Relatives are calling for an investigation into the deaths of 11 civilians shot by British soldiers in Ballymurphy in 1971, reports Susan McKay.
When Irene Connolly's schoolfriends used to ask her if she missed her mother, she'd say no, because she had never known her. Irene was only three when her mother, Joan Connolly, was shot dead in Belfast in 1971. Irene has a photograph of herself as a small girl in a yellow dress with her smiling, red-haired mother, but no memories. It was only many years later, when Irene gave birth to her own daughter, that she began to dream about her mother, and to long to remember her.
"I dreamt that I was chasing her but I couldn't see her face," she said at a meeting in Belfast last week, organised by the Relatives for Justice group. "I had to ask my older sisters if I ever cried for her when I was small, and what they'd told me at the time." Her sisters told her that in 1971 they had explained their mother's disappearance by saying she had gone to heaven to get sweets for Irene.
The truth was that Joan Connolly had been shot several times in the face and body by British soldiers from the Parachute Regiment and had died alone on waste ground at the side of the road.
It happened during the mayhem that followed the introduction of internment on August 9th 1971. Under pressure from hardline unionists, NI prime minister Brian Faulkner's response to the worsening violence of that year was to introduce internment without trial. It began with a series of dawn raids in Catholic areas on 9th August. Hundreds of men were "lifted". Many had no connection with the IRA. No loyalist suspects were arrested. The security situation deteriorated sharply.
Joan Connolly was one of 11 people killed in the Ballymurphy area of West Belfast during a bloody three-day period.
Early that evening, the 45-year-old mother of eight had gone out to look for two of her teenage daughters, Briege and Joan, who had gone to see what was happening in the streets. The girls were watching other local young people throwing stones at the soldiers near the big Henry Taggart army base on the Springfield Road. Their mother told them there was a curfew and they were to come home, but then a crowd of loyalists seemed to come surging down the road, the army started firing CS gas. In the confusion that followed, they got separated.
By this stage, an intense gun battle was going on in the area, with loyalists firing into Catholic homes, IRA men firing at the Henry Taggart base, and British soldiers firing from that base and two others in the area, as well as from the roofs of a local block of flats. Terrified Catholic families were trying to move out of the area. The soldiers were shooting at civilians.
One man, Bobby Clarke, told last week's meeting that he was making his way across waste ground after carrying a child to safety, when a bullet hit his leg. Someone saw him falling, and ran for Fr Hugh Mullan, who had spent the afternoon pleading with loyalists to stop attacking the Catholic homes. Crouching down as bullets whistled through the grass, Fr Mullan, who was 40, ran out into the field, waving a white flag - actually a white babygro. But the soldiers shot him anyway, and he died. They also shot a young man called Frank Quinn, who was lying on the ground beside Bobby Clarke, and he died too.
Joan Connolly was sheltering from the gunfire at a gateway near the Henry Taggart base when she saw a young boy crawling along the ground, clearly having been shot. She walked out to him, telling him he'd be all right, and that was when she was shot. Witnesses heard her screaming over and over again that she had been blinded and could someone please help her. Then there were more shots and she stopped. Danny Teggart, a father of 13, was also shot nearby and killed. He had come out to tell his brother, who lived dangerously close to the base, that it was all right for him to go and stay with Danny's daughter, Alice.
Soon after this, a saracen armoured car with a red cross on its side emerged from the base. Witnesses said soldiers piled the dead and the dying into the back of the vehicle and drove back into the base.
A man said he saw a soldier shoot an injured man. "We began to be frightened they'd find us. We crawled to a fence," he said. "I was nine years old." Another man who survived said that, inside the base, soldiers beat up and shot at some of those who were still alive.
This led to the death, two weeks later, of father-of-nine Joseph Murphy.
Joan Connolly's husband, Denis, was frantic with worry when she didn't come home. Eventually, he was told that there was a red-haired woman in the morgue. He went out, and was brought home sobbing and unable to speak. Shortly after this, a car arrived and five of the children were bundled into it. Briege, now Briege Voyle, was 14 at the time. "We drove a long way through the night. We were frightened," she said. "We had no idea what was going on." The children were brought first to Cork, and then to Waterford. Up to 7,000 refugees from the North were housed by the Irish government in old army bases and internment camps at this time. Two days later, Briege said, she and her sisters saw the RTÉ news on a television.
"It said my mummy had been buried. And that was how we knew for sure she was dead." The British Ministry of Defence claimed that those it shot in Ballymurphy, including Joan Connolly, Danny Teggart and Fr Mullan, were all armed. There was no evidence to support this.
Relatives for Justice, the group which organised the meeting last week, called for "an independent, transparent investigation linked to a truth commission".
The Parachute Regiment was moved on to Derry. The events of January 30th 1972 are as notorious as the events of August 9th 1971 have been unknown. But listening to the voices of witnesses to the internment day killings was like listening to an account of a malign dress rehearsal for Bloody Sunday.
Relatives cared for the Connolly children in the Republic for a few months, and then they were sent home to Belfast. They discovered that home as they had known it was gone. "Daddy was a nervous wreck," Briege said. "Then, after Bloody Sunday, he went to pieces."