BELFAST, Northern Ireland (CN) — David Voyle stands in Belfast where his grandmother was shot by British soldiers and left for dead. Joan Connolly — a 44-year-old mother of eight — bled to death on Aug. 9, 1971, one of 10 Catholic civilians, including a priest, killed by British soldiers during three terrifying days in an outburst of violence at a West Belfast housing estate called Ballymurphy.
Back then, the British army described those killed as gunmen with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Now, 48 years later, that official story has been unmasked as a falsehood.
The Ballymurphy deaths are the focus of a long-running and complicated government inquest into a largely forgotten, but pivotal, moment in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Ballymurphy Massacre.
The inquest is significant because it examines the actions of the Parachute Regiment, an elite fighting branch of the British army sent into Northern Ireland to defeat the IRA, a paramilitary force that fought a guerrilla-style war against British rule.
Most significantly, the Parachute Regiment's allegedly criminal killing of civilians in Ballymurphy foreshadowed the regiment's actions nearly six months later in Londonderry when 13 unarmed civilians were killed in the infamous Bloody Sunday shootings on Jan. 30, 1972. The deaths in Derry, as the city is known among those who are pro-Irish, helped ignite “the Troubles,” the decades-long virtual civil war in Northern Ireland that left more than 3,600 people dead.
This new inquest into what happened in Ballymurphy mirrors a probe launched in 1998 that re-examined the military's responsibility for the Bloody Sunday deaths. That inquest led to charges being filed in March this year against one British soldier, known as Soldier F. Under British rules, the identities of former soldiers are often kept secret to protect them from potential revenge attacks.
This new probe into the killings in Ballymurphy is reopening old wounds and memories in Northern Ireland.
On one side, there are those like Voyle who see the inquiry as a way to right injustice and shed light on alleged crimes committed by the British army. For Voyle, the British government and army are the guilty ones responsible for unleashing decades of violence.
On the other side, those who support the British army view the inquest as unfairly treating soldiers as criminals for actions they took during a war against terrorists. They blame the IRA for the decades of bloodshed.
“Without the army we would have had a civil war, but they were also a blunt instrument,” said Trevor Ringland, a lawyer and former top member of the Northern Ireland Conservatives, in an email to Courthouse News.
He added that thousands of soldiers were injured and more than 1,000 were killed. By comparison, he said the military killed about 350 people.
“So overall and whether some like that reality, their story is generally one of restraint,” Ringland said. “Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday were terrible tragedies but they also have to be looked at not in isolation but in the context of what was happening at that time.”
In 2011, upon the request of family members of the deceased, the attorney general of Northern Ireland, John Larkin, opened the Ballymurphy inquest. It began hearing testimony in November 2018.