9 JULY
ARMY SNIPERS KILL FIVE IN WEST BELFAST INCLUDING THREE CHILDREN AND A PRIEST
[ 9 July 1972 ]
On 9 July 1972, soldiers of the British parachute regiment had taken up position behind sandbags in a lumbar yard on the Springhill Estate in West Belfast. They claimed to have been fired upon first, but civilian witnesses asserted that it was the soldiers who opened fire on two cars which had driven into the estate.
ARMOURED CAR RAMS FURNITURE VAN TO PREVENT CATHOLIC FAMILIES MOVING INTO THEIR HOMES
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[ 9 July 1972 ]
Approximately one thousand Catholic refugees who had been forced out of their homes had been allocated houses in the mixed Suffolk neighbourhood of Belfast by the Northern Ireland Central Housing Executive. When they arrived on 9 July 1972, they found the road blocked by UDA loyalist militia. They appealed for the army to support them in their legal right to have access to their homes. Their request was denied and to ensure the refugees understood an armoured car rammed one of the furniture lorries.1
BRITISH ARMY’S DOUBLE STANDARDS IN PORTADOWN
[ 9 July 1972 }
Eight days prior to the Orange Day parade in Portadown, scheduled for 9 July 1972, in which hundreds of marchers wee determined to demonstrate their loyalty to the Union, nervous nationalists had begun to build barricades to protect their homes which were on the scheduled route. Despite appeals from the local population, the police refused to reroute the parade. In the early hours of 9 July, just hours before the march was to begin, the British Army used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the barricades. The same soldiers refused to intervene when fifty loyalist UDA men, dressed in full paramilitary uniform, escorted the march through the neighbourhood.2
FOOTNOTES
- Margaret Urwin, A State of Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries, Mercier Press, Cork, 2016, pp. 38-39.
- Anne Cadwallader, Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland, Mercier Press, Cork, 2013, p. 21.
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