DVD celebrates lives of Ballymurphy Volunteers

A NEW DVD celebrating the lives and contribution to the struggle of three IRA Volunteers from the greater Ballymurphy area of West Belfast is to be released this coming Sunday, 18 May, after a commemorative parade.
Jimmy Quigley and Eddie ‘Mundo’ O’Rawe were both killed by the British Army while on active service in the early 1970s; the third man to be remembered, James ‘Spotter’ Murphy, died of natural causes in 1986.
Spotter, an uncle of Eddie O’Rawe, was no stranger to active service as he was active in the IRA’s campaign in England at the beginning of the 1970s.
He was involved with one of the IRA’s most successful units (which was captured at Balcombe Street) and was himself imprisoned for a number of years.
Of the other Volunteers, Jimmy Quigley was 17 when he was shot dead in 1972 while Mundo was 28 when he died.
The British Army killed him while unarmed as he tried to make good his escape from a safe house in Garnett Street in the Lower Falls.
Both Volunteers were active in D Company even though their family homes were in the Ballymurphy area.
The DVD tells the story of all three men with family, friends and comrades recounting details of the men’s lives and experiences of growing up in a sectarian state.
The DVD will serve great use as cumainn and other republican groupings will be able to use the film as an educational tool because of the historical footage and information contained in it.
One of those interviewed is the late Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes and in a moment of great clarity he said that people talk about the shoot-to-kill policy as if it only came about in the 1980s.
“The British Government introduced its shoot-to-kill in 1970 during the Falls Curfew,” The Dark said, referring to the time in July 1970 when the British Army curfewed the Falls Road and killed four men: three were shot dead while a fourth was knocked down by a British armoured car.
That period marked the beginning of the British Army’s war on the nationalist people of the North and the DVD, in telling the stories of Jimmy, Mundo and Spotter, tells the story of the courage, dedication and steadfastness of three IRA Volunteers who dared confront the British oppression of their people.