The Greysteel massacre
Posted by Jim on October 27, 2018
A Catholic priest who comforted the bereaved after the Greysteel
massacre 25 years ago has said he believes the revulsion felt after the
savage mass-murder helped move the North of Ireland towards peace.
“It was very true of Greysteel that those who suffered the most were
quickest to forgive, to look for peace,” Fr Stephen Kearney said ahead
of the 25th anniversary.
On October 30, 1993, loyalist gunmen entered the Rising Sun pub in the
quiet, rural village in County Derry during a Halloween party and, with
the words ‘trick or treat’, opened fire. At first, those inside believed
the gunmen were playing a Halloween prank.
The shootings at the Rising Sun Bar claimed the lives of seven people,
and another who died from his injuries six months later. Six of the
deceased were Catholics, while two were Protestant.
The attack was claimed by a group styling itself ‘Ulster Freedom
Fighters’, a cover name for the UDA. The attack was said to have been
in revenge for an IRA attack which targeted a UDA meeting on the
Shankill Road in Belfast days before.
It took place just before 10pm, when three gunmen – Stephen Irwin,
Geoffrey Deeney and Torrens Knight – entered the busy pub. Irwin was
armed with an automatic rifle, Deeney with a pistol, and Knight with a
sawn-off shotgun.
The Czechoslovakian-made VZ-58 assault rifle used by Irwin was one of
several hundred smuggled into the north with the help of UDA member
Brian Nelson, who was working for the British Army’s Force Research
Unit.
Knight was also widely alleged to have been an RUC Special Branch agent
after it emerged he had been paid tens of thousands of pounds from an
unidentified source. Unanswered questions remain about the role of
collusion in the massacre.
Fr Kearney, who is now based in County Tyrone, told the Derry Journal of
his memories of the aftermath of the shooting ahead of the 25th
anniversary this week.
He said his colleague, the late Fr Jack Gallagher, had been the first
person to enter the bar after the carnage.
“The place was lit up with the lights of cars,” he said. “The first
person I saw coming out was Fr Jack Gallagher. I didn’t know how many
were actually dead. We couldn’t have counted them.”
He recalled a “haze of grey dullness” hanging over the village in the
immediate aftermath.
“I remember certain moments,” he said. “One was when I was standing
outside the chapel the next morning. I hadn’t been to my bed until that
morning. I was over for the nine o’clock Mass in the chapel and I saw a
few people standing there.
“They were barely able to speak, in shock. It was a dry, cool autumn
morning. If I could paint the picture I wouldn’t have to describe it –
everybody seemed to be grey, everything seemed to be grey, everyone
seemed to have been wearing grey clothes. Everything was in a haze of
grey dullness.
“One of the people I saw was John Duddy whose wife had been killed.
“I had given her a lift home a few days before and she had arrived at my
door with an apple tart as a reward for leaving her home. She was a
lovely woman. They were there, a middle aged couple out for a drink that
night, as were most of the people there. They were mostly older people.”
Asked how the community reacted to the terrible events that night, Fr
Kearney said: “The people joined into their suffering. In the immediate
aftermath there were some who found it hard to cope, who were saying
things that wouldn’t have been normal for them to say, out of anger or
hopelessness.
“But most were neither hating, nor angry, nor hopeless.”
But he said “there was a strength that came out of the people” when they
felt least strong. “It has been said that the Troubles had its origin in
Derry, but it had the beginning of its end in Derry.”
The dead were Karen Thompson (19), Steven Mullan (20), Moira Duddy (59),
Joseph McDermott (60), James Moore (81), John Moyne (50), John Burns
(54), and Victor Montgomery (76).