West Belfast Sinn Féin Sinn Féin -- Building an Ireland of Equals

Ballymurphy Internment Families Deserve Truth

Published: 15 June, 2010

Sinn Féin west Belfast MP Gerry Adams will tomorrow morning host a press conference with the Ballymurphy Massacre Families to highlight their demand for truth and justice after 39 years.

Mr. Adams said: "On Tuesday the Bloody Sunday families finally achieved truth for themselves and their loved ones. We are all inspired and awed by the dedication and commitment of the Derry families who never gave up through decades of vilification and lies, and of a cover-up by the British state.

On Tuesday the British Prime Minister in apologising for the actions of the Paras stated that "Bloody Sunday is not the defining story of the service the British Army gave in Northern Ireland from 1969-2007."

That is wrong. Bloody Sunday is the defining story of the British Army in Ireland.

In Ballymurphy six months before Bloody Sunday we have another striking example of the brutality with which the Paras acted against the civilian population and how the British system then colluded in denying the families the truth.

In the 36 hours after the introduction of internment in August 1971 eleven people - ten men, including a local priest and a mother of eight children - were killed by the British Army's Parachute Regiment in the Ballymurphy area.

As a consequence 46 children in Ballymurphy were left without a parent. Many of these children were evacuated to the South, mostly to Irish Army camps as refugees - some of the children watched the funerals of their parents on news footage broadcast by RTE - others were too young to comprehend the enormity of what occurred. Their lives were forever changed.

The British Army's actions at that time were part of a deliberate tactical decision designed to intimidate the Ballymurphy and wider nationalist community by killing citizens. In unravelling the accounts of how their loved ones died the stories these families tell bear a striking similarity to the stories told by the Derry families.

And as in Derry the British Army PR claims after the killings were accepted as fact by sections of the media who were complicit in carrying news reports labelling all of those killed as 'gunmen and a gunwoman'. In fact, none of those killed had any connection to any armed group. They were innocent civilians.

All of these families deserve the full support and encouragement of the community, and of the Irish government, in their efforts to secure an independent international investigation in these deaths.

The British government in acknowledging the wrong done in Derry must acknowledge the wrong done in Ballymurphy and to these families. It must make a public apology for what it and its armed forces did."