The Treason Felony Blog

Weaver Street, Tuam and Bessborough as ‘non-sites of memory’

In 1992, Mary Kerr was driving along the M2 motorway in Belfast at the point immediately to the east of the former location of an area known as Weaver Street, off the York Road. As the name suggests, Weaver Street had been a residential area largely occupied by mill workers and their families. Kerr later recounted to the Sunday Life newspaper how a fair-haired girl, aged around 11, wearing an old-style dress and without shoes, skipped across the motorway in front of her car. When Kerr looked around to see where she had went, the girl was gone.

One year to the day later, Kerr read an old article which the Irish News had reprinted reporting on girls killed in a bombing in Weaver Street on that day some 70 years previously. Kerr told the Sunday Life, “Instinctively I knew they were connected to what I had seen that night…”[11]

Weaver Street had been the scene of a horrific bombing in February 1922, an event that remained unmarked and largely unremarked in 1993 (and is still barely known today). Little, if any, of Belfast’s dark heritage from 1919-22 is formally commemorated in the city, either, as if events and the violence of those years were somehow just not remembered. Of course, that absence of commemoration is revealing in itself.

Below, I explore events after the Weaver Street bombing using ideas found in studies of my eastern Europe, that of a ‘non-site of memory’ (the origin of the term ‘non-site of memory’ is explained further below). This article also looks at the suitability of the concept to provide insights into the scenes of other significant episodes from twentieth century Irish history, such as the Tuam and Bessborough Mother and Baby Homes, as well as other institutional settings. There may be insights here too into the near future in Gaza, where we may see a similar process of elision and erasure of physical memories of the Palestinians.

It was a French historian, Pierre Nora, who coined the term ‘site of memory’ in 1970 to describe the likes of monuments to the past or archives of historical documents. Nora was trying to understand the past through studying memories of events and how they are used to create histories and (in doing so) influence the world around them. History, and archaeology, and heritage, are regularly used to define and shape values and create a narrative that is intended to legitimize or promote contemporary political ideologies. The phrase ‘site of memory’ is perhaps best explained by the more accurate translation of the French term ‘lieux de mémoire’ as (the more awkward sounding) ‘site of remembering’.[1]

People today are familiar with sites of memory, even if they haven’t heard them described as such. Most modern societies use monuments to commemorate historical events. Some, such as the Whitehall cenotaph in London are, or have become, the setting for annual rituals to display and communicate values to modern audiences (such as trying to evoke former military and imperial glories). These rituals use symbols and imagery that draw upon particular and often partisan readings of history to promote political strategies in the present or future.

Later writers have suggested that the term ‘sites of memory’ should be more restricted in its scope and exclude archives and other spaces where records are brought together. Instead, the likes of Jay Winters have defined sites of memory as “…physical sites where commemorative acts take place…” noting that often, in twentieth century contexts, such sites are associated with wartime violence.[2] Winters goes on to say that sites of memory “…are there as points of reference not only for those who survived traumatic events, but also for those born long after them. The word ‘memory’ becomes a metaphor for the fashioning of narratives about the past when those with direct experience of events die off. Sites of memory inevitably become sites of second-order memory, places where people remember the memories of others, those who survived the events marked there.” Others have noted that ‘sites of memory’ are not necessarily spaces that can be neatly drawn on a map, as Andrzej Szpociński has pointed out some are almost metaphorical ‘places’ with no real specific definition.[3]

One of Pierre Nora’s main interests was in understanding how memory of the past was shaped, transmitted and used by societies. In the 1980s, his concept was explored and inverted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann who also identified ‘non-lieux de mémoire’, or ‘non-sites of memory’ during his work on the landmark 1985 film Shoah which documented the systematic murders of European Jews during the second world war.[4] Lanzmann was referring to places that witnessed past violence but which had been configured to obscure that violence and render them, in effect, invisible to contemporary society. Completely forgotten, and often minimised or excluded from historical accounts, these places and the events that took place there are the antithesis of ‘sites of memory’ that have monuments or plaques or host communal commemorative events.

Such non-sites of memory may even be places at which human remains were still present and may continue to be present. As Roma Sedenkya describes it, these human remains typically “…have not been neutralized by funerary rites” either through performance of religious ceremonies or completion of administrative or legal proceedings.[5] By ‘neutralized’, Sedenkya means the typical ways societies use funerals, formal burial, commemoration and remembering to mark a death and begin or progress the process of grieving and recovery after a loss, which often has huge emotional and psychological value to families and communities. Obviously the lack of those rites, then, can delay or inhibit any such recovery. These non-sites of memory often have particular characteristics, such as having been abandoned, an absence of memorial markers and possible evidence of reactions of fear and shame.

On February 13, 1922, Weaver Street was the scene of an act of violence that Winston Churchill described as the “…worst thing which has happened in Ireland in the last three years”. That day, a man in a police uniform directed Catholic children in adjoining streets to go and play as a group in Weaver Street. Two other men then appeared and chatted to other men in police uniforms, before one threw a bomb into the middle of the children who were playing 20-30m away.[6] The men then opened fire on people that come out of their houses to try and help the wounded and dying. Six died including four young girls, while more than twenty children were wounded (including a girl named Mary Kerr). Some were left with life changing injuries. An incident in the adjoining Milewater Street, months previously, had also led to a number of children being wounded by gunfire.

Three months after the bombing, in May 1922, any Catholic residents who had remained in the area were forced to flee (around one hundred and forty-eight families). At a coroner’s hearing on the bombing victims, residents identified the role of policemen in the bombing itself and failures to gather evidence or investigate the attack. The Unionist government’s press office also issued disinformation to mislead about the nature of the bombing and identity of the victims. Today the street itself no longer exists on the map of Belfast and an event deemed to be the “…worst thing which has happened…” barely features in histories of the period, or – in 2022 – as part of the Decade of Centenaries programmes that remembered events from 100 years previously.

Map showing location of Weaver Street. The nearby R.I.C. barracks is the building marked in black beside the letters T.B. on York Road.

So, should we regard Weaver Street as a ‘non-site of memory’? Claude Lanzmann and later scholars like Roma Senedyka used the concept of non-sites of memory in an attempt to find language that might describe aspects of the horrific violence inflicted on European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s and the subsequent history of those locations where the violence took place. Since then Pierre Nora’s original concept, ‘sites of memory’, has been used to explore locations as far apart as Georgia and Chile.[7] But can the same be done with ‘non-sites of memory’?

In the case of Weaver Street, some of the basic characteristics are clearly present such as a lack of physical recognition at the site. And this is reinforced by noting that an absence of memorialisation to victims of the period is not universal. Six victims of a massacre at Altnaveigh, near Newry in June 1922, were already commemorated with a memorial by the following summer.[8] An obvious contrast here, reflecting the interests of the post-1921 Unionist government in Belfast, being that the victims at Altanaveigh were Protestants killed by an IRA unit under orders given by Frank Aiken (later a senior figure in the government in Dublin), while those at Weaver Street were Catholic.[9]

After being forced from the area in May 1922, the Catholic residents of Weaver Street and surrounding streets were dispersed over a variety of locations, typically within other districts in Belfast with substantial Catholic populations. Their former houses were then occupied by Protestant families. The Catholic residents mainly fled to areas in north Belfast and in west Belfast. Some families retained memories of the violence but in other cases relatives of the dead had heard little of the events.[10] In the summer of 1932, ten years after the bombing, Belfast’s main unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph, could carry a photograph of Weaver Street decked out in flags at the main annual event celebrating Protestant hegemony. The photograph is positioned in the centre of a single page photographic spread. Of all the places in the area, on a number of occasions Weaver Street was selected to host election rallies and other unionist political gatherings in the 1930s.

This grainy image was printed in the press in May 1922 showing residents fleeing Weaver Street, it appears to be the only such image published.

1932 photograph of Weaver Street with its page context from Belfast Telegraph 9 July 1932 shown below.

Over the course of the decades between 1922 and the 1990s, the area between between York Road and the railway line, including Weaver Street, Shore Street, most of Milewater Street and some of North Derby Street were gradually absorbed into a factory complex and the streets removed from the map of Belfast by the end of the 1960s. Every other street between York Road and the railway line present in the 1890s is still there today. In the background of a photograph showing Shore Street being demolished in the late 1950s someone has painted ‘No Pope Here’ on a wall. Weaver Street survives, in an archaeological sense, below ground beneath the factory complex and the position of Weaver Street itself remains echoed in the alignment of today’s buildings.

Late 1950s photograph showing demolition of Shore Street. Note ‘No Pope Here’ on wall.

Today, it is possible for someone to walk down North Derby Street as far as the large factory building and turn and look along the front elevation of the building. This elevation stands over the former façade of the little red brick houses of Weaver Street. The view is partially obscured by fencing and (until recently) vegetation, and the fencing itself means it is not possible to walk along what was Weaver Street. The only publicly accessible space today is the exact spot from which a man threw a grenade into a group of children playing only yards away in 1922.

The only remaining publicly accessible space at Weaver Street: the location where the bomber stood on 13 Feb 1922. The entrance to Weaver Street is now block by the fence and vegetation and the facade of the factory building sits directly on the same alignment as the facade of the houses where the bombing took place.

In terms of assessing the applicability of transposing Lanzmann’s non-lieux de mémoire concept to Ireland, these elements of the Weaver Street story resonate with other characteristics of non-sites of memory that Roma Senedyka identifies, including that “…the victims typically have a collective identity (usually ethnic) distinct from the society currently living in the area, whose self-conception is threatened by the occurrence of the non-site of memory. Such localities are transformed, manipulated, neglected, or contested in some other way (often devastated or littered)…”.[12] This suggests that the approach can help provide a framework in which it may be possible to begin to interrogate the wider questions around how such events were remembered, or forgotten or ignored, and what conclusions we might draw from that.

This concept of non-sites of memory may also be usefully transposed to other locations in Ireland, particularly twentieth century sites such as Tuam and Bessborough.[13] Both were ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ where many of the characteristics of non-sites of memory can be recognised, particularly if Senedyka’s sense of collective identity is defined as including ideas of gender and social class. In both cases, the presence of human remains at the sites, the subsequent treatment, remembering and forgetting of those buried there could be explored and understood in a framework drawing upon the characteristics of non-sites of memory. Assessing the subsequent histories of sites like Tuam and Bessborough through the prism of non-sites of memory may then be a useful narrative tool to explore how contemporary society viewed and understood them. It may also help develop language which former residents and those who have family members who were resident can use to talk about the experience.

Drawing of ghostly figured associated with Weaver Street from article in Sunday Life, Aug 23, 1993.

[1] Nora, Pierre 1974 Mémoire collective in Faire de l’histoire. Le Goff, Jacques and Nora, Pierre (eds). Paris: Gallimard.

[2] Winter, Jay 2010 Sites of Memory in Radstone, S. and Schwarz, B. (eds) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, pp.312-324. Fordham. Winters also discusses the use of cenotaphs and the longer quote in this paragraph in the same paper (p.313).

[3] Szpociński, Andrzej 2016 Sites of Memory. Teksty Drugie 2016, 1, pp.245-254

[4] See Lanzmann, C. and Gantheret, F. 1986 L’Entretien de Claude Lanzmann, Les non-lieux de mémoire. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 33, pp.293–305.

[5] See Sedenyka, R. 2021 Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1, pp.1-11.

[6] See https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/the-weaver-street-bombing-and-not-dealing-with-the-past/

[7] Marszałek-Kawa, Joanna and Ratke-Majewska, Anna 2016 Anna Sites of Memory in the Public Space of Chile and Georgia: the Transition and Pre-Transition Period. Polish Political Science Yearbook, 45, pp. 99–116.

[8] Northern Whig August 27, 1923

[9] See Knipe, Gregory 2019 The Fourth Northerners. Litter Press.

[10] Karl O’Hanlon, pers. comm. (great nephew of one of the victims, Eliza O’Hanlon); thanks also to nieces of Florence Sheridan and Maggie Sheridan who had been wounded (aged 19 months and 6 years) by a bomb thrown into a group of children playing in Milewater Street, adjoining Weaver Street on 25 September 1921, they recalled their aunt was still able show them the wounds in her old age.

[11] Sunday Life, June 27, 1993.

[12] Sendyka R. 2016 Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory. East European Politics and Societies, 30(4): p.700.

[13] See Irish Examiner, March 11, 2017.

The Belfast Tunnels 1920-22

In the summer of 1922, police and soldiers carrying out raids in the Grove Street area (off North Queen) reported that “…the search revealed that the yards on the Grove Street side were tunnelled the whole length of the street, and access to Grove Street could be made from Vere Street through another tunnel.” (Belfast Newsletter, 21/8/1922). The photograph above and below shows some of those yard walls in Grove Street and Vere Street (the next street over – note the same man in the cap in both photos), and appeared in the contemporary press coverage. In each case the brickwork was removed from the walls that separated the back yards of houses from each other. By doing so, people could move from back yard to back yard while hidden from view by the exterior walls.

By the summer of 1922, the discovery of these ‘tunnelled yards’, as they were called, shouldn’t really have been too much of a surprise anymore. In September 1921, the Norfolk Regiment reported that the backyards of houses in Cross Street (which linked Sussex Street to the ends of Grove Street and Vere Street and across to Earl Street) were tunnelled to allow access to and from York Street (see Northern Whig, 26/9/21, the photos above first appeared in the Belfast Telegraph on 20/9/21 – you can read more on how they were reported here). That issue of the Northern Whig was reporting on a court case where a number of men were seen leaving and entering a house during curfew hours. When the house was searched by the military and some of the men were chased into the adjoining streets, the holes in the walls of the yards were found in a follow-up raid. When the men were prosecuted for breaching curfew, the defence offered by their solicitor, Mr J. Graham, included that “…the passages through the walls had to be made so that the Protestant workers living in these houses could get into York Street to go to their work without having to go through the dangerous streets… It was as much as a man’s life was worth to go into the open street, and finally the people had to tunnel passages from their back yards to get out and in in safety.” This was echoed by John Steele in a report to the Irish Examiner in January 1922: “Belfast. Jan. 19.—I have spent a day visiting tlie little houses and mean streets of Belfast where women and children live in terror, and men crawl to work through tunnels cut in backyard walls, out of reach of snipers who lie in wait for those whose only offence is a different religion.”

An alternative explanation for the tunnels is given by Roger McCorley, an officer in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA’s 3rd Northern Division in 1920-22. In his account of events recorded in a Witness Statement for the Bureau of Military History in 1950, he states that “…the men defending an area would have to move from point to point and in the initial stages this was generally done by climbing across the backyard walls when the post they were firing from was no longer reasonably safe. The danger about the backyard wall was that if the enemy succeeded in getting to the rear of the house and were first up over the level of the yard walls, movement was impossible. On two or three occasions some of our men were killed when attempting to cross walls. In order to cover this, the idea of breaking holes through yard walls was generally practiced in border line areas like Raglan Street. This left complete freedom of movement throughout the rows of houses which in Belfast are generally built back to back.”

In a court case taken in 1923 by the Northern Banking Company, mention is made of Ballymacarrett tenants having to leave then return to houses in Seaforde Street and the Newtonards Road only to find that there were tunnels knocked through the adjoining yard walls. The implication here was that the tunneling was not by the residents themselves (see Northern Whig, 1/5/23).

The existence of similar tunnelled yards is mentioned in various parts of Belfast in 1921 and 1922. They appear to have been more typically found in the Belfast districts which were mainly Catholic and examples were reported from almost all such areas.

Press coverage of violence in Arnon Street and Stanhope Street (in Carrickhill) in March and April 1922, described how armed men used the tunnels against the residents as they gained access to the tunnelled yards and entered houses killing both adults and children (Ballymoney Free Press, 5/4/22). Other streets in Carrickhill, such as Wall

Street and the Old Lodge Road are described as being similarly tunnelled. At one trial that April, the prosecutor, Mr Moorehead, called for houses that had their back yards tunnelled to be leveled to the ground (Belfast Telegraph, 8/4/22).

In May 1922, in another case, it was reported that yards to the rear of houses in Chatham Street and Herbert Street (in Ardoyne) were tunnelled. Another Ardoyne street, Havana Street, was also tunnelled and was mentioned during a case in which two men were charged with breaching curfew regulations. From comments made in the court on that occasion, it appears that householders who had had their yards tunnelled were expected to report this to the police (see Belfast Telegraph, 23/5/22). In the east of the city, on 25th May, James Sloan was arrested and charged that his house in Arran Street (in Ballymacarrett) had been tunnelled with his knowledge, thus enabling people to move from Arran Street to Thompson Street while staying within the back yards.

The press in mid-June reported that Sloan was charged with an offence under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act as being the occupier the house 17, Arran Street, which had been “adapted by the opening of large holes in the walls to facilitate the escape of persons from arrest and the commission of acts prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order.” This was noted to be the first such prosecution under the act although it’s unclear if it made it to court as it never gets referred to again by the press. Sloan was also cited in a linked case over movement of weapons (see PRONI HA/5/628).

In June 1922, it was reported that houses were burned so that the ruins could be used as a base by gunmen to fire along the tunnels that had been made through the yards to the rear of Vere Street. The press also reported that houses in Cullingtree Road (including Brook Street and Quadrant Street) and in the Shore Street/Weaver Street district had their yards tunnelled. In July that year, tunnels were clearly still in use in the Marrowbone district as Eneas McGibbon and Peter Cosgrove were reportedly chased through tunnels by police before being arrested (see Northern Whig, 15/7/22). According to The Scotsman (24/7/22), military and Special Constables searching the Marrowbone discovered, “The whole district was found tunnelled underground presenting all the features of a huge rabbit warren.” Like a report in the Liverpool Daily Post the previous month (12/6/22) which talked about tunnels and burrows, some press coverage clearly misunderstood the nature of the ‘tunnels’, although the Post does not that, in one street, attic walls were breached to allow movement through roof spaces as well.

Effectively, every area in Belfast that saw significant violence in 1920-22 is recorded as having back yards that were linked up by opening holes in the brickwork. Do any such yards survive today? A review of a modern map and aerial photographs of the city illustrates how little of the housing stock in those areas survives from 1920-22 with many streets in those districts laid out since 1922. In north Belfast, two terraces survive at the junction of Kent Street and Stephen Street. This area was the scene of repeated gun battles, sometimes involving armoured cars and Lewis guns (and so likely to have had tunnelled yards to avoid the gunfire and snipers). Many of the back yards and walls have been completely replaced and rebuilt in recent decades. One, just off Kent Street is shown below.

Section of discoloured brick – evidence for the yard off Kent Street having been tunnelled in the past (presumably 1921-22).

The yard wall of red brick off Kent Street appears to be relatively old and has survived by chance as it is propped with more recent brick at the far end. It has been redone with newer cement pointing but clearly has a substantial area of discoloured brick that forms a deep U-shape from the top of the wall (see area marked in yellow above). The brick work is in courses that follow different bonds or patterns although the pattern appears disrupted in the discoloured section in places, suggesting it may have been rebuilt. Is this a last vestige of a tunnelled yard from 1920-22, or are there other examples out there to be found?

Missing

This is the story of some boys who went missing in Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Some of whom returned home, but most were never heard from again.

So the following is a timeline of reporting on incidents involving the main publicized cases of some of the boys who disappeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s around Belfast, namely Jonathan Aven, David Leckey, Randal Kirk, John David Glennon, Brian McDermott, Thomas Spence and John Rogers.

With Kincora back in the news, one bit of speculation that inevitably accompanies the Kincora story is that of the fate of a number of boys who went missing around Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s, usually including the names above. Despite growing up in Belfast (admittedly later in the 1970s and then the 1980s), I’d never heard of any of the cases being mentioned or in the media. That might tell it’s own story, but it made me wonder whether some of the boys did eventually turn up.

That says ‘some of the boys’ because it is clear that there isn’t a definitive list available. Contemporary newspapers (1960s-70s) contain regular accounts of missing boys and boys reunited with their families who ran off and were found elsewhere (running away was a recurring theme in childrens adventures like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and others that were popular at the time). In 1969 alone, cases that were mentioned in the press included Clifford Millar (15) from Railway Street, Ballymena disappeared on 21 Feb 1969 and then was found working in a Wimpy in Dublin in mid-April that year (see Belfast Telegraph 24/2/69 and Belfast Telegraph 16/4/69). The same week as Clifford turned up, two Ballymena girls, Pauline Agnew (13) and Wilma Elliott (15), went missing for 5-6 days and turned up on the Antrim Road (Belfast Telegraph 14/4/69). On the day Millar was found 11 year old John Hamilton left Barnardos in Whiteabbey and didn’t return, his reappearance (if any) was not mentioned in the press. Similarly Patrick O’Hare (16) of Waterford Street (his father John was a Councillor) went missing on 22 January but any return home was not reported (see Belfast Telegraph 5/2/69). I don’t know if either boy was ever found. So the story of boys going missing wasn’t unknown, nor was a happy or tragic ending to the story necessarily confirmed in the press.

Nor was it just boys who were reported missing from Belfast in 1969-70, obviously, with girls being listed as missing even if over 16 years of age (although missing boys do seem to be reported more frequently). Patricia Harper was 17 but was notified as a missing person months after leaving her Stanhope Drive home in March 1970 (see Belfast Telegraph 5/5/70, the previous day the Irish Press reported she was believed to have run away to join an evangelical sect). Christine McAreavey was 20 when she was reported as having disappeared from her Raglan Street home in October 1970 (Belfast Telegraph 7/10/70). Neither Patricia or Christine’s return was reported in the press (and both may, rightly, believe that whether they did or not is no-one else’s business).

So it may be wrong to presume that all such missing children cases include reporting on both the child going missing and then being found again. Or that the few names listed above is even representative. Many such stories were reported and the early 1970s police suggested they normally get notified of five missing children a week (but no information on how many cases stay unresolved). Where Jonathan Aven, David Leckey, Randal Kirk, John David Glennon, Brian McDermott, Thomas Spence and John Rogers are mentioned, the cases of Aven and Leckey and Spence and Rogers are often treated as double abductions (which are unusual), despite there being no witnesses or other evidence.

Of those missing Belfast boys, tragically Brian McDermott’s remains were recovered, but there are no public references to the return of any of the other boys in the well-publicized cases, hence the continued speculation about their fates. Some of those boys – like Randal Kirk and John David Glennon – were 16 years old and possibly old enough to have ran away and built lives elsewhere and simply not returned home (as it transpires, this turns out to have been the case with Glennon).

A 2017 Freedom of Information request, published online, found no files on those two older boys (Kirk and Glennon), maybe indicating that, as they were over 16, the RUC did not pursue an investigation of their disappearances, didn’t retain their files or that both had turned up in the end (at least Glennon definitely returned). Similarly, the reason why they, in particular, feature in later missing boy accounts (possibly over other 16 years olds that were missing) isn’t clear, although the lack of sustained information campaigns may have meant that good news, as such, was more likely to be overlooked or simply unreported.

The other missing boys were younger than Glennon, with likes of David Leckey just 11 years old and, one would assume, they were highly unlikely to have simply found jobs or built new lives on their own after going missing. But it should be stressed, in all but the McDermott and Glennon cases, that there is simply no evidence for what happened to them, and no reason to automatically assume any particular outcome is more likely than others – either they simply ran away and found a new life, that they suffered a tragic accident, or were deliberately abducted.

The chronology below sets out the main newspaper reports (mostly Belfast Telegraph) of their disappearances, searches and then some later references. As mentioned above, it clearly identifies the fate of John David Glennon, which is included along with some of the story of his wider family. It also establishes a lack of connection between the Aven and Leckey disappearances, beyond the general location and being in the same week. Hopefully, some day further information, and possibly even good news may emerge for any remaining families and friends of the missing boys.

TIMELINE

undated, 1969

There are references in more recent accounts, eg the 2017 FoI request (linked above) to the disappearance of a boy called J. Lesithen from East Belfast in 1969. This name appears to be an error – see 1982 below for more information.

September 19 1969

Jonathan Aven, aged 13 (21 Sydenham Drive) goes missing on a Friday after school.

Photo of Jonathan Aven, *Belfast Telegraph* 31/10/70

There had been a news report in the Belfast Telegraph earlier in 1969 (Belfast Telegraph 14.3.69) that give some family background with a photo of 18 year old Christopher Aven, son of Sergeant Major Aven and Mrs C. A. Aven of 21 Syndenham Drive (below). Aven senior was in the 43rd Signals. His son Christopher was a Royal Marine Section Commander who joined the Marines in 1967 and was studying for a commission and had just won a Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award (for a 50 mile hike). He was formerly of Ashfield Boys School. Another brother, Anthony, was with the Royal Corps of Transport in Berlin. Jonathan was younger than Christopher and Anthony by a number of years.

[Note, despite being reported in the Belfast Newsletter on 16.10.69 and 12.11.69 that he did, Jonathan did not attend Oakleigh School on the Ravenhill Road – that the boys went different school is clearly stated in the Belfast Telegraph in 1976 (see below). It seems more likely Jonathan went to Ashfield Boys like his brothers – although this is not stated in media accounts. The Newsletter also included a claim the boys were seen together in England that never appeared elsewhere even at the time.]

Photo of Sgt Major Aven and his son Christopher, *Belfast Telegraph* 14/3/69

September 25 1969

David Leckey, aged 11 (24 Memel Street) goes missing. He left for school (Oakleigh School, special school) and has not been seen since. First reported in press, with photo, on 7th October 1969 (Belfast Telegraph). Like Sydenham Drive a few days earlier, there are no press reports of street disturbances or violence in the vicinity.

Photo of David Leckey, *Belfast Telegraph* 31/10/70

October 1969

Randal Kirk, aged 16 (Barn Road, Carrickfergus) reported missing after going to a football game. Note – his name is occasionally given as ‘Ronald’ or ‘Roland’.

Photo of Randal Kirk, *Belfast Telegraph* 31/10/70

January 8 1970

John David Glennon (Divismore Crescent) went to school and then disappeared.

Photo of John David Glennon, *Belfast Telegraph* 31/10/70

February 1970

RUC ask for help on Aven/Leckey cases – suggest families search caravans and holiday homes (Belfast Telegraph 28.2.70) as they “believe they may be sleeping in a caravan or holiday residence”. The RUC also carried out searches of some Co. Down caravan parks and others further afield with no success (Belfast Telegraph 5.3.70, includes photos of the boys).

[Note: RUC treat as linked cases despite discrepancies in disappearance dates – it later emerges that the boys seemingly did not know each other – see 1976 below]

March 1970

RUC again ask families to search caravans and holiday homes (Belfast Telegraph 28.3.70)

July 1970

Fresh appeal about Leckey and Aven disappearance. RUC describe absolute silence as unusual although they get regular reports of ‘sightings’ (Belfast Telegraph 23.7.70). Accounts seem to assume the boys disappeared together.

October 1970

In Belfast Telegraph (31.10.70) the missing boys story is covered again and includes David Leckey and Jonathan Aven along with Randal Kirk and John David Glennon. Leckey is described as a ‘home bird’ who never ventured far from his local area, although the report says “It was belived the pair went off together.” That does appear to be to be borne out in later comments from the families.

For Kirk, it was claimed it “is thought he worked for a time at Greenford, Middlesex, but left this employment before police could check.” Did Kirk, like Glennon just run away? Glennon is stated to have just gone to school and then disappeared.

A follow-up article in the Belfast Newsletter (2.11.70) explicitly states that the disappearances are not linked and notes that the Leckey family had involved a clairvoyant (Mr Ossie Rae) in the search.

7 March 1973

David Glennon (45) left the Glennon’s home in Divismore Crescent to pay a bill in town. This included an arrangement for an appointment at the Education Welfare Office (Academy Street) at 3:30pm which David didn’t make it to, there were some newspaper reports that claimed he had been in a Donegall Street pub late on Wednesday afternoon (eg Irish Independent 9.3.73). A car was stolen from outside a club in Craven Street on the “Wednesday evening”, the next morning (8th March) the car was found in Summer Street. David Glennon was in the back seat with the feet tied and a hood wrapped around his head and tied by wire around his neck and a pool of blood outside the car. Army Technical Officers blew off the door and David’s body was dragged out with a rope. A Mrs Jean Pittman gave a statement saying she saw blood outside the car when she thought it was suspicious, but she could not be traced for his inquest (all Belfast Telegraph 24.1.74). The report notes that Mary (or Maureen in some reports) and David Glennon’s son had been missing for four and a half years and included pleas from her for him to come home.

David Glennon’s hooded body, rope still attached, after being dragged from the car by soldiers – this image was published by *Belfast Telegraph, 9.3.73*.

[Note: The gap between time the car was stolen in Craven Street and timing of his possible abduction is unclear, so whether David was deliberately targeted or a random victim is unknown. Glennon’s wider family were subject to a series of attacks which are included in the timeline below, although, as will become obvious, there is connection to John David Glennon’s disappearance.]

2 September 1973

On this day Brian McDermott was last seen at a playground near his home. In a story that still shocks today, his headless, dismembered and charred remains were found (by chance) a week later in the River Lagan. His brother Billy was questioned in 1976 when he made a confession that he has always insisted was coerced by the RUC. He then was investigated in 2004 and again in 2008 when an ex-partner alleged he had confessed to killing Brian. Despite some of his family suspecting him, Billy McDermott continues to insist that he is innocent.

January 1974

Inquest into David Glennon murder (this produced many of the details given above).

14 March 1974

Noel McCartan, a cousin of David Glennon’s, was shot dead near his family home in McClure Street. Another family member, Noel’s nephew, James McCartan, had been tortured and then shot dead in Mersey Street in October 1972 in a killing involving Albert Baker (an ex-soldier whose exact role is unclear). Another cousin of David’s and the McCartans, John Whyte, was killed by shots reportedly fired at an army footpatrol on 1st January 1974.

24 March 1974

John Hamilton (a Protestant married to a Catholic, Elizabeth – sister of Noel McCartan) found near his home on Spruce Street, having been shot dead. Family members reported that had been receiving death threats that said “Remember… sooner or later… I will not forget any of you. You are all marked. Until we meet.” (Belfast Telegraph 26.3.74). The press point out that none of the McCartans, Hamiltons etc were politically involved. Alice McCartan died in the week after her son (Noel’s) and son-in-law (John’s) deaths from what relatives said was a broken heart.

14 May 1974

Desmond McCartan was leaving his home at Annadale Flats when he spotted a booby trap bomb in the glove compartment and got out before it could detonate. It was later defused.

26 November 1974

John Rogers (13) from Rodney Drive and Thomas Spence (11) Rochdale Street leave their homes and were waiting on a bus on the Falls Road (to go St Aloysius Special School on the Somerton Road). John is last seen leaving home at 9am. Thomas is last seen at 9.15am at a bus stop on the Falls when he should have already been on the bus, while other witnesses suggested that both boys were seen and also in a shop on the Falls Road (see Irish Independent 14.9.2001). When Mrs Spence was told he was still at the bus stop (after the bus would normally have left) she went to get him but he wasn’t there. Neither boy is seen again. John’s adoptive mother, Alice, claims she later escaped an abduction attempt (see Sunday Tribune 18.8.2002). See also here for a more recent account of their story.

A 1976 article (Belfast Telegraph 22.12.76) includes information on the family searches, discounted rumours about the boys ‘being on the run’ from (paramilitary) organizations, while Alice Rogers said she never thought John was the type to go away.

Same article notes that David Leckey and Jonathan Aven attended different schools and, as far as David’s mother was aware, they had no knowledge of each other. She said her husband met the Avens and neither could find a link between the boys. Former investigating officer said (in 1976) that the lack of any evidence at all in the case was unusual.

There was a search for their remains in 2001 (see below).

1979

Belfast Telegraph (8.3.79) reports that a 23 year old John David Glennon from Divismore Crescent had pleaded guilty (along with two men from Ardoyne) to shooting a man on Twaddell Avenue on 8th October 1977 and IRA membership. He got 16 years with 7 years concurrent for membership. Address and name the same but reported age is three years too young. See also 1987 entry below.

1982

Jim Cusack (in Belfast Telegraph 11.3.82 and reprinted in other papers such as the Irish Independent), reported that the RUC were “keeping tight-lipped” about claims that Kincora detectives were investigating David Leckey and Jonathan Aven’s files, although some the papers (eg Irish Independent) explicitly link the boys and Kincora. Cusack includes a claim from “some sources” that Leckey, Aven and two other boys had skipped school to steal lead off roofs, then went to Bangor where they slept in a haystack. When the haystack was set on fire the boys then returned to Belfast. While the other boys returned home, David and Jonathan may have sheltered in derelict houses and, could have tragically been caught up in destruction of property at the time. All of that appears untrue, given the boys didn’t know each other and no reference to the returned boys appears to feature in the earlier reports. Nor does Cusack explain the difference in dates of disappearances (or the 1976 account that included interviews with the Leckeys that said the boys didn’t know each other). Cusack does suggest that Kincora detectives looked at this Brian McDermott case (but doesn’t mention those of Glennon, Kirk, Spence and Rogers). That this last suggestion was actively being pursued is corroborated in state papers that were released much later (see 2013 below). So the source of Cusack’s other inaccurate claims is untrue.

The name J. Lesithen appears in reference to an entry in the Peter Heathwood Collection for a BBC news report broadcast on Thursday 11th March 1982 (presumably on foot of the BT story above). It states “On Kincora case, RUC begins investigating disappearance of children David Leckey and J. Lesithen in 1969, and employee in home suspended, De La Salle home at Kirkcubben to be closed.” This appears to be a mistranscription of J. Aven, but has entered later accounts of the disappearances as the name of a boy in a separate disappearance case. The surname ‘Lesithen’ doesn’t even appear to be a real surname.

11 November 1987

A John David Glennon, again of Divismore Crescent and with age given as 28, was reported (Belfast Telegraph 11.11.87) to be charged with possession of a bomb. During his trial in 1988 (Belfast Telegraph 21.9.88) it was indicated that his age was 33 and that he had been released early in June 1986 after a previous conviction (see above), that he claimed he had transported the bomb under duress and (it was offered as mitigating circumstances in court) that his father had been murdered in 1973. This clearly indicates that this is the same John David Glennon although his own disappearance and return aren’t discussed.

2001

Search of a property reported at Rodney Drive for remains of John Rogers and Thomas Spence, based on a re-investigation, and allegations about a former resident in Rodney Drive. The searches revealed no new information.

2013

In 1982 (according to state papers released in 2013), Brian McDermott’s case was raised as part of internal discussions about the Kincora inquiries and investigations. It was reported that the Attorney General said that “The RUC were looking again at the murder of Brian McDermott in the mid-1970s [whose] death was thought at the time to have been sectarian, but it was now believed possible that there were homosexual aspects.” This seems to post-date the investigation of Billy McDermott and so it’s unclear if it is speculation or suggests that Billy McDermott was excluded from having a role in Brian’s death.

2017

A Robert Giles submitted an Freedom of Information request about whether the cases of five missing boys were still open cases. He named the boys as Jonathan Aven, David Lecky, Ronald (sic) Kirk, John David Glennon and a J. Lesithen from East Belfast (see above undated, 1969). Only the first two remain listed as open cases. Link is here for the response (on 27.4.2017).

Missing

Of the boys mentioned here, the fate of Jonathan Aven, David Leckey, Randal Kirk, Thomas Spence and John Rogers all remain unknown (as with Patrick O’Hare and John Hamilton). Aven and Leckey, despite later fairly sensationalist claims, did not go missing at the same time and represent two distinct disappearances, albeit with a half mile of each other. John Rogers and Thomas Spence did go missing at the same time and in a different part of the city entirely. At this remove, and with no firm evidence to contradict it, it is hard not to assume the boys met a tragic fate.

In the case of Randal Kirk, who was older and was claimed to be working in England at one point, there is less reason to believe anything untoward befell him. John David Glennon, of the same age as Kirk, absconded but then returned while Brian McDermott met a violent death that is still unresolved. And there are probably many other children from Belfast who could have their names added here but like the children themselves their stories, too, are missing.

19 August 1922: a book burning and an end of history

“The ‘Outrage’ propaganda should be dropped in the Twenty-Six Counties. It can have no effect but to make certain of our people see red which will never do us any good.”

So wrote Ernest Blythe in August 1922. Blythe himself was seeking to suppress a collective study of events in Belfast from 1920 to 1922 which, even at the time, were considered to have been hidden from the public eye. The study, ‘Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom 1920-1922‘ by G.B. Kenna is a book very much shrouded in mystery.

Written and printed in 1922, thousands of copies were printed for distribution but only eighteen ended up in circulation. The rest were apparently pulped to prevent the book reaching the shops. It is, of course, well known that the author wasn’t actually ‘G.B. Kenna’* but the name of the publisher, the ‘O’Connell Publishing Company, Dublin’ similarly appears to be fictitious. So, what was going on?

[*Even the authors pseudonym, G.B. Kenna is a pun – Great Britain doesn’t know]

Cover of the original edition of Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom 1920-1922

The book began in the work of the Publicity Committee of the Provisional Government in 1922 (as the early Free State government was known). Michael Collins had sent Cork man Patrick O’Driscoll to Belfast in mid-February 1922 to gather statements on the intense violence that had been happening in the city. Northern IRA units had been sending a stream of intelligence reports to Dublin with accounts of the violence since 1920. It had always been assumed by Collins, IRA GHQ and others, that these accounts exaggerated not just the extent of the violence, but Craig and the Unionists’ role in inciting it, and the behaviour of the B Specials and others that had led Belfast Catholics to label it as a ‘pogrom’ (the use of the term ‘pogrom’ is discussed further below). It appears to have been first introduced for events in Belfast in 1911.

Given the disputes over the Anglo-Irish Treaty he signed in December 1921, at the very least, Collins now needed the northern IRA units to not openly oppose the treaty. O’Driscoll being sent was likely part of the same trust-building exercise by pro-treaty supporters in Dublin that had included a promise of arms and ammunition to the northern IRA units if they backed the treaty. Highly regarded by Collins, O’Driscoll (later a Dáil reporter) was to explore the truth of the ‘pogrom’ claims.

The statements and information O’Driscoll collected began to be appear in Provisional Government bulletins during March 1922. Collins likely sought to use the revelations as leverage during his own negotiations with the northern Unionist leader Sir James Craig (these negotiations led to the Craig-Collins Pacts). O’Driscoll also advised Collins that the Catholic bishops and community leaders were demanding that someone publish a detailed exposé to counteract the propaganda the unionist press had been printing since 1920. This included funerals of Catholics being wrongly reported as IRA victims, attacks on Catholics being wrongly ascribed to the IRA and photographs of damaged ‘Protestant’ homes that had actually been owned by ‘Catholics’. [You can read more about a typical example, Weaver Street, here.]

Collins asked the Catholic Bishop of Down and Conor, Joseph MacRory, to release Father John Hassan, the administrator in St Mary’s, Chapel Lane in the centre of Belfast, to work on gathering suitable material for a book. Hassan had previously been the parish priest in St Joseph’s in Sailortown and was familiar with, and well known in, the districts which had seen the most violence. He had also been recording the details of events since 1920. Hassan set out to gather information to address the black propaganda issues (sometimes at the expenses of completeness in his statistics).

Fr John Hassan (courtesy of his great grand nephew, Niall Hassan)

Hassan, however, told O’Driscoll that he personally didn’t feel up to the task of writing a book on the subject and it was agreed with Collins that it be entrusted to a member of the Publicity Committee, Alfred O’Rahilly, who would be supplied with the necessary information by Hassan. O’Rahilly, a noted mathematician and theologian, was the Registrar of University College Cork and had been the constitutional advisor to the treaty delegation in 1921. He had helped draft a constitution for the new Irish Free State earlier in 1922 and was very much a Catholic intellectual, having initially trained as a Jesuit. O’Driscoll said that O’Rahilly was going to write “…one of the most powerful indictments of Orangeism ever published” (see J. Anthony Gaughan’s biography of O’Rahilly).

After the Provisional Government’s North East Advisory Committee met on 11th April 1922 to review events, O’Rahilly met with Collins on the 20th and agreed to write the book. In early May he sent an outline to Kevin O’Higgins’ secretary (Patrick McGilligan) but O’Rahilly was then busy with university business until June. As Kieron Glennon has pointed out (in From Pogrom to Civil War), the dire reports from the north at the 11th April meeting and O’Driscoll’s eye witness accounts surely alarmed Collins and Richard Mulcahy over their capacity to retain the confidence of northern IRA units. Mulcahy had been Chief of Staff of the IRA and was now Chief of Staff of the new Free State’s ‘National Army’. They then agreed to an abortive, disorganised and ultimately futile northern offensive by the IRA in mid-May 1922. That offensive eroded most of the northern IRA’s remaining resources and capacity to no obvious purpose (other than perhaps diverting their attention from events further south).

In early June, O’Driscoll wrote to O’Rahilly to advise him that all the necessary material was now available. He also told O’Rahilly that Fr Hassan was starting to get uneasy as he hadn’t yet heard from O’Rahilly. By now, though, the outbreak of hostilities between pro- and anti-treaty supporters had taken centre stage in the south. The Provisional Government set-up a new North East Policy Committee without Collins but including the likes of Ernest Blythe, a republican with a northern Protestant background. Hassan continued to work on collecting information for the book. O’Rahilly’s public standing, though, meant that he was caught up in attempts to broker peace between pro- and anti-treaty supporters in Cork and he seems to have been unable to commit to completing his part of the work at the time. According to Gaughan it was then decided that, as an interim report, Hassan would publish the information he had gathered to date as a book. This was to be funded by Collins and O’Rahilly would follow it with his own devastating polemic in due course.

So Hassan pulled together the material he had gathered to date. He appears to have finished up at the start of August as the book contains details of sentences handed out in court in Belfast on the same date that he wrote the foreword, 1st August 1922. The foreword explicitly set out the motivation behind writing the book: “…to place before the public a brief review of the disorders that have made the name of Belfast notorious… A well-financed Press propaganda… has already succeeded in convincing vast numbers of people, especially in England, that the victims were the persecutors… What the Catholics of Belfast would desire most of all…is an impartial tribunal set up by Government to investigate the whole tragic business… considering the magnitude of these outrages…?”

But by the 1st August 1922 Michael Collins had only three weeks left to live.

The timing seems to be quite significant. On 2nd August Collins and the northern IRA units had agreed to cease offensive operations in the north and were instead to adopt a policy of passive resistance and non-recognition of the Northern Ireland government. The 3rd August issue of the Irish Bulletin from the Publicity Committee included a summary of some of the information gathered by Hassan. The next day the Freeman’s Journal called it a “…an admirable antidote to the lying propaganda which has been flooding this country for many months past.”

However, Ernest Blythe made very different proposals to the North East Policy Committee a few days later on 9th August. Instead, Blythe suggested that they should push the IRA and northern Catholics to recognise the authority of the Northern Ireland government and actively support it. However Blythe’s rationale was that the current policy (non-conciliation) was supported by the (anti-treaty) IRA and so the Provisional Government should reverse its position on the north as a way of “…attacking them [the IRA] all along the line.” Furthermore, Blythe wrote, “The ‘Outrage’ propaganda should be dropped in the Twenty-Six Counties. It can have no effect but to make certain of our people see red which will never do us any good.” Blythe effectively proposed sacrificing the book, details of the Belfast pogrom and revealing the truth of what had happened in Belfast since 1920 for tactical reasons during the civil war. Perhaps to test the public reaction, Blythe’s proposals were clearly leaked to some newspapers, such as the Donegal News, which reported them on 12th August as ‘rumours circulating in Dublin’. The leaks claimed they were actually proposals that had been agreed between a northern bishop and a leading British cabinet minister (this may have been mischievous as Blythe, at least, knew that Bishop MacRory had recently met Lloyd George in London). On 19th August the Provisional Government endorsed Blythe’s proposals.

Presuming Hassan had immediately given his manuscript to the printers, it seems unlikely that it had been composited, printed and bound before either the 19th August when Blythe had the Provisional Government agree to drop it or Collins’ death on 22nd August (Collins was apparently to meet with Alfred O’Rahilly the night after he was killed). As such, it seems likely that the book was literally in the printers when Collins died. Since Collins hadn’t yet challenged other members of the Provisional Government over endorsement of Blythe’s proposals, or had a chance to argue they should be dropped, Blythe’s policy stood and that was the end of Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom 1920-1922. For now.

Hassan’s own obituary in the Irish Independent (5/1/1939) confirms the story but adds a different spin to the reason why the book was censored, “By order of the Provisional Government an edition, running into many thousand copies, was printed for distribution on a world-wide scale, but before the time of publication things in the North took a better turn, and it was decided not to proceed further with it.” Hassan being from Banagher in Derry, he had a lengthy obituary in the Derry Journal (6/1/1939) which also confirms that “…when printed, the publication had been withdrawn…” although the Derry Journal implied that had happened earlier in 1922, during the Craig-Collins talks (which is clearly incorrect based on the content of the book). In a 1970 article in the Irish Examiner (9/9/1970), historian Andrew Boyd was closer to the truth in suggesting that the Provisional Government thought publication of the book “…was more likely to incite war than promote peace.”

While Boyd’s phrasing suggests slightly more altruistic motives, failure to publish the book may have had much more longer term repercussions. Many of the issues raised throughout the book, and much of Hassan’s language, finds dark echoes in the violence in Belfast in 1935 and again from 1969 onwards. Given that between January 1919 and June 1922, around 20% of all War of Independence fatalities occurred in Belfast, the almost absolute absence of meaningful histories of the period in Belfast, until ‘Facts and Figures’ was eventually made widely available in 1997, is still astonishing. A moment, which could have possibly seen some sort of coming to terms with the immediate past in 1922, was entirely missed. Failing to quickly unpack the legacy of 1920-1922 may also have been crucial to creating the type of long-term dynamics around ‘dealing with the past’ that we still see today. While the Provisional Government effectively censored reporting on the violence in Belfast after 19th August 1922, the likes of Belfast Newsletter and Northern Whig could continue, unchallenged, to dismiss accounts of the violence as shameless propaganda.

A final key point, here, is in the use of the term ‘pogrom’ in the books title. In recent decades, historians like Robert Lynch and Alan Parkinson have been at pains to dismiss the use of the term. However, contemporary commentators who had witnessed the violence in Belfast in 1920-1922, had absolutely no qualms about using it and had been applying it to Belfast since 1911.

Ironically, the current accepted definition of ‘pogrom’, used by the likes of Werner Bergmann and David Engels, is “…a unilateral, non-governmental form of collective violence initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless ethnic group”. That collective violence generally manifests as riots and is directed at the minority group collectively rather than targeting specific individuals. There is also an the implication that officials have connived at it, but not directly organised it. This is exactly how Hassan uses the term, but not Lynch or Parkinson [Lynch claims, for it to be a pogrom, victims should be mostly women and children, Parkinson that it should be state organised. Neither interpretation is consistent with current accepted definitions of a ‘pogrom’]. Kieron Glennon, though, thought it appropriate and used the term in the title of his From Pogrom to Civil War.

Today, pretty much no-one will want the term ‘pogrom’ used. But as pointed out earlier, the real moment for coming to terms with all this likely passed with the original suppression of ‘Facts and Figures’ in 1922. Yet Hassan himself makes the most important point of all in his own dedication at the start of the book. Proportionally, very few people took an active part in the pogrom, and of those many were likely caught up in it rather than instrumental in making it happen. Hassan makes that point explicitly at the start of the book, dedicating it to that vast majority who took no hand or part in it: “The many Ulster Protestants, who have always lived in peace and friendliness with their Catholic neighbours, this little book dealing with the acts of their misguided co-religionists, is affectionately dedicated.”

Facts and Figures of the Belfast Pogrom 1920-1922 by G.B. Kenna, in its original cover, is available again now via Amazon.

Kieron Glennon’s From Pogrom to Civil War is published by Mercier Press. The details of Ernest Blythe’s proposals to the North East Policy Committee are included in his papers in UCD (IEUCDAP24) and quoted at length by Glennon.

J. Anthony Gaughan’s biography of O’Rahilly, Alfred O’Rahilly is published by Kingdom Books.

The appropriateness of the term ‘pogrom’ is discussed by Robert Lynch (in his 2008 paper in the Journal of British Studies, “The People’s Protectors? The Irish Republican Army and the “Belfast Pogrom,” 1920-1922”) and Alan Parkinson in The Unholy War (published by Four Courts).

For a discussion of Werner Bergmann’s definition of a pogrom see Heitmeyer and Hagan’s survey paper in International Handbook of Violence Research, Volume 1. David Engels views are reviewed in Dekel-Chen, Gaunt, Meir and Bartal’s Anti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History.

The first use of ‘pogrom’ for violence in Belfast appears in 1911 and became well established by 1912.

Thanks to Martin Molloy and Niall Hassan for the photograph of Fr Hassan. Father John Hassan was born in Coolnamon, near Feeney in Derry in 1875 and went to school first at Fincairn, then Ballinascreen, then St. Columbs in 1892. In 1894 he went to Maynooth and then Rome the following year where he was ordained in St John Laterans by Cardinal Respighi on 9th June 1900. He was fluent in Italian, French and German as well as Irish and English. He returned to the Down and Conor diocese in Ireland, serving in parishes in Ballycastle, Castlewellan, Downpatrick and Kilkeel before he was transferred to Belfast, firstly to St Josephs in Sailortown in1910. He moved to St Mary’s, Chapel Lane in 1916 where he was involved in the events described above, staying there until 1929 when he moved as parish priest to Ballymoney were he died in 1939 (from Derry Journal, 6/1/1939).

Weaver Street, Tuam and Bessborough as ‘non-sites of memory’

Here, I’m exploring Weaver Street using an idea taken from studies in eastern Europe, that of a ‘non-site of memory’ (the origin of the term ‘non-site of memory’ is explained further below). This article also looks at the suitability of the concept to provide insights into the scenes of other significant episodes from twentieth century Irish history, such as the Tuam and Bessborough Mother and Baby Homes.

People today are familiar with sites of memory, even if they haven’t heard them described as such. Most modern societies use monuments to commemorate historical events. Some, such as the Whitehall cenotaph in London are, or have become, the setting for annual rituals to display and communicate values to modern audiences. These rituals use symbols and imagery that draw upon particular and often partisan readings of history to promote political strategies in the present or future.

[1] Nora, Pierre 1974 Mémoire collective in Faire de l’histoire. Le Goff, Jacques and Nora, Pierre (eds). Paris: Gallimard.

[3] Szpociński, Andrzej 2016 Sites of Memory. Teksty Drugie 2016, 1, pp.245-254

[4] See Lanzmann, C. and Gantheret, F. 1986 L’Entretien de Claude Lanzmann, Les non-lieux de mémoire. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 33, pp.293–305.

[5] See Sedenyka, R. 2021 Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1, pp.1-11.

[6] See https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/the-weaver-street-bombing-and-not-dealing-with-the-past/

[8] Northern Whig August 27, 1923

[9] See Knipe, Gregory 2019 The Fourth Northerners. Litter Press.

[11] Sunday Life, June 27, 1993.

[12] Sendyka R. 2016 Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory. East European Politics and Societies, 30(4): p.700.

[13] See Irish Examiner, March 11, 2017.

International reactions to #BloodySunday: Germany and the death of Erwin Beelitz

The events of Bloody Sunday were immediately broadcast around a world that had been getting used to hearing and seeing news footage almost as it happened. For several years well-resourced American media organisations had been showing footage of combat in Vietnam, sometimes live, that was seen globally. Similarly, film clips of mass political protests in America, in support of civil rights and against the US role in south-east Asia, provided a visual toolkit for organizing civil rights protests in Ireland in the late 1960s. Repression, including violent state responses to protest like the Kent State shootings in 1970 gave people references points that linked their experience to political struggles around the world.

On the evening of Bloody Sunday, a young German, Michael Baumann, had watched a television report on events in Derry that day. Like many of the post-war generation in West Berlin, there was a certain level of resentment at the continued occupation by the victorious allies of various sectors of Berlin. This lent itself to empathising with others they perceived to be sharing an experience of military occupation, whether that was in places like Vietnam or, since 1969, Ireland. And, just as the presence of US troops in Germany had created a target for protests over US actions in south-east Asia, the presence of British troops meant that there was a highly visible focus for protests over British actions in Ireland. At the time, watching reporting of Bloody Sunday in Derry on television, Michael Baumann claimed he was so moved by events that he decided that he “…had to do something about it”.

Next day, Monday 31st January, Baumann and a friend, Hans-Peter Knoll, met with Verena Becker, Harald Sommerfeld and Inge Viett who had also concluded that the killings of unarmed civilians by the British Army demanded a response. Becker, Sommerfeld and Viett had been members of Schwarzen Hilfe, a support group for political prisoners, but had recently joined Baumann and Knoll in Bewegung 2 Juni or B2J (the June 2nd Movement).

B2J had been founded the previous year by individuals associated with some of the German groups that had emerged from the student and radical campaigns of the late 1960s. Even the B2J name commemorated the day in 1967 (June 2nd) when unarmed Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police detective, following vicious police repression of a protest against a visit by the Shah of Iran to Berlin. The events of that day were repeatedly cited by many individuals involved in the radical groups as a pivotal moment in their transition from peaceful and largely conventional protests to more militant actions.

Like many of the German radical groups, B2J were trying to adapt urban guerilla tactics, largely following the outlines sketched by Brazilian Marxist-Leninist Carlos Marighella (in his Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla). They hoped that the example of actions by a small, elite, guerilla group would catalyse support for their aims. Ultimately, this was meant to lead to ‘the people’ seizing power from the conservative, capitalist forces that controlled the state. This marked a departure from the successful, ‘focalist’ model used in the likes of Cuba and Vietnam, where the impetus began in remote rural areas prior to marching on, and seizing, the urban centres. In the metropolitan western states, the focus needed to be on building support in the urban areas rather than rural districts. The Tupamaros in Uruguay and, historically, the urban IRA operations organised by the likes of Michael Collins were seen by Marighella and others as exemplars of the urban guerilla method. Up to 1972, B2J had mainly confined itself to robberies and shootings. A response to Bloody Sunday seemed to provide an opportunity to progress to widen its campaign. This was largely following the template set out by Marighella in his Minimanual.

B2J itself was a loose coalition of anarchists unlike the better known Marxist-Leninist group, the Rotte Armee Fraktion (R.A.F.). The latter is usually rendered in English as Red Army ‘Faction’ although ‘Fraction’ is more accurate and reflects the intention to identify the group as an integral part of wider society (i.e. a ‘fraction’), rather than a discrete entity in its own right as the term ‘faction’ implies.

Famously, the R.A.F. included Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler and Ulrike Meinhof. A name that was often, erroneously, given to the first generation R.A.F. was the ‘Baader-Meinhof’ Group or just ‘B-M’ (mistakenly taking Meinhof to be a leader). The R.A.F. didn’t really have leaders, per se, but the most prominent female figure was Gudrun Ensslin rather than Meinhof. Emerging from those same left wing challenges to the aging conservative establishment in West Germany, the R.A.F. held a particular appeal to young Germans. In a television era, imagery and optics were important and the group’s public personae, consciously or subconsciously, resonated with a sort of revolutionary chic. For instance, a mythical preference for using stolen BMWs (dubbed the Baader-Meinhof Wagen) is believed to have brought the then provincial and largely unheralded BMW brand to prominence. And when Baader was arrested in 1972, he had a bleeding gunshot wound in his thigh, he still managed to keep his Raybans on for the cameras. The high profile female voices within the organisations, like Ensslin and Meinhof, similarly signalled an aspiration towards gender equality that both increased their youth appeal, and, differentiated them from the older male-dominated West German establishment which was also tarnished by the country’s history under the Nazis.

I think you can see influence of the projected media image of the likes of Ensslin and Meinhof in Irish republican depictions of female activists in the early 1970s, much of it resonating with second wave feminism. Presumably this would equally apply to media imagery of women involved in loyalist organisations in the 1970s (check out the new Her Loyal Voice blog which might explore some of the history there). Bob White’s documentary on Cumann na mBan, posted here previously, suggests there is scope for more exploration of the interplay of second wave feminism and interaction between the IRA and Cumann na mBan (keep an eye out for Dieter Reinsich’s work in this area too, eg see here). It also partly explains the fascination with particular images from the conflict in Belfast, like the one of a young woman firing a gun at a street corner.

While there had been widespread student and radical protests in Europe in the late 1960s, only really Germany, Italy and Ireland had also saw the development or renewal of a range of militant groupings. The publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was connected to both German and Italian radicals, provided some of the thinking and resourcing behind the development of the Italian groups. He was instrumental in setting up the Gruppi di Azione Partigiana (Partisan Action Groups) which was founded around the same time as other left radical groups like Lotta Continua and Gruppo XXII Ottobre (October 22nd Group) in 1969, soon to be followed by the more durable Brigata Rossa or ‘B-R’ (‘Red Brigade’, later ‘Red Brigades’ as it absorbed members of the other groups as they disbanded). Unlike the German groups, there were very few prominent women in the Italian organisations.

In Italy, right wing groups were also active. They carried out occasional bombings and shootings from 1969 onwards to which the left wing radical groups responded in kind. Media coverage meant that left wing protests around the world quickly reached a much wider audience (just as from October 1968 onwards, Irish events also began to feature on television news bulletins). The patterns of militant activity and scale of fatalities in Italy and Germany (and indeed Ireland) were not vastly dissimilar for much of 1969 and 1970. While there were points of contact between the various groups, there was little in the way of formal links. However, all were constantly aware of, and sympathetic to, events in other countries. As late as 1985, the third generation R.A.F. had a unit called ‘Kommando Patsy O’Hara’.

For that reason, Baumann and the others identified with events in Derry on Bloody Sunday. In West Berlin, a peaceful protest by fifteen hundred people on the Tuesday following Bloody Sunday had converged on the British Consulate-General. The protesters had demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland. Trouble flared afterwards and eight windows of the BBC’s Berlin office were broken by stone throwers.

While that was going on the former Schwarzen Hilfe members in B2J, Verena Becker, Inge Viett and Harald Sommerfeld and another inexperienced member, Willi Räther, were scouting for British military targets to attack in the Gatow and Kladow districts along the western outskirts of West Berlin. Figuring most were too well protected, they happened upon a sign for the British Yacht Club on the Havel, just off Kladower Damm which was mainly used by British officers. They reconnoitred the club and decided it would make a suitable target. As it was out of season, it was deserted and so there was little risk of anything more than damage to property.

Up to then, B2J had mainly been involved in a handful of encounters with German police and bank robberies to raise funds. Baumann and Knoll had went to see other leading figures in a Schoneberg apartment including Heinz Brockmann, Ralf Reinders and ‘Ina’ Siepmann to see what could be done. It was agreed that Brockmann would manufacture explosive devices to be used in mobile attacks. Next day Baumann acquired the necessary materials and brought them to an apartment in Sybelstrasse where Brockman manufactured three bombs using fire extinguishers, water pipes, clock parts, gunpowder and fireworks. Baumann made explosives from weed killer and sugar. Meanwhile, Becker and the others reassembled in Eisenbahnstrasse and prepared a letter to leave at the British Yacht Club stating that the attack was in solidarity with the IRA and in revenge for the British Army’s actions in Derry.

The bombs were all set to detonate at 2.15 am on 2nd February.

The inexperienced Becker, Viett, Sommerfeld and Räther were to plant one bomb at the deserted British Yacht Club. They drove to Gatow by car where Viett stayed in the car with the lights on and engine running while Becker, Räther and Sommerfeld climbed the fence. Once inside, Becker kept watch as Sommerfeld and Räther carried the bomb around to the side of the clubhouse facing out onto the Havel. Räther placed the bomb on a chair and set the time for the ignition, delaying it until 2.30 am to allow them more time to get away. Having attached the cables so the bomb was now live, he covered it in a bag while Sommerfeld left the A3 sheet with their statement by a window of the building. Without waiting for the detonation, they headed for home.

The remote British Yacht Club was assumed to be a safe target. The other two bombs, on a public street, brought a much higher risk of passersby becoming casualties. Those two bombs were carried by the more experienced B2J members around Charlottenburg in Berlin. They drove around with the armed bombs looking for targets of opportunity. Brockman spotted a car with British plates in Theodor Heuss Platz, where he planted one of the bombs under it himself. Baumann and Knoll planted the second after finding a similar car.

At quarter past two in the morning, the two Charlotteburg bombs exploded. Even allowing for the slight delay, the Yacht Club bomb didn’t explode. At 8 am the next morning, a boat builder employed at club for twenty years, sixty-six year old Erwin Beelitz, found the bag covering the bomb on his morning inspection of the premises. He took it to his workshop where he put the contraption in a vice to open it up. The bomb exploded, blowing fingers off Beelitz’s right hand and sending fragments into his stomach and thigh. Three students visiting the club later that morning find him bleeding and dying.

Erwin Beelitz (Getty Images)

Shortly afterwards, B2J started officially using the name Bewegung 2 Juni on communications. By May 1973, Sommerfeld had been captured and was tried and sentenced for the Yacht Club bomb (various members were to face the courts by 1974). He received a sentence of four years and nine months for the bombing as the court accepted that the intention had been to damage property only and that it had been intended as a show of solidarity with the IRA.

You can read more about the German radicals in Peters Butz’s 2017 book, 1977: RAF gegen Bundesrepublik, Wolfgang Kraushaur’s 2012 book Verena Becker und der Verfassungsschutz and in contemporary news reports in Irish press and Der Spiegel. Richard Huffman has a blog and podcasts dedicated to the R.A.F. and related groups here.

And you can read an online edition of Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla here.

The omission of Erwin Beelitz from conventional lists of violent conflict deaths is part of a broader issue that is worth exploring further in terms of understanding the wider impact of violence. I’ve another post on it here, with a preliminary look at structural violence.

An earlier version of this post has appeared previously.

Police notice listing *Rotte Armee Fraktion* members, Heinz Brockman shown on bottom row with Ralf Reinders in the second row.

…for fear of alienating the Unionist vote… #BloodySunday50

When the UK’s current Brexit Minister, Liz Truss, held a series of clandestine meetings in Belfast last week, it seemed clear that the Tories intention is to continue to make the UK’s relationship with the EU fractious. And to play along with misrepresenting views in Belfast as part of a public pretense of opposition to the Protocol. It is probably a mistake to imagine Truss, or Tory party policy, is focused on events in any part of Ireland. On the fiftieth anniversary of the horrors of Bloody Sunday, revisiting some of the political dynamics that drove events reveals absurdly similar issues at play. It also gives part of an answer to ‘why’ Bloody Sunday happened.

The early 1970s was also a pivotal moment in the relationship of London and the European community. Over the course of 1971 and 1972 Edward Heath was trying to push his European Communities Bill through a reluctant House of Commons. The Bill was instrumental in the UK joining the European Economic Community (as the EU was then known). Following the 1970 General Election, Heath had come to power intent on legislating for UK membership of the EEC. With 330 MPs he had a slim majority of 14 and that included the 8 Unionist Party members returned in the north (along with Ian Paisley, Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devlin and Frank McManus).

Over the summer of 1971, in the lead up to the early stages of the Bill, the press speculated on the extent to which Heath’s reliance on the Unionist votes was a factor in deciding security policy, including in the lead up to the widespread arrest and internment of Catholics in August 1971. At an early stage, in October 1971, most of the Unionist MPs (who were joined in a formal parliamentary grouping with Heath’s Conservatives) voted against the Bill. All of this provides a notable backdrop to the Heath’s perceived need to win Unionists support for his European project for the crucial votes that would happen later in 1971 and early in 1972. Notably, over this period, security policy continued to fall in line with Unionist demands. Political reform was largely ignored (you can see the types of proposals under consideration at the time). And formal scrutiny of recent events was heavily sanitised, such as the Compton report issued in November 1971. During critical events such as the McGurks Bar bombing in December 1971 and Bloody Sunday in January 1972, UK government policy remained favourably aligned on Unionist needs and wants despite significant international opprobrium.

The saddest aspect of this, in many ways, is that the events on Bloody Sunday, Widgery and the long drawn out process of holding the UK government to account were all a sideshow to the main strategic focus of the UK’s government in 1972. Not that anything has changed today (given how swift the Tories are to manipulate unionists in their gamesmanship with the EU).

On 17th February 1972, Heath finally got his European vote over the line with a bare majority of eight (the sum total of the Unionist MPs). His biographer, John Campbell, called it ‘Heath’s finest hour’. Within weeks, there was a shift in security policy as first Stormont was prorogued and then the British government began talks with the IRA that appeared to open up all sorts of political possibilities of British withdrawal to the IRA.

This isn’t to suggest that the guiding factor in Heath’s security policy in the north in 1971 and 1972 was predicated upon needing Unionist support to pass the European Communities Bill. But, whatever it’s significance, it was a factor. And once the need for those Unionist votes was passed, the shift in emphasis in political policy against the Unionists was relatively swift.

The following editorial captures all this under the headline “Heath’s Close Call”, it appeared in the Irish Independent on 18th February 1972.

To Irish people who are used to Dáil cliff hangers coming out in a majority of two or three for the Government, Mr. Heath’s majority of eight in Westminster last night on the crucial E.E.C. Bill will seem small beer. But in a Parliament with over 600 members this vote was proportionately as close as any we have seen in Leinster House in recent times.
Now that Mr. Heath has won his vote, however, it is fair to say that the crisis is over for him on this issue. He can expect a gradual improvement from last night’s lowest ebb. With luck the coal and power crises will be things of the past in a few months’ time; a “handout” budget can be expected in an effort to stimulate the economy and fight unemployment; and Rhodesia has already caused the Westminster Government its fill of embarrassment.
There remains Northern Ireland. Certainly Mr. Heath has personally taken political punishment as a result of his handling of the North. However, last night’s critical vote may now free his hand a bit to make some concessions to the minority viewpoint. Up to this, with this crucial vote pending, Mr. Heath has had to be careful what political initiatives he even hinted at for fear of alienating the Unionist vote for last night’s test. Six of the eight Unionist M.P.s had voted against the principle of the Common Market on October 28th; but last night’s vote had turned into a straight political fight, an issue larger that the E.E.C. question. Three of the six anti-Market Northern Unionists were thus free to support the Government on the basis, presumably, that the E.E.C. with Heath was preferable to Wilson with no E.E.C.
His failure to secure a bloc Unionist vote, however, on an issue which had turned into a vote of confidence in the Government means that Unionist opinion is not solidly behind him. One reason for this could be that some Northern Unionists feel that he is about to “do a deal” with the Northern minority. His hands certainly seem less tied after this vote than before it.

European Union flag

Weaver Street, Tuam and Bessborough as ‘non-sites of memory’

Weaver Street had been the scene of a horrific bombing in February 1922, an event that remained unmarked and largely unremarked in 1993 and is still barely known today. Little, if any, of Belfast’s dark heritage from 1919-22 is formally commemorated in the city, either, as if events and the violence of those years were somehow just not remembered. But that absence of commemoration can be revealing in itself.

It was a French historian, Pierre Nora, who coined the term ‘site of memory’ in 1970 to describe the likes of monuments to the past or archives of historical documents. Nora was trying to understand the past through studying memories of events and how they are used to create histories and influence the world around them. The phrase ‘site of memory’ is perhaps best explained by the more accurate translation of the French term ‘lieux de mémoire’ as (the more awkward sounding) ‘site of remembering’.[1]

People today are familiar with sites of memory, even if they haven’t heard them described as such. Most modern societies use monuments to commemorate historical events. Some, such as the Whitehall cenotaph in London are, or have become, the setting for annual rituals to display and communicate values to a contemporary audience. These rituals use symbols and imagery that draw upon particular and often partisan readings of history to promote political strategies in the present or future.

Pierre Nora’s interest was in understanding how memory of the past was shaped, transmitted and used by societies. In the 1980s, his concept was explored and inverted by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann who also identified ‘non-lieux de mémoire’, or ‘non-sites of memory’ during his work on the landmark 1985 film Shoah which documented the systematic murders of European Jews during the second world war.[4] Lanzmann was referring to places that witnessed past violence but which had been configured to obscure that violence and render them, in effect, invisible to contemporary society. Completely forgotten and often minimised or excluded from historical accounts, these places and the events that took place there are the antithesis of ‘sites of memory’ that have monuments or plaques or host communal commemorative events.

Such non-sites of memory may even be places at which human remains were present and may continue to be present. As Roma Sedenkya describes it, these human remains typically “…have not been neutralized by funerary rites” either through performance of religious ceremonies or completion of administrative or legal proceedings.[5] These non-sites often have particular characteristics, such as having been abandoned, an absence of memorial markers and possible evidence of reactions of fear and shame.

On February 13, 1922, Weaver Street was the scene of an act of violence that Winston Churchill described as the “…worst thing which has happened in Ireland in the last three years”. That day, a man in police uniform directed Catholic children in adjoining streets to go and play as a group in Weaver Street. Two other men then appeared and chatted to other men in police uniforms, before threw a bomb into the middle of the children who were playing 20-30m away.[6] The men then opened fire on people that come out of their houses to try and help the wounded and dying. Six died including four young girls, while more than twenty children were wounded (including a girl named Mary Kerr). Some were left with life changing injuries. An incident in the adjoining Milewater Street, months previously, had also led to a number of children being wounded by gunfire.

Three months after the bombing, in May 1922, any Catholic residents who had remained in the area were forced to flee (around one hundred and forty-eight families). At a coroner’s hearing on the bombing victims, residents identified the role of policemen in the bombing itself and failures to gather evidence or investigate the attack. The Unionist government also issued disinformation to mislead about the nature of the bombing and identity of the victims. Today the street itself no longer exists on the map of Belfast and an event deemed to be the “…worst thing which has happened…” barely features in histories of the period, or as part of the Decade of Centenaries programmes remembering events from 100 years ago.

Today, it is possible for someone to walk down North Derby Street as far as the large factory building and turn and look along the front elevation of the building. This elevation stands over the former façade of the little red brick houses of Weaver Street. The view is partially obscured by fencing and (until recently) vegetation, and the fencing itself means it is not possible to walk along the former location of Weaver Street. The only publicly accessible space today is the exact spot from which a man threw a grenade into a group of children playing only yards away in 1922.

In terms of assessing the applicability of transposing Lanzmann’s non-lieux de mémoire concept to Ireland, these elements of the Weaver Street story resonates with other characteristics of non-sites of memory that Roma Senedyka identifies, including that “…the victims typically have a collective identity (usually ethnic) distinct from the society currently living in the area, whose self-conception is threatened by the occurrence of the non-site of memory. Such localities are transformed, manipulated, neglected, or contested in some other way (often devastated or littered)…”.[12] This suggests that the approach can help provide a framework in which it may be possible to begin to interrogate the wider questions around how such events were remembered, or forgotten or ignored, and what conclusions we might draw from that.

[1] Nora, Pierre 1974 Mémoire collective in Faire de l’histoire. Le Goff, Jacques and Nora, Pierre (eds). Paris: Gallimard.

[3] Szpociński, Andrzej 2016 Sites of Memory. Teksty Drugie 2016, 1, pp.245-254

[4] See Lanzmann, C. and Gantheret, F. 1986 L’Entretien de Claude Lanzmann, Les non-lieux de mémoire. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 33, pp.293–305.

[5] See Sedenyka, R. 2021 Sites of violence and their communities: critical memory studies in the post-human era. International Journal of Heritage, Memory and Conflict 1, pp.1-11.

[6] See https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2016/02/04/the-weaver-street-bombing-and-not-dealing-with-the-past/

[8] Northern Whig August 27, 1923

[9] See Knipe, Gregory 2019 The Fourth Northerners. Litter Press.

[11] Sunday Life, June 27, 1993.

[12] Sendyka R. 2016 Sites That Haunt: Affects and Non-sites of Memory. East European Politics and Societies, 30(4): p.700.

[13] See Irish Examiner, March 11, 2017.

“…launched into eternity”: Belfast Newsletter on execution of Henry Joy McCracken

On Tuesday 17th July, Henry Joy McCracken was tried for treason and rebellion and hung in Belfast. Reporting the execution, the Belfast Newsletter states that:

“…at five o’clock the prisoner was brought from the Artillery Barracks to the place of execution. Having been attended in private by a Clergyman, he was only a few minutes from the time he came out, till he was launched into eternity.”

McCracken was tried at the Assembly Rooms (later remodeled as the Belfast Bank in Waring Street). According to Henry Joy’s final letter he had “… been ignominiously condemned to die at five o’clock this afternoon on the testimony of two witnesses who knew me not and have no knowledge of me in any way.” He finished the letter by saying “…In my fight for reform and redress of evils which constitute a crying shame to any nation and its rulers I have pleaded the cause of the Catholics who are more oppressed than we Dissenters, and I am a true Dissenter and shall die in that simple faith in less than an hour from now. What I have considered as my great mission is drawing to a close, but may the sons of freedom continue the struggle for rights above might.”

He was hung in Cornmarket, Belfast at 5 o’clock on 17th July 1798. An hour later his body was taken down and buried, his remains are believed to lie in Clifton Street Cemetery.

You can read the (brief) report below.

HJMcC

Belfast Fenian leader, William Harbinson

In July 1867 Belfast IRB leader William Harbinson was brought up on charges of treason felony. He died in Belfast prison in September 1867 before he was brought to trial. While his name was given to the original republican plot in Milltown and his funeral was attended by over 40,000 people (in defiance of opposition from the Catholic clergy), I suspect relatively few people have heard of him.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood was founded in 1858 to establish Ireland as an independent democratic republic. In the United States, there was a parallel American organisation, known as the Fenian Brotherhood which tended to give its name (Fenians) to the wider movement. The outbreak of the American Civil War stalled the development of the Fenians. The support given by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, Orange Order and the wealthy to the confederacy and slave owners energised the IRB in Ireland, inspiring the likes of Frank Roney, from Carrickhill, to be sworn into the IRB by 1862. Roney was to be the first Belfast and Ulster Head Centre. Like Robert Johnston, who was to replace Roney on the Supreme Council of the IRB by the start of the 1870s, Roney met and knew some United Irishmen who had been active in 1798 (Johnston was 99 when he died in 1937).

At local level, the IRB was formed into units of ten volunteers, whose leader was called a ‘centre’. At county or district level (referred to as a ‘Circle’), a ‘Head Centre’ was elected by a convention of the centres. The organisation was governed by an eleven member Supreme Council, seven electoral divisions (four provinces of Ireland, Scotland, North and South England) each returned a member at a convention at which a divisional committee of five was also elected. While the IRB was a clandestine organisation, its Supreme Council met in Dublin and some records of its meetings survive (see here).

Some modern historians dispute the scale and nature of the IRB in Belfast, but contemporaries like Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy were complimentary of the work done in Belfast. The authorities also seemed similarly impressed as, when arrests began, the proportion of suspects detained in Belfast was on a par with other centres of IRB activity like Dublin, Cork and Tipperary.

[You can read more about the IRB in Belfast in an article on Frank Roney published by Kerby Miller and Breandán MacSuibhne in the journal Eire-Ireland last year, or in Catherine Hirsts’ 2002 book ‘Religion, Politics, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast: The Pound and Sandy Row’.]

In Belfast, the IRB had revealed itself in response to Orange Order violence in August 1864. It recruited many soldiers, including William Harbinson, a staff sergeant in the Antrim Rifles who had access to the arsenal of weapons held in the barracks in Belfast. Soldiers also drilled and trained other IRB volunteers in Belfast. This allowed the IRB to prepare for an insurrection. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, it actively recruited veterans and collected weapons, intending they also be available for any uprising in Ireland.

William Harbinson was born in Ballinderry in 1832 (in 1867 his age is mistakenly given in newspaper accounts as 41 or 44). His father, John Harbinson, may be the same one who is recorded living in Portmore in Griffiths Valuation in the 1850s. He was underage when he joined the 39^th Foot Regiment in Liverpool, undoubtedly fleeing the famine, in February 1847. Ballinderry lost a sixth of its population during the famine. The Northern Whig had referred to the famine, in the previous month, as ‘the present favourable crisis … for conveying the light of the Gospels to the darkened minds of the Roman Catholic peasantry’. After a slump in the linen industry, as well as potato blight impacting on Antrim in late 1846, January 1847 had saw overt attempts to Catholics to convert to Protestantism in return for famine relief. The rate of fatalities during the famine rapidly increased in 1847 year. Exposure to the famine may have left its mark on Harbinson, as he was discharged from the army as unfit for service, due to ill health, in May 1852, from when he was pensioned until July 1853.

At the time of his marriage to Catherine McClenaghan in St Patrick’s, Donegall Street, in April 1857, he was working as a labourer and living in Wesley Place, while Catherine was living in Inkerman Terrace, both close to what is now Shaftesbury Square. William and Catherine appear to have had one child, a son, William John, who was born in October 1859 but died young (he was baptised in St Malachys, suggesting they were still living close to the Markets). His brother Philip, who also to be prominent in the IRB, moved to North Queen Street.

William returned to the army serving in a local militia regiment, the Antrim Rifles, where he rose to the rank of colour sergeant. In 1864, the Belfast Morning News reported that he was presented by a valuable gold watch and chain by the non-commissioned officers and privates of K Company of the Antrim Rifles, in John Edgars bar in John Street on Thursday 11^th August. Oddly, that episode occurred during the bloody riots that began on the evening of the previous Monday, with the Pound, and John Street, at the epi-centre of the violence. That was the same year Harbinson was recruited into the IRB.

By late 1865, the British government closed down The Irish People, the IRB newspaper founded in Dublin in 1863, and arrested staff including Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. A few months later, it suspended Habeas Corpus to legalise the arrest and detention without trial of suspected IRB members and sympathisers (a process that would later be more familiar to people as ‘internment’). In early 1866, it began to utilise those powers to stage a number of arrests in Belfast, beginning with Michael McGonigal on the 19^th February, the next day Frank Roney (apparently using the surname O’Neill) was arrested at a pub at the junction of Peter’s Hill and the Old Lodge Road owned by Gordon O’Neill. Others arrested that day included John O’Rorke, a pensioner with a wooden leg who had a barbers shop in Millfield, Patrick Hassan (of the 83th New York Irish Volunteers) and Harbinson.

Roney and Harbinson were imprisoned in Crumlin Road and Mountjoy, although both were eventually regain their freedom due to public pressure for the general release of republican prisoners and letters of support from their family and prominent individuals. Harbinson was released in September and Roney in November.

Harbinson appears to have taken over as Head Centre in Belfast. Roney remained on the Supreme Council, travelling to Paris and London on IRB business. Early in 1867, Harbinson also travelled to London. It was later alleged by an informer, John Massey, that Harbinson represented Ulster at a meeting of the Supreme Council in February 1867 (see The Nation, 7^th December 1867).

On Thursday 7^th March, Harbinson was arrested at his house in Pinkertons Row, just off North Queen Street. The police had been watching the house the previous night and raided the house immediately once Harbinson’s wife, Catherine, had opened the window shutters at 7 am on the Thursday morning. Harbinson was still in bed and another IRB volunteer, John Murray, was found in the kitchen of the house. Harbinson was held by the police while Murray was taken to Banbridge.

It was alleged in the press (from Monday 11^th March – see likes of The Examiner) that Harbinson had taken over as Belfast Head Centre from Roney. The newspapers claimed there were six Centres in Belfast who had all observed the security protocols meaning that it had been difficult to penetrate the IRB with informers. This bit of information was possibly a cover for John Murray, who had been arrested on 14^th February, remanded, then released. Murray was to give evidence against Harbinson and others at a remand hearing in court in mid-July.

After his arrest Harbinson was held under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in Crumlin Road then sent to Mountjoy. He was returned to Crumlin Road on 24^th May, presumably with the intention of bringing charges against him and other IRB leaders that had been arrested in Belfast including the likes of his brother Philip and Francis Rea.

William Harbinson was brought to court for an ‘investigation’ along with Edward Gilmore, Patrick Keith and Richard Lavery on 13^th July. By the end of the month, a treason felony charge was brought against Harbinson in front of a Grand Jury which found that he would have to stand trial. The trial was to take place at the Spring Assizes in March 1868. In prison, Harbinson and the other interned IRB suspects were able to have their food brought in to them rather than eat the prison diet. They also were not forced to do prison work and were permitted frequent exercise, association, books and tobacco (this is what would later be classed as political status).

On the night of Monday 9^th September, William Harbinson was found dead in his cell in Crumlin Road during the 9 o’clock check by staff. An attempt to hold an inquest the next day was delayed until his brother Philip (who was also imprisoned) and father-in-law, Edward McClenaghan, could attend.

At the inquest, the prison governor’s evidence stated that he always thought Harbinson was of ‘delicate’ appearance, although neither he, Catherine Harbinson nor his lawyer had made any complaint about his health. The inquest heard from prison staff that he had been outside exercising for around four hours that day and returned to his cell at either two o’clock or four o’clock and was last reported at quarter to six as sitting reading on his bed. When found, he was lying undressed on the floor as if he had fallen out of bed, although staff reported that there were no marks on his body. The inquest found he had died of disease of the heart and it was officially recorded as the bursting of aneurism aorta and he had been delicate a considerable time. This may have been the same condition which had led to his discharge from the army in 1852 and may have had its roots in damage done to his health by the famine.

While the Catholic hierarchy had been trying to counteract the rise of the IRB, it found it impossible to limit Harbinson’s funeral. On Sunday 15^th September, round 40,000 people are believed to have either watched or taken part in the procession, which began in North Queen Street and carried the remains to Laloo, in Ballinderry. It travelled via Donegall Street, Bridge Street, High Street, Castle Place and the Pound to the Falls Road. The original republican memorial erected in Milltown in 1912 was named the Harbinson Plot in his honour.

Harbinson’s funeral was to be the largest republican event held in Belfast until Bobby Sands funeral in 1981.

You can read more accounts of the funeral and Harbinson on Joe Graham’s Rushlight webpages.

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