On 4th December 1971, my granny, along with 14 others, died when a bomb was left in the doorway of the McGurk's Bar in the New Lodge area of Belfast. It was almost immediately described in the press as an IRA 'own goal'- ie, that members of the IRA were making a bomb in the bar, when it exploded prematurely. This narrative continued for many years. What actually happened was that members of the UVF, aided and abetted by the security forces, planted the bomb in a bar which had no political connections and which was well known as a pub for older people. 46 years on, my family and the families of the other victims are still involved in the fight for truth and justice.
I wanted to make this thread many times, especially when the Hillsborough families began to see light at the end of the tunnel a few years ago, and again recently when Grenfell happened. However, I didn't want to take any focus away from those tragedies, so I didn't.
What happened in December 1971 is another example of the people who should be protecting us actually smearing and blaming victims for deaths which they themselves have caused. Three weeks before Christmas, my dad had to bury his mum. My grandfather was also in the bar at the time, but he survived. He was never the same again and often woke up screaming, drenched in sweat, until he died some 23 years later. Here are a few paragraphs by Kate McCabe from the transconflict.com website:
On a cold, quiet night in December 1971, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) detonated a bomb outside the door of the family owned and operated McGurk’s Bar in downtown Belfast. The impact of the loyalist bomb tore through the roof, causing the walls to cave in and the gas mains to burst into flame, trapping the predominantly Catholic patrons inside. Residents from neighboring communities raced from their homes and poured into the streets surrounding the bar, many frantically digging through the rubble with their bare hands in an attempt to get to those that were still alive. In all, fifteen people were killed that night, with ages ranging from 13 to 73 years old. Seventeen more were injured in the blast.
In the aftermath of the bombing, it was left to the families who lost loved ones to determine whether their relatives were amongst those killed. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) made no effort to notify them; many were informed of their loss while watching the news on television. The remains of Philip Garry, 73, were so badly burned that members of his family were only able to confirm his death when they used a set of keys found in the pocket of an unidentified man to unlock their own front door. Said one grieving relative, Tommy McCready, on going to the hospital to identify James Smyth, 58, “If people had to see what I had to see in that room, there would not have been another bullet fired or bomb exploded.”
The unimaginable grief of the families would soon be compounded by the official line put forth by the British security forces: that the bomb that exploded in McGurk’s that night was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) “own goal.” The police’s immediate response to the tragedy was to blame the victims (all of whom were Catholic), labelling some as republican paramilitaries carrying a bomb that had exploded prematurely. State authorities used this lie and subsequent campaign of disinformation in the immediate aftermath of the bombing to place the blame on the shoulders of those who died or were injured, implying that they were responsible at worst and guilty by association at best.
In the wake of the explosion, the McGurk’s Bar Massacre Campaign was born, as the families of the victims began to piece together their lives and embarked on a journey to uncover the truth about what happened and why. For over forty years now, the families have pursued every avenue available to them to clear the names of their loved ones and to have the truth about what happened officially acknowledged. Pat Irvine, daughter of Kathleen “Kitty” Irvine, who was killed in the blast, has said that she doesn’t feel like she truly started grieving for the loss of her mother until she started doing research for the campaign. Though one member of the UVF, Robert James Campbell, was prosecuted in 1978 for his role in the bombing, in 2010 the McGurks families discovered that he was named alongside four others by the RUC as perpetrators. The other four were neither arrested nor questioned about their involvement.
As you can see, the similarities with Hillsborough (victims are blamed, justice and truth are dragged out of government, kicking and screaming), and Grenfell (survivors and a grieving community left to fend for themselves) are striking. It's why I'm drawn to those threads on the Caf. I know, first hand, that the powers that be simply don't care. They will obfuscate and throw up smokescreens, they will point the finger and push false narratives, they will delay and hope that people simply die or give up before they can get truth or justice.
But governments are human beings, right? People can make mistakes, can't they? It's easy to think that a bomb going off in a Catholic area during the Troubles was caused by an IRA unit setting the fuse too short or something like that, right? It's understandable to jump to conclusions, since loyalists weren't particularly known at that time for their bomb making capabilities, right? So the victims were initally blamed, it took a while before the truth came out, but now that it's known that the UVF planted the bomb, it's all good in the hood, right?
Wrong.
The UVF unit was aided and abetted by the security forces. In other words, the BRITISH ARMY and RUC, cleared the way for them and then spread the story that it was an IRA own goal. The British intelligence services were also up to their necks in this aspect of 'The Dirty War', their strategy of disinformation attempting to portray the IRA as callous murderers who didn't care about their own community, thus turning Catholics against them.
The day before the bomb, three high profile IRA prisoners escaped from Crumlin Road jail, five minutes' walk away from McGurk's Bar. North Belfast was encased in a ring of steel, as security forces set up roadblocks and saturated the New Lodge, looking for the escapees. On the day of the bomb, the Belfast Telegraph wrote:
In a massive clamp-down operation, hundreds of troops today saturated Belfast’s city centre… in an effort to prevent a repetition of last Saturday’s IRA terror campaign… More than 4000 men in nine regiments are stationed in and around Belfast, and today each regiment was told to keep a lookout for trouble in its own area… All this was in addition to the massive search which has been mounted for the three IRA jail breakers. Road blocks on all roads leading into and out of the city are being manned round the clock.
However, on the night of the explosion, the roadblocks disappeared. The British soldiers evaporated into thin air. The UVF unit's target wasn't even McGurk's- it was a bar called The Gem, which was frequented by members of the Official IRA- and the plan was to blow it up, blame the Provos, and start a feud within the republican movement. The one convicted bomber, Robert James Campbell, testified that the unit waited a long time near The Gem, waiting for the opportunity to plant the bomb, but that men were outside the bar, so they decided to go elsewhere. Any Catholic bar would do. So, a carload of men, carrying 50lb of gelignite, were able to drive around without fear of being stopped, wait for ages outside one bar, then plant a bomb in another, then escape unscathed. All while the area was supposedly on lock down. Sound plausible?
If only that was all that had happened to the survivors and the families of the victims. What came next was the disinformation phase:
The recently formed Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) section in Palace Barracks and GHQ Lisburn, known as the Information Research Department, within minutes had begun to propagate the lie that the bomb was an IRA own-goal in order that the objective of their original plan was realised and the local power-base of the IRA drained. This heinous and groundless lie was lodged in an RUC Duty Officer’s Report and released to the ministry of Home Affairs before being leaked to John Chartres of the Times. As ordinary people emptied onto North Queen Street to claw at rubble and debris, British officers were debriefing journalists with the lie spun by their Intelligence superiors: bombers were being trained in the bar or the bomb was waiting to be transported to its intended target. The IRA were to blame and the people in the bar were guilty by association if not legally culpable through complicity.
- http://mcgurksbar.com/collusion/
The lengths to which the state goes, in order to pursue its grubby agenda, know no bounds. A few weeks after the bomb, on Xmas Eve, The Guardian(!) published the following:
“Security men and forensic scientists have finished the grisly investigation of the explosion in Paddy McGurk’s Bar, which killed at least 15 Belfast Catholics earlier this month. If they are to be believed – and in this case they probably are – this figure will have to be revised upwards. They claim to have established that five men were standing round the bomb when it went off inside the crowded bar in North Queen Street. All five were blown to pieces.
The scientists have been able to identify one of them as a senior IRA man who was an expert on explosives and was on the government’s wanted list.
Of all the conflicting theories about the explosion, the security men are now convinced that the bar was a transfer point in the IRA chain between the makers and the planters of the bomb. Something went wrong and the bomb exploded.”
However, the actual forensic report wasn't produced until 11th Feb 1972, around 6 weeks later. Dr Robert Hall found no evidence to suggest that any of the victims were stood around the bomb. Tests revealed that none of the victims' clothing had traces of shrapnel or explosive residue. In fact, those closest to the bomb were found to have splinter injuries, indicating that furniture (or, I don't know, a DOOR) was between them and the explosion. He concluded that the device was placed at or outside the main entrance.
Now you may think that today's news is tomorrow's chip paper, and that there would be no aftermath from getting the facts wrong initially. That they'd thought it was an IRA bomb which went off prematurely, but that the forensic report had put everything straight, and there'd be apologies all round. But this is not how the British state operates. The 'own goal' theory becomes accepted as the facts of the case, despite the findings of Dr Hall completely exonerating the victims. Even after Robert Campbell was tried and convicted, the 'official' story remained unchallenged. I remember my Dad telling me how he trawled the bookshops of Belfast in the late 70s, demanding that the latest book on the Troubles be removed from the shelves, as every single one reported the McGurk's Bar bombing as the work of the IRA, not the UVF. Every single book smeared his mum and the other 14 victims as terrorists. And terrorists who blow themselves up deserve it, right? It's poetic justice, isn't it? We've all seen how devastating a newspaper story or headline can be when it's used to smear innocent people and how it becomes the truth for many years.
Trying to get to the truth has been a labyrinthine struggle. At every juncture, the families have been stalled, given false information, fobbed off and sometimes ignored. There have been discoveries in the archives by family members which have shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the authorities were aware very quickly after the explosion that this was not an IRA 'own goal', and yet they carried on with their false narrative. The only eyewitness, a 9 year old boy, saw the bomb being placed in the doorway and the fuse lit, before the bombers fled, and yet the false narrative remained. The Historical Enquiries Team, tasked with discovering the truth, found no evidence of RUC investigative bias, in spite of all the evidence pointing to a police force, with the help of British intelligence and the army, which blamed the victims immediately and never deviated from it. By the way, when it released its report, the HET misspelt many of the victims' names and messed up the timeline of events.
There's so much more to say and so much of which I'll remember as soon as I hit 'post'. Recently, we were told that some British army files relating to the bombing are not going to be released until 2056. 2056! I'll let you make up your own mind as to why that should be the case. Michael Mansfield QC, gave a lecture to mark the 45th anniversary in December just gone, and asked that the Chief Constable apologise on behalf of the police, but he declined. Things which may seem inconsequential to some, have huge resonance for my family. For example, it wasn't until a few years ago that my dad and his sisters discovered that my granny burned to death. They had always presumed that she had died instantly, because that's what you assume happens when a bomb goes off. But, no, the gas pipes burst when the explosion occurred and she suffered an agonising death, and my family suffered the agony of finding that out decades later, which obviously brought it all back in a big way. Everything we know about the truth, we found out ourselves. Just like Hillsborough, Grenfell and countless other disasters and tragedies, when it happens to you, you really do find out how little you matter to the British state.
Below is the Spotlight episode about the bombing. It's the only copy I could find on youtube, so please take no heed of the Youtube Channel's name. It has nothing to do with us or anyone else involved in the campaign. Thanks for reading.
I wanted to make this thread many times, especially when the Hillsborough families began to see light at the end of the tunnel a few years ago, and again recently when Grenfell happened. However, I didn't want to take any focus away from those tragedies, so I didn't.
What happened in December 1971 is another example of the people who should be protecting us actually smearing and blaming victims for deaths which they themselves have caused. Three weeks before Christmas, my dad had to bury his mum. My grandfather was also in the bar at the time, but he survived. He was never the same again and often woke up screaming, drenched in sweat, until he died some 23 years later. Here are a few paragraphs by Kate McCabe from the transconflict.com website:
On a cold, quiet night in December 1971, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) detonated a bomb outside the door of the family owned and operated McGurk’s Bar in downtown Belfast. The impact of the loyalist bomb tore through the roof, causing the walls to cave in and the gas mains to burst into flame, trapping the predominantly Catholic patrons inside. Residents from neighboring communities raced from their homes and poured into the streets surrounding the bar, many frantically digging through the rubble with their bare hands in an attempt to get to those that were still alive. In all, fifteen people were killed that night, with ages ranging from 13 to 73 years old. Seventeen more were injured in the blast.
In the aftermath of the bombing, it was left to the families who lost loved ones to determine whether their relatives were amongst those killed. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) made no effort to notify them; many were informed of their loss while watching the news on television. The remains of Philip Garry, 73, were so badly burned that members of his family were only able to confirm his death when they used a set of keys found in the pocket of an unidentified man to unlock their own front door. Said one grieving relative, Tommy McCready, on going to the hospital to identify James Smyth, 58, “If people had to see what I had to see in that room, there would not have been another bullet fired or bomb exploded.”
The unimaginable grief of the families would soon be compounded by the official line put forth by the British security forces: that the bomb that exploded in McGurk’s that night was an Irish Republican Army (IRA) “own goal.” The police’s immediate response to the tragedy was to blame the victims (all of whom were Catholic), labelling some as republican paramilitaries carrying a bomb that had exploded prematurely. State authorities used this lie and subsequent campaign of disinformation in the immediate aftermath of the bombing to place the blame on the shoulders of those who died or were injured, implying that they were responsible at worst and guilty by association at best.
In the wake of the explosion, the McGurk’s Bar Massacre Campaign was born, as the families of the victims began to piece together their lives and embarked on a journey to uncover the truth about what happened and why. For over forty years now, the families have pursued every avenue available to them to clear the names of their loved ones and to have the truth about what happened officially acknowledged. Pat Irvine, daughter of Kathleen “Kitty” Irvine, who was killed in the blast, has said that she doesn’t feel like she truly started grieving for the loss of her mother until she started doing research for the campaign. Though one member of the UVF, Robert James Campbell, was prosecuted in 1978 for his role in the bombing, in 2010 the McGurks families discovered that he was named alongside four others by the RUC as perpetrators. The other four were neither arrested nor questioned about their involvement.
As you can see, the similarities with Hillsborough (victims are blamed, justice and truth are dragged out of government, kicking and screaming), and Grenfell (survivors and a grieving community left to fend for themselves) are striking. It's why I'm drawn to those threads on the Caf. I know, first hand, that the powers that be simply don't care. They will obfuscate and throw up smokescreens, they will point the finger and push false narratives, they will delay and hope that people simply die or give up before they can get truth or justice.
But governments are human beings, right? People can make mistakes, can't they? It's easy to think that a bomb going off in a Catholic area during the Troubles was caused by an IRA unit setting the fuse too short or something like that, right? It's understandable to jump to conclusions, since loyalists weren't particularly known at that time for their bomb making capabilities, right? So the victims were initally blamed, it took a while before the truth came out, but now that it's known that the UVF planted the bomb, it's all good in the hood, right?
Wrong.
The UVF unit was aided and abetted by the security forces. In other words, the BRITISH ARMY and RUC, cleared the way for them and then spread the story that it was an IRA own goal. The British intelligence services were also up to their necks in this aspect of 'The Dirty War', their strategy of disinformation attempting to portray the IRA as callous murderers who didn't care about their own community, thus turning Catholics against them.
The day before the bomb, three high profile IRA prisoners escaped from Crumlin Road jail, five minutes' walk away from McGurk's Bar. North Belfast was encased in a ring of steel, as security forces set up roadblocks and saturated the New Lodge, looking for the escapees. On the day of the bomb, the Belfast Telegraph wrote:
In a massive clamp-down operation, hundreds of troops today saturated Belfast’s city centre… in an effort to prevent a repetition of last Saturday’s IRA terror campaign… More than 4000 men in nine regiments are stationed in and around Belfast, and today each regiment was told to keep a lookout for trouble in its own area… All this was in addition to the massive search which has been mounted for the three IRA jail breakers. Road blocks on all roads leading into and out of the city are being manned round the clock.
However, on the night of the explosion, the roadblocks disappeared. The British soldiers evaporated into thin air. The UVF unit's target wasn't even McGurk's- it was a bar called The Gem, which was frequented by members of the Official IRA- and the plan was to blow it up, blame the Provos, and start a feud within the republican movement. The one convicted bomber, Robert James Campbell, testified that the unit waited a long time near The Gem, waiting for the opportunity to plant the bomb, but that men were outside the bar, so they decided to go elsewhere. Any Catholic bar would do. So, a carload of men, carrying 50lb of gelignite, were able to drive around without fear of being stopped, wait for ages outside one bar, then plant a bomb in another, then escape unscathed. All while the area was supposedly on lock down. Sound plausible?
If only that was all that had happened to the survivors and the families of the victims. What came next was the disinformation phase:
The recently formed Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) section in Palace Barracks and GHQ Lisburn, known as the Information Research Department, within minutes had begun to propagate the lie that the bomb was an IRA own-goal in order that the objective of their original plan was realised and the local power-base of the IRA drained. This heinous and groundless lie was lodged in an RUC Duty Officer’s Report and released to the ministry of Home Affairs before being leaked to John Chartres of the Times. As ordinary people emptied onto North Queen Street to claw at rubble and debris, British officers were debriefing journalists with the lie spun by their Intelligence superiors: bombers were being trained in the bar or the bomb was waiting to be transported to its intended target. The IRA were to blame and the people in the bar were guilty by association if not legally culpable through complicity.
- http://mcgurksbar.com/collusion/
The lengths to which the state goes, in order to pursue its grubby agenda, know no bounds. A few weeks after the bomb, on Xmas Eve, The Guardian(!) published the following:
“Security men and forensic scientists have finished the grisly investigation of the explosion in Paddy McGurk’s Bar, which killed at least 15 Belfast Catholics earlier this month. If they are to be believed – and in this case they probably are – this figure will have to be revised upwards. They claim to have established that five men were standing round the bomb when it went off inside the crowded bar in North Queen Street. All five were blown to pieces.
The scientists have been able to identify one of them as a senior IRA man who was an expert on explosives and was on the government’s wanted list.
Of all the conflicting theories about the explosion, the security men are now convinced that the bar was a transfer point in the IRA chain between the makers and the planters of the bomb. Something went wrong and the bomb exploded.”
However, the actual forensic report wasn't produced until 11th Feb 1972, around 6 weeks later. Dr Robert Hall found no evidence to suggest that any of the victims were stood around the bomb. Tests revealed that none of the victims' clothing had traces of shrapnel or explosive residue. In fact, those closest to the bomb were found to have splinter injuries, indicating that furniture (or, I don't know, a DOOR) was between them and the explosion. He concluded that the device was placed at or outside the main entrance.
Now you may think that today's news is tomorrow's chip paper, and that there would be no aftermath from getting the facts wrong initially. That they'd thought it was an IRA bomb which went off prematurely, but that the forensic report had put everything straight, and there'd be apologies all round. But this is not how the British state operates. The 'own goal' theory becomes accepted as the facts of the case, despite the findings of Dr Hall completely exonerating the victims. Even after Robert Campbell was tried and convicted, the 'official' story remained unchallenged. I remember my Dad telling me how he trawled the bookshops of Belfast in the late 70s, demanding that the latest book on the Troubles be removed from the shelves, as every single one reported the McGurk's Bar bombing as the work of the IRA, not the UVF. Every single book smeared his mum and the other 14 victims as terrorists. And terrorists who blow themselves up deserve it, right? It's poetic justice, isn't it? We've all seen how devastating a newspaper story or headline can be when it's used to smear innocent people and how it becomes the truth for many years.
Trying to get to the truth has been a labyrinthine struggle. At every juncture, the families have been stalled, given false information, fobbed off and sometimes ignored. There have been discoveries in the archives by family members which have shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the authorities were aware very quickly after the explosion that this was not an IRA 'own goal', and yet they carried on with their false narrative. The only eyewitness, a 9 year old boy, saw the bomb being placed in the doorway and the fuse lit, before the bombers fled, and yet the false narrative remained. The Historical Enquiries Team, tasked with discovering the truth, found no evidence of RUC investigative bias, in spite of all the evidence pointing to a police force, with the help of British intelligence and the army, which blamed the victims immediately and never deviated from it. By the way, when it released its report, the HET misspelt many of the victims' names and messed up the timeline of events.
There's so much more to say and so much of which I'll remember as soon as I hit 'post'. Recently, we were told that some British army files relating to the bombing are not going to be released until 2056. 2056! I'll let you make up your own mind as to why that should be the case. Michael Mansfield QC, gave a lecture to mark the 45th anniversary in December just gone, and asked that the Chief Constable apologise on behalf of the police, but he declined. Things which may seem inconsequential to some, have huge resonance for my family. For example, it wasn't until a few years ago that my dad and his sisters discovered that my granny burned to death. They had always presumed that she had died instantly, because that's what you assume happens when a bomb goes off. But, no, the gas pipes burst when the explosion occurred and she suffered an agonising death, and my family suffered the agony of finding that out decades later, which obviously brought it all back in a big way. Everything we know about the truth, we found out ourselves. Just like Hillsborough, Grenfell and countless other disasters and tragedies, when it happens to you, you really do find out how little you matter to the British state.
Below is the Spotlight episode about the bombing. It's the only copy I could find on youtube, so please take no heed of the Youtube Channel's name. It has nothing to do with us or anyone else involved in the campaign. Thanks for reading.
