In a new book Edward Burke identifies the man he believes to have been responsible for the brutal killing of a Belfast Catholic family in 1922, a massacre whose repercussions continue to be felt
Ireland’s most infamous unsolved murder: a massacre intended to strike fear into the hearts of Catholics
For a century, many historians have believed that the leader that night was RIC inspector John Nixon, though during his life Nixon won two libel cases against newspapers who dared to make that charge in print.Now, University College Dublin historian Edward Burke has written Ghosts of a Family, which investigates the killings cited as justification by one of the IRA assassins of Field Marshall Henry Wilson – the act that triggered Ireland’s Civil War.
“They had allied themselves with leading nationalists like Joe Devlin, with the Catholic Church, and had made an enormous success for themselves and were living this comfortable existence,” says Burke. Following their arrival in Belfast, the Norfolk Regiment quickly became hated by Catholic after meting out violence on the Falls Roads. Soon, however, they were praised for “being quite as ready to shoot Orangemen as Shinners”.
There, one of his top aides was Ian Freeland, who later led Royal Anglian soldiers back on to the streets of Belfast on August 15th, 1969, when a new generation of strife had begun.
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