Same Time, Same Place: A Memoriam

St MacNissius Church, Tannaghmore

Earlier tonight, my daughter Zoe and I attended a memorial Mass in Tannaghmore for my father's brothers, Shaun and Brendan Byrne, who were shot dead by loyalist paramilitaries during the 1974  UWC strike, a strike that brought this province to a near standstill and ultimately collapsed the power-sharing government. 

That shooting was exactly fifty years ago. We'd been to Mass that night too. Friday night Mass in Tannaghmore Chapel was an institution, everyone (that could) attended. After Mass we went home to a dark house, the power being off again. Our parents left to call on family in Randalstown and were away when the news came. A shooting at the pub

I wouldn't have been the only person tonight who found themselves in the same church they'd prayed in fifty years ago. There would have been others who had knelt at those pews a few days later when they attended Shaun and Brendan's Funeral Mass. Yet there weren't that many of us tonight. It took the younger people, some of them Shaun's grandchildren, grandchildren he never got to meet, to make the crowd. Fifty years is a long time. 

I Go To A Funeral

 It was the first funeral of the year, Aunt Maud in her 91st year. Bert said,

You must be running low on aunts by now. Have you any left at all?

I had to think,

There's just the one left in Australia but I don't know her at all.

In my younger days, I had heaps of Aunts.

On my mother's side, Aunt Kathleen, Aunt Josephine, Aunt Sadie, Aunt Bernadette and Aunt Clare.

And on my father's side, Aunt Roisin and  Aunt Mary

Then there were the aunts by marriage, all on dad's side, Mary, Bernie, May, Marian, Maud, Peggy, Maureen and Eileen.

Maureen is, as far as I know, the only one still living.

Maud was the last of the Irish aunts and we buried her today. 

This was the beautiful young woman that Uncle Brendan met and fell in love with. 

Brendan was murdered when she was in her early forties and today, almost half a century later, she was laid beside him in St Comgall's burying ground.

Maud never had children of her own yet the gathering today was full of children she had cared for and helped look after, the oldest of them in the mid-sixties, the youngest about five years old. 

She was a feisty woman, widowed twice, adored children, was incredibly kind, had a sharp tongue, loved hard, held grudges, was easily hurt, a grafter, sensitive, and fiercely loyal. The thing that I've been thinking about the most these past few days is the terrible grief, the despair she suffered in the days after Brendan's death. He was everything to her.

Maud and two of her godchildren, my brother Joe and my daughter Zoe.

Zoe was born three months after Shaun and Brendan were shot during the 1974 UWC strike In my naivety I thought that asking Maud to be her godmother would cheer her. Wrong reasons, the right choice. She spent the following Christmas with us which is when the picture was taken. When I look at it now I see her brave spirit. Even with a broken heart she still could raise a smile for little children.

 

A Shooting At The Pub

On Friday 24^th May 1974, Day 10 of the UWC strike we went, as usual, to evening Mass in Tannaghmore chapel. As always we were in good time and there was the regular group of men standing chatting at the chapel door. This had recently become an ordeal for me, passing those men, neighbours and family members, for I was 20 years old, six months pregnant and unmarried. Forty years ago this was no light matter. John Heffron and Uncle Sean smiled and nodded at me but Uncle Brendan was not on speaking terms with me and made no acknowledgement. This was hurtful but understandable. I'm sure, that if given the chance, once my daughter was born, he would have come round. Brendan had a great fondness for children and was a very well-loved uncle.

After Mass my parents went to visit Mum's family in Randalstown. The first hint of something wrong was a series of strange phone calls. My younger sister took the first call that alerted us to something badly wrong. A shooting at the pub. A neighbour called to the door and took my brother down to Randalstown to inform my parents. I took a call from a woman who did not identify herself.

“Is that Byrne's?”
“It is.”
“Tell Sean we'll be over for a carry-out.”

There was laughter in the background. It sounded like they were having a party. I took it to be a malicious call.

The younger children were hysterical with fear. They thought that maybe the gunmen were coming to our house too. I tried to reassure them. By the time the tragic news came to us the gang had left the Wayside Halt and were already in police custody.

The thing is, the RUC were well aware of the gangs' activity. They were a ramshackle band of UVF, UDA and other loyalists who had come down to our area to reinforce the strike. Around thirty in number, they were armed with cudgels and sticks and at least one carried a loaded firearm. A neighbour of ours saw them at their work in the Harryville area of Ballymena where they smashed up pubs that were open in defiance of the strike. Their way back to Belfast took them past the Wayside Halt public house and it was there that a gun was used to shoot my uncles. That is when the police went in pursuit. That neighbour reported their activities in Harryville at the time. Had the RUC moved in Ballymena my uncles would not have died that night.

So there it was. Two devastated widows, eight fatherless children, a community torn apart, a loss felt as keenly today as on that terrible evening 40 years ago.

That link above is well worth reading as it is my sister's account of the events of that night and there are details that I have not included here.

Forty Years Ago

In my last post I wrote a little about the Dublin-Monaghan bombings that occurred 40 years ago during the Ulster Worker's Council (UWC) strike. I did not add that I was pregnant with my first child at this time. Perhaps it was being pregnant that made me feel so thin-skinned about everything that had happened. I remember walking at dusk feeling as if a cloud of dread was enveloping me. I felt terribly apprehensive to be bringing new life into the world at such a dangerous and precarious time.

Daddy brought the terrible news to us. A young man, Michael Mallon, from Cargin, near Toome, had been found beaten and shot on the outskirts of Belfast. He was twenty years old, a student at Queen's University in Belfast. I did not know Mickey but my sister did and our family knew his family. My father and my sister went to his funeral. So did my Uncle Sean, who is supposed to have remarked that the funeral was a big one and he hoped not to be at such a one for a very long time. His own funeral would be held less than a week later.

Mickey Mallon was the closest that the Troubles had come to us but it would be closer again within days. I will write about it on the anniversary.

Michael Joseph Mallon was found murdered, at the age of 20, forty years ago today.

Looking Back In Anger

In February 1973, during the first Loyalist Workers Strike, I was working in the Ballymena branch of Crazy Prices. There was a prolonged power cut and all the freezers powered down. Urged by our managers we worked on. Until the cry went up, 'the Tartan Gangs are coming!' And sure enough, gangs of youths, wearing denim, big boots and tartan scarves were rampaging along Broughshane Street, smashing windows as they went. Managers hastily locked the doors and told us to get ourselves off home but not before allowing us to help ourselves from the freezers. So it was I phoned Daddy to come and rescue me and my big cardboard box full of frozen food. Seamus was not afraid of any Tartan Gang.

That is my abiding memory of the 1973 Loyalist strike. Tartan Gangs and a surfeit of frozen food to which we were certainly not accustomed. Of course the power cuts meant that we couldn't refrigerate the food and a good deal of it had to be thrown out anyway.

This month is the 40^th anniversary of the second, and even more sinister, Loyalist strike, the one that brought down the power sharing executive, and the one that Ian Paisley and his ilk supported to the hilt.  

Today is also the 40^th anniversary of the co-ordinated bombings in Dublin and Monaghan. On the third day of the UWC strike thirty-three people died, the greatest number of people killed on any one day. A full-term unborn infant is not included in the list of dead but tiny sisters Jacqueline and Anne Marie O'Brien are. They were 17 and 5 months respectively and their parents died with them.

No-one has ever been charged in relation to the murders in Dublin and Monaghan.

It was thirty-three years later, again in the month of May, that Ian Paisley, who had been so vehemently opposed to the idea of power-sharing, accepted the post of First Minister of Northern Ireland, in an assembly that included Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein as Deputy First Minister. It is rumoured that the two of them got on so well they were dubbed the Chuckle Brothers.