The Ballymurphy Massacre

The children speak out

‘THE BALLYMURPHY MASSACRE’ is the name given to the murderous rampage in the 36 hours after the introduction of internment in August 1971 when 11 civilians – 10 men, including a local priest, and a mother of eight children – were killed by the British Army’s Parachute Regiment. The same regiment went on less than six months later to gun down 14 civil rights marchers in Derry City on Bloody Sunday.

Was the Parachute Regiment given a licence to kill?

Fifty-four children lost a parent as a result of the Ballymurphy Massacre

To mark the 39th anniversary, LAURA FRIEL spoke to three of the children of victims of the Ballymurphy Massacre. They give an insight into what they have had to live with for almost 40 years and the questions that still need to be answered by the Parachute Regiment, the British Army and the British state.

Will they ever see justice?

BRIEGE VOYLE

Daughter of Joan Connolly

BRIEGE was 14 when her mother, Joan Connolly, was shot dead by British paratroopers. Joan had been looking for two of her daughters on the night she was killed. 

Joan had warned her daughter not to go near Springfield Park because “loyalists would shoot you but not the [British] army”. Joan’s eldest daughter was married to a British soldier and Joan had a pass to visit her son-in-law at his barracks.  

I went down to the house and my daddy was there but my other sister wasn’t back and neither was my mummy. An hour later my sister - she was only 12 - came into the house. We all waited but my mummy never returned home.

As soon as it was light, my eldest sister went around all the centres to see if my mummy was there. She came back crying, she couldn’t find her.

My daddy went to a neighbour’s house and used their telephone to ring the hospital. He asked if a woman with red hair had been admitted and they said, ‘Yes, but she’s in the morgue.’ That’s how my daddy found out.

Our neighbour went with my father to identify my mummy and then they came back home and told us. As you can imagine, with six girls and two boys, eight children and the youngest only three, the house was in uproar.” 

The youngest children, my sister and I were taken to a refugee camp over the border.

We were in Waterford when a RTÉ news bulletin came on the television and that’s how we learned my mummy had been buried that day. It was like a nightmare. We couldn’t grasp it. We stayed with relatives but cried to go home. We imagined home would be like it always had been but it wasn’t. It was an empty shell without my mummy.

We had already been through a terrible ordeal but it didn’t stop there. The paratroopers continued to torture us. They used to sing ‘Where’s your mama gone?’ outside our door and you couldn’t walk down the street without them taunting you. We were all so terrified.

The soldiers deliberately targeted the families of those who had been killed. But we all tried to get on with life. I went to school with Mr Teggart’s daughter and John Laverty’s sister - the three of us in the same classroom but we never spoke about it; no one spoke about it.  

My mummy was standing talking when the soldiers came out of Henry Taggart Fort and opened up.

She managed to run away but when she heard a young man crying, she left her place of safety. Witnesses heard her say, ‘Don’t cry, son, you’ll be alright. I’m coming to help you.’ She was wearing a skirt, she had a mop of red hair and it was still light but some of the soldiers who shot my mummy claimed they didn’t realise they’d shot a woman.

She took the first shot to the side of her head and she was heard to cry out that she was blind and couldn’t see. Three sisters in a nearby house saw her wandering confused around the field. They knocked the window to tell her to come into the house but when she turned around they saw half of her face was gone. 

The autopsy report said if she had been brought to hospital after the first shot my mummy would have survived. But she was repeatedly shot and then left to bleed to death.

The coroner’s report says my mummy was shot, once or twice, in the head, she was shot in the shoulder and the same round came out through her hand and she had multiple wounds at the top of her thigh.

Six soldiers made statements regarding my mummy. Three claimed responsibility for her death. All their accounts contradicted each other. One said he was shooting at someone firing at him from a roof; another at someone crawling in the grass firing at him with a rifle; another says it was a machine gun. 

One soldier admitted firing then exchanging guns with another soldier and firing again. I don’t know much about the army but, to me, when a soldier is issued a gun, that’s his and nobody else uses it. It was as if they were trying out different weapons - it was like a sport to them.

If these paratroopers had been held to account there never would have been a Bloody Sunday, or Springhill. But they never were. They were given immunity; they gave themselves immunity. My mummy wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s where we lived. You could see where my mummy was murdered from our back window.

JANET DONNELLY

Daughter of Joseph Murphy 

JANET DONNELLY was only 8 years old when her father, Joseph Murphy, was shot and brutalised by British paratroopers.

Joseph Murphy was shot by paratroopers who came out of Henry Taggart Fort. A neighbour came to tell Mrs Murphy her husband had been shot. “But don’t worry, he has only been shot in the leg,” he’d said. 

My daddy was out with his cousin, Dessie, and both of them were looking for their children.

They were outside the Henry Taggart when soldiers came out through the gates and started firing. The two of them ran for cover but my father was hit. He shouted out, “Dessie, I’m hit in the leg!” My father was shot on August 9th but he didn’t die until the 22nd. He was able to tell my mummy what happened.

My daddy said the British Army came into the field in an armoured personnel carrier and lifted the dead and wounded and flung them in the back of the vehicle - alive and dead just thrown together. They were driven to Henry Taggart and inside the fort they were brutalised even further. 

My daddy said they treated the dead as badly as the living, jumping and kicking the bodies. He was taken to a room and the soldiers came in and gave him and others the severest of beatings. They fired rubber bullets into my daddy’s open wound, kicked and booted him for hours. There were beds in the room and soldiers jumped off the beds onto the bodies of the dead and living.

My daddy was eventually brought to the hospital and placed under armed guard. Only my mother and other relatives were allowed to see him. That’s when he told my mother what had happened. My daddy had been so badly beaten that the surgeons were afraid to operate on his leg. The doctors told my mother he had a lot more injuries than a gunshot wound.  

Within a week his organs were failing and he was being taken for dialysis when a main artery in his leg burst. The leg was amputated on August 20th. My daddy never regained consciousness and died on the 22nd.

My mother always said my daddy died of the beating he got in Henry Taggart and not the gunshot. As a child, I found that hard to accept and it always bothered me. I think that was the reason I wanted to find out exactly what happened and got involved with the families of other victims.

We found two men who had been taken to Henry Taggart but survived. One witness told us he had been pulled out of the field into the street by soldiers and shot four times before being taken to Henry Taggart. He said if you couldn’t walk you were trailed along two lines of soldiers who kicked and punched as you were brought through.

He said he was taken to a room where soldiers jumped off beds onto the bodies of the dead and wounded. He told me a soldier put the muzzle of a gun into his gunshot wound and tried to lift him up. This confirmed what my daddy had told my mother before he died.

JOHN TEGGART 

Son of Daniel Teggart

JOHN’S father, Daniel Teggart, had been worried about his brother’s family, who lived close to where a 400-strong loyalist mob was attacking the homes of Catholic residents in Springfield Park, which runs onto Moyard Park where his brother lived. 

There had been a build-up of tension throughout the day. Hundreds of loyalists had gathered at Springmartin and everyone was worried there was going to be trouble. My father had asked his brother earlier in the day if he and his family wanted to stay with relatives but my uncle refused. Later that evening, my father decided to go and make sure that his brother’s family were okay. Gerard said they didn’t want to leave their home.

My father and uncle heard the first shots at Springmartin. My father ran down to Henry Taggart and my uncle back into his house to make sure his family were alright. There was a lull in the shooting and my father met a group standing on wasteground outside Henry Taggart. He met Janet’s daddy, Joseph Murphy, and Briege’s mummy, Mrs Connolly, was also round about there.

When the Paras came out of the Henry Taggart it was only a distance of 30 to 40 yards. When the soldiers started shooting, everyone ran into the Manse field to take cover between two gateposts. The soldiers were firing indiscriminately.

One soldier was actually firing from the hip. Then there was a bit of a lull and some of those taking cover got up. Noel Philips and my daddy went to run towards Divismore. 

Noel was shot first and one witness said my daddy had turned his head when he heard Noel cry out. As he turned, he was shot. My daddy fell down and lay on the ground. About 15 or 16 Paras have admitted they were shooting in that field at the time.  

My father was in the field when he was repeatedly shot where he lay out in the open, defenceless. He was so close to the soldiers who shot him that the bullets passed right through his body. He was shot 14 times and eyewitnesses said his body jumped with every bullet that hit him.

My daddy was immobilised but they continued firing at him. It was as if it was target practice. There is evidence that soldiers were exchanging weapons. Most had SLRs but one had a .303, which was passed on to an officer and he took a few shots. There was five .303 bullets fired as well. It was very close and a bright summer’s night, you don’t need a telescopic .303 to hit someone less than 50 yards away.

About 20 minutes later, two soldiers and an officer with a handgun came into the field and began firing indiscriminately again. Noel Philips was lying wounded on the ground when the army officer walked over to Noel and executed him by shooting him behind the ear. There is evidence to confirm this.  

Another man was also shot at point-blank range but he survived. He was dragged out into the street by soldiers and then shot four times.

He also spoke about the brutality inside Henry Taggart. He said he was taken into a room with bunk-beds and said soldiers jumped off the top bunk onto the injured.

He also said a naked body was thrown into the room and treated just the same. My daddy was the only one to arrive at the morgue stripped of all clothing.