The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Army policy, and the ending of the truce, emboldened the Loyalists to declare open season on the Catholics in a fashion which seems to indicate a desire to demoralise the minority into flight by creating an atmosphere of terror. Sadistic torture began to accompany murder as a matter of routine, and it was in this period that the activities of ‘the Shankill Road Butchers’ gang began. This group committed well in excess of a dozen murders in which the victims were tortured to death, before being apprehended (see p. 284). During the fevered season of the ‘Twelfth’, four armed Loyalists raped a Catholic widow in the Oldpark area of Belfast several times before shooting her and her mentally retarded son. The widow survived, the boy did not. The following day, on the 12th itself, one of the last Catholics remaining in the UDR was kidnapped in east Belfast, tortured by being branded with a red-hot iron and stabbed before being eventually shot dead. Some days later a well-known Catholic girl singer and her boyfriend were stopped at a UDA barricade. The girl was forced to sing for the UDA men before she and her boyfriend were shot dead. The following August, another Catholic, Thomas Madden, was horrifically murdered, once again in the Oldpark area. His injuries included 150 stab wounds. Death was eventually caused by strangulation. The Oldpark area was a mixed district, and obviously the deaths, none involving members of the IRA, were aimed at driving Catholics out. By August 1972,...