Ken Wharton: Grief and loss of IRA victims rises up to challenge Sinn Fein's rewriting of Troubles history

My latest book “To A Dark Place: Survivors Tales”, shows how her statement will be heard by the relatives of IRA murder victims - and most victims were IRA victims.

I have never hidden that I served as a British soldier and did two tours of service in Northern Ireland. I served in the Markets and west Belfast in 1971 and 1972, but that was in the past and I think I can look back with a more restrained anger.

Although the IRA and other nationalist paramilitaries were responsible for over 60% of total deaths in the Troubles, killed more Catholics than any other force and were far more prolific killers than loyalist paramilitaries, I still make every effort not to let that grim fact unbalance my book.

That is made easier by the fact that these testimonies are not mine but the lived experience of both IRA and loyalist victims. My book records the personal accounts of those wounded by the emotional ‘shrapnel’ of terrorism. For balance I went in search of the testimonies of both Catholics and Protestants - grieving people who had lost a child, a parent, a husband, wife, or a close friend. All these murdered victims were sacrificed on the altar of two mutually exclusive ideals: that of remaining part of the UK, or alternatively, that of being forced into an Irish Republic, under the iron rule of Sinn Fein.

Sadly, I got no help from politicians in trying to talk to the families of terrorists from both sides of the sectarian and political abyss, and giving an equal voice to both sets of victims. I was continually thwarted by the destructively negative influence of the representative political parties which claim to represent both communities of Northern Ireland.

It was particularly disappointing to see the political advisors of those few Catholics brave enough to tell me their story, deliberately place obstacles in the way of these truth tellers. Again and again, these whispering commissars vetoed their stories, often with comments about my military background. In one instance, the son of parents murdered by a loyalist murder gang, was warned of the “shame” in speaking to “one of the enemy”.

Another obstacle was that Catholics who had willingly told me their stories of grief and tragedy, mysteriously retracted them days later, citing “political advice” as their only reasons for withdrawal. Some others would only allow their words to be published, on strict condition of anonymity, so as not to be recognised by either their neighbours, or by those in their local Sinn Fein branches. The fear and the intimidation still haven’t gone away; the new cosmetic Sinn Fein still wears a balaclava inside its head.

Since their emergence into mainstream politics, Sinn Fein has not-so surreptitiously continued its mendacious narrative of rewriting the history of the Troubles, as it seeks to brush the dirty deeds of the IRA’s squalid murder campaign onto an increasingly growing pile under the carpet.

I initially compiled over 80 first-hand accounts of the tragedies which were visited on the tiny country of Northern Ireland, by organisations such as PIRA, IPLO, the UVF and the UFF. However, of the 20 or so from loyalist victims, only 12 were allowed into print, as a result of interference. Sadly, this has meant some loss to the emotional integrity of the book, but there is enough grief and loss left to last many lifetimes.

In pursuit of recording the long-term emotional damage caused by the gunmen and bombers, I spoke to people like Sammy Heenan who witnessed the murder of his father, killed by an IRA gunman on remote farmland, at Castlewellan in May 1985; I spoke to Mary Hull whose young husband was murdered by a loyalist gunman at the petrol station at which he worked in January 1973; I spoke to Mary McCurrie whose father was gunned down by an IRA sniper, firing from Saint Matthews Church, in the Short Strand interface, in 1970. I also spoke to a young woman whose father was shot down by IPLO gunmen at Derriaghy in November 1989, as he answered his front door - years afterwards she could see taunting ghosts in the bloodstained walls and shattered glass.

Above all, it is also a book for those to make a case for the condemnation of Michelle O’Neill’s weasel words. Tell the families of David Harkness, or the families of the other men killed by the IRA's Teebane Crossroads bomb, in January 1992, that there was “no alternative”. The families of IRA and loyalist victims would like to ask the same question of the Sinn Fein leader, or any other paramilitary apologist: “Why us?”

Michelle O’Neill has never retracted - never mind apologised for - that cruel comment and, more depressingly, most northern nationalists either publicly support her amoral statement or endorse her words by not condemning them.

In George Orwell’s depressingly dystopian novel “1984” our hero, Winston Smith has the thankless and arduous task of rewriting history - one wonders who had the most difficult role: Winston Smith or Michelle O’Neill?

But the dead still rise up to tell their stories through the relatives and friends left behind. Here are the harrowing stories which political advisors from both sides of the sectarian divide tried in vain to suppress.

• Ken Wharton is a former soldier, turned writer, and author of To a Dark Place: Survivors Tales (The History Press, 2022)