Ballymurphy findings due today.
All innocent.
They saw this coming
Good background article here
Not that you’d compare, but worse than Bloody Sunday in many regards. In Derry there was a march and stone throwing youths and later some shots fired at the army… This was people just going about their lives in their own estate. It was premeditated murder.
Has Johnny Mercer commented?
Absolutely horrific. And that these families should have had to wait 50 years to even get to this stage.
Some of them were only 19, 20. They should be still alive to this day, maybe with kids and grandkids.
I’ve argued for years that Ballymurphy set the scene for Bloody Sunday. The Parachute regiment murdered 10 people there without consequence. A few months later they headed to Derry knowing full well exactly what they could get away with.
Wednesday 9pm Channel 4 The Ballymurphy Precedent
Agreed … and i’ve watched the doc, harrowing viewing.
We’ve a large population of people down south who wont bat an eyelid at such atrocities … they’ve been conditioned over years and years to believe it was all IRA incited … People like John Bruton (the sensible voice on unification apparently) , Eoghan Harris, Ryan Tubridy, Neale Richmond, Bob Geldof - people of influence… and a host of others. They have lectured us on the northern position, telling us those nasty northerners hijacked our culture and our flag and brought shame on us as a people - when in fact, it was us who abandoned them to the hands of British murder squads… I despise these people more than anything.
a noble post
Don’t forget the cowardly Cork cunt who was in power at the time and expelled those who tried to help Irish nationalists defend themselves.
If you were a nationalist/catholic teenager in Ballymurphy after that I’d say no one would bat an eyelid if you joined the IRA
This press conference is harrowing stuff
Imagine it taking 50 years to say these people were innocent.
Also imagine the British government waiting until this verdict came out to decide that suddenly we need an amnesty for offences committed during the Troubles.
Maybe the next time people are minded to condemn the actions of the IRA\INLA they should bear in mind events like Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday, or the recent report into the RUC murders of 4 people in 1969 (Report condemns RUC for firing on Belfast flats in 1969, killing four people | Northern Ireland | The Guardian) and ask themselves how they might have felt if they’d been a young nationalist back then.
I’ll be honest here, I didnt know the full details of the Ballymurphy massacre. I had heard of it and knew people were killed, but I never knew the manner in which snipers just picked off random people for no reason than just to be murdering bastards. So I dont know if thats on me that I didnt know more of it, or is it a case that in the south we truly know fuck all about what happened up north, a true case of I’m alright jacks. Its not happening us, so lets not focus on it.
Granted, it happened before my time, but surely things like that should be part of history and far more discussed and known about than it is. There are some of the more infamous cases, Kingsmill, Miami Showband, Loughlinishland, Warrenpoint etc, but there are thousands of people who were killed in the last 50 years on this island, and its pretty much like it never happened at all. And that in itself is not right.
Good post. I haven’t got the actual stats to hand but, depite 10s of thousands of men and women being jailed over the Troubles it’s reckoned that there are over 3000 killings for which no one has ever been held accountable. That’s a lot of grief and hurt.