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

by Tim Pat Coogan

in the Catholic Short Strand enclave as Protestant mobs began an incursion on the night of the 27th, a Sunday. Armed with a Thompson gun, Billy McKee, the Provisional leader, and four or five of his men took up a position in the grounds of St Matthew’s Church on the Lower Newtownards Road. Through the night, under heavy rifle and small-arms fire, McKee and his men defended the area. Five Protestants and one member of the group, Henry McIlhone, were killed. But despite the fact that the army never arrived, the mobs were repulsed and St Matthew’s was saved. McKee received a wound that bled so much that a comrade of his, Kevin Hannaway, told me: ‘You’d think he was after washing his overcoat in blood.’ The engagement, which subsequently entered the folklore of Republican Belfast, was the emerging Provisional IRA’s most significant operation to date. No Irish Ran Away this time. Instead, a classic piece of defenderism that saved a church, provided a martyr, McIlhone, and a hero in the neat, slight, unobtrusive figure of McKee, who looked more like a church sacristan than a gunman. Kevin Hannaway said of him: ‘That man would never ask you to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself.’