Teenage republican shot dead by UVF honoured in Lower Ormeau ceremony

AMONG the republicans, young and old, who turned out to mark the 40thanniversary of the death of Fian Jim Templeton on Sunday 31 August were many stalwarts of the Lower Ormeau Road community standing shoulder with the Templeton family.

Young Templeton, a 15-year-old member of Fianna Éireann, was gunned down by a UVF killer gang who had no idea that he was a republican activist – they just saw a Catholic and that's why they shot him.

That was on 29 August 1975.

As a tribute to Jim Templeton and an acknowledgment of their activism, members of the Belfast-based Mairéad Farrell Republican Youth Committee dressed in Fianna uniform to form a colour party to lead the procession.

Other members of the committee carried their banner honouring the iconic republican while the O'Neill/Allsopp Republican Flute Band, from north Belfast, which is named in memory of two other Fianna activists, Jim O'Neill and Robert Allsopp, turned out.

Liam Smyth from the band played a lament on the flute as wreaths laid, including by Gerard Rice (pictured), who is synonymous with the Ormeau community's opposition to the triumphalist Orange parades through streets and homes scarred by the deadly gunfire of loyalist death squads.

Sinn Féin South Belfast MLA Máirtín Ó Muilleoir was the main speaker.

Alluding to the present attacks on Sinn Féin and the attempts by our political enemies to undermine the Peace Process, he said “We have come through a lot worse” and he called on the republican community of the area to “stand strong as you did in the past”.

● MLA Máirtín Ó Muilleoir addresses the crowd at the spot where Jim Templeton was gunned down by the UVF