"Sociopaths in Arms"
Brave siblings stand up to IRA
By Ben English in London
March 05, 2005
From:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12446626-38200,00.html
THEY have no guns, no bodyguards, nor any police protection.
Yet with words and a raw courage that few of their neighbours have mustered, five sisters have done more to hasten the destruction of the Irish Republican Army than the combined might of the British and Irish Governments.
Following the IRA murder of their brother Robert McCartney in a Belfast pub on January 30, the sisters have fearlessly spoken out against the assailants.
These married mothers have shattered a decades-old tradition in Short Strand - one of the most fiercely pro-republican districts in Belfast - of unquestioning loyalty to the IRA.
At any other time in modern Irish history, the women could expect a severe, possibly deadly, reprisal.
Before they spoke out, it appeared one of the most shameful incidents in republican history would go unpunished.
IRA henchmen murdered McCartney - a family man with no active interest in the republican cause - in a beating witnessed by more than 70 people at Magennis's pub in Belfast city centre.
The father-of-two had gone to the hotel to meet Brendan Devine, an old mate who did have enemies in the IRA. A row broke out and the IRA commander present gave his lieutenant the signal - a finger drawn across his neck - to kill Devine. McCartney stood by his friend and paid for his loyalty with his life when he was fatally stabbed in a lane next to the hotel and left for dead. Ironically, Devine survived.
IRA officers guarded the hotel doors as the floors, walls and benches were scrubbed of incriminating evidence. Closed-circuit TV cameras and tapes were destroyed. The killers were ushered to safe homes to have their clothes washed or burned.
And everyone obeyed the commander who announced to the pub: "Nobody saw anything. This is IRA business."
Everyone, that is, except for the McCartney sisters.
Their defiant call for a candlelight vigil evoked something which had not been since the beginning of the conflict: an open and public show of revulsion at the IRA by the very republican sympathisers who had always previously protected them.
More than 600 of the McCartneys' nationalist neighbours joined them in the vigil. The sisters had struck a nerve in a community fed up with the bullying and oppression of a group now more associated with organised crime than nationalism.
Previously unheard of graffiti of "IRA scum out" emerged on Belfast's streets while a new expression was adopted for the paramilitary force: Rafia - a hybrid of the street word for the Provisionals "Ra" and the Mafia. Since then, the half-hearted response of IRA leaders and their Sinn Fein spokesman Gerry Adams have only strengthened the backlash.
When it became clear public sympathy lay with the dead man's family, Mr Adams told people to contact a solicitor or priest. The IRA issued a statement urging "truth and justice" but neither could take the leap of telling people to call the police.
The McCartney sisters' message was, by contrast, simple and direct: "We are not interested in any kind of revenge," said one of the sisters, Paula. "We want these men to give themselves up so we can have a trial, that's all."
More than a thousand mourners - a third of Short Strand's population - attended Robert McCartney's February 8 funeral. There, Paula then openly accused the IRA of shielding her brother's killers.
Last Sunday thousands more poured on to Short Strand's streets to show their anger and solidarity with the McCartneys.
Now the McCartneys have promised to take their campaign for justice to Washington for the St Patrick's Day celebrations in a move certain to heap more pressure on the IRA-Sinn Fein hierarchy.
At the weekend, it showed the first signs of crumbling, expelling three of the central murder suspects, including the knifeman. Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, followed suit on Thursday night by suspending seven members also implicated in the murder.
But the McCartneys won't stop until those responsible for their brother's death face trial in a court of law.
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