. Such a risk they ran.
Policemen - thirty years older now, promoted to detectives and superintendents, whose nephews, if not sons, wink at you everyday as the delectable and friendly Police Service for Northern Ireland - back then said that the killings were ‘inexplicable’, another one of those - to be - one thousand, ‘motiveless’ killings. Nine millimetre bullet casings were found in the car. Some time later the UDA, in an interview with, I believe, Jack Holland, said that they were working hand-in-hand with the British army and that it was one of their specialities to carry out at an attack and provoke a republican response so that British soldiers could shoot active-service IRA Volunteers.
Jim Sloan and Jim McCann were in the IRA. They were not on active service; nor was another victim, Volunteer Tony Campbell. In fact, another fella was about to leave the bar in front of Sloan and McCann, only he realised that he had a phone call to make and let the lads go out the door.
A few days before the shootings the British army had been issued with the latest technology - night-sights. That night they shot most of their victims through the head. They said that they had shot six gunmen and wounded a seventh. They have never retracted that statement, though the inquests found that there was no forensic evidence to link the men with weapons. All the families were given compensation, though most were given derisory sums.
The men who died.
Jim Sloan, Jim McCann, Tony Campbell, John Loughran, Brendan Maguire, Ambrose Hardy.
The men who shot them?
Anonymous. Protected. The law. The government. The authorities. The newspapers. History. The real gunmen.
Now represented, defended and protected by Tony - the IRA must disband - Blair.
But now the people of the New Lodge Road are fighting back through their community representatives and groups, and next week, on Friday and Saturday, November 22nd and 23rd, the families of the dead are organising an inquiry and seeking answers into these murders which were never properly investigated by the authorities.
Back then, in 1973, the nationalist community was disorganised and besieged and had been deserted, more or less, by the Irish government. Even so, Sinn Fein, the Catholic church, then, lawyers such as SDLP Councillor Pascal O’Hare, Paddy McGrory (who later represented the families of the Gibraltar Three), Ted Jones, and a priest, Father Blaney, attempted to carry out a number of fact-finding inquiries to nail the official lie. They were vindicated in-so-far-as the inquests ruled that none of the accused was armed or involved in aggressive activity at the time they were shot dead.
The inquiry organisers, among them, Paul O’Neill, Tommy Quigley and Irene Sherry, on very limited resources, which involves most of the jurists paying their own air-fares, accommodation and expenses, have diligently researched that night in February 1973. They have knocked on doors throughout North Belfast; found the people extremely generous; have raised funds (with some brilliant anecdotal accounts about the enthusiasm of poor pensioners!); coaxed frightened people into giving testimony and have been boosted by the firm of Peter Madden & Finucane which, in the pioneering spirit of Pat Finucane, has sponsored a number of lawyers, including American, Colleen Kerr, to dedicate their time into researching what happened that night.
In contrast to the response they have received on the ground and from the victims’ families the group have received no replies to the letters they have written to the Northern Ireland Office, the General Officer Commanding of the British Army, the Department of Public Prosecutions, the RUC/PSNI, or Nuala O’Loan of the Ombudsman’s Office. When ‘North Belfast News’ asked the British army to stand over its version of events it was told, “Fuck off.”
“So far,” says Paul O’Neill, “the whole history of this event has been told by the British, the British media and the British military. The people’s history, the people’s version of what happened that night hasn’t been told or documented. We have fifty witnesses whom the RUC never sought. The relatives are not into vindictiveness, are not looking for revenge, for soldiers to be charged or to be jailed. They just want the truth and, from our point-of-view, the truth is revealing about the hand-in-glove nature of the relationship between loyalist paramilitaries and the British army.
“Like their strategy in Derry on Bloody Sunday it seems that they expected the IRA to spill onto the streets after the initial shooting outside Lynch’s bar. The Brits had sand-bagged emplacements at Edlingham Street from early in the day, then, that night, opened fire on people on the New Lodge. It was only later that the IRA came out but no IRA people were wounded or killed on active service.
“However, the fact that the IRA was involved at all has been the pretext for much of the southern media in Ireland to ignore our press releases and calls for coverage.”
Tony Campbell was out for his nineteenth birthday.
John Loughran was in bed, getting ready to watch an Elvis Presley movie, ‘Flaming Star’, when he went out to help a neighbour.
Brendan Maguire had the ’flu but decided to go out and meet a friend. He drank a coke.
He drank a coke and was shot dead.
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison