For years, journalist Martin Dillon had nightmares about Billy Moore, one of the Shankill Butchers, the loyalist gang that roamed Belfast’s streets, abducting and torturing Catholics in the mid-1970s before cutting their throats in dark alleys.
“In the dream, I’m running after two people and one of them is going to be a victim and I am trying to tell them that Billy Moore is waiting for them up the street, and I am trying to grab them and I’m trying to scream. And I can never grab them,” he says.
Now 75, Dillon wrote two of the most searing books of the Troubles, the often painfully difficult to read story of The Shankill Butchers, A Case Study of Mass Murder (1989) and The Dirty War (1988), which dug deep into the world of informers and double agents.
He has now written The Sorrow and the Loss: The Tragic Shadow Cast by the Troubles on the Lives of Women, which in 16 chapters tells the stories of women during the Troubles – those left injured or grieving, those involved in the violence, and the price they paid.
So much of the writing about the Troubles has been about men, by men that Dillon thought long and hard about whether he should be the one to write a book that tried to tell the story of women.
[ From the archive: Legacy of 'Shankill Butchers' survives in Belfast memoryOpens in new window ]
“There were female figures throughout, such as Bernadette Devlin and others. But, really, when people like myself were writing about it we were writing about all the bad guys. We weren’t actually writing very much about the victims.”
The loss and suffering of people on all sides during the conflict have not healed, and cannot be healed, despite the endless calls for investigations and inquiries, in Dillon’s view.
“People live in a country where the past is important as the present and the future. People don’t separate them. It’s just one running sore,” says the Lower Falls-born journalist, who now lives in New York.
“A whole part of society had almost been forgotten. Mothers, daughters, who were asking questions about the past. Who killed my husband? Who killed my brother? Who killed my father? Who killed my grandfather?”
I couldn’t believe it, I swear to God I could not believe that after so long someone was talking about [the bomb attack] as an accident
— Martin Dillon
Quickly, he realised that many of the answers he was getting were the same, no matter the background of the women he spoke with.
“That shocked me, because you wouldn’t have known what side of the fence they were,” he says.
“The issue for all of them to everybody was, ‘Please, open up, please tell me the truth,” says Dillon, though he believes that no such comfort will ever be offered by those who know the truth behind their loss.
In most cases the British, Dillon and many others believe, have destroyed records, while some of those who were in the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries will never answer the questions they legitimately face: “The sad thing for the families is that they are never going to get the answers they want.”
In The Sorrow and the Loss each story has a chapter, pithily encapsulating for a new generation of readers the darkness that enveloped families when their loved ones were killed, injured or disappeared.
Mary Kane never knew her father, Edward, a quietly spoken 29-year-old bricklayer who was one of 15 people killed in the McGurk’s pub bombing on December 4th, 1971, but she looks at his photograph on her sittingroom mantelpiece every day.
“When she was old enough to walk alone to school, she would pass the bombed-out ruins of McGurk’s bar on Belfast’s North Queen Street in the New Lodge area were her father was murdered,” writes Dillon.
The bombing of “a pub for old men” – Edward Kane was one of the youngest who called to it for a pint on his way home from work – was carried out by the Ulster Volunteer Force, but suspicions have persisted for decades that security forces colluded in it.
Within minutes of the bombing, senior Royal Ulster Constabulary and British army officers wrongly decided it had been an IRA “own goal” and, also wrongly, that the bomb had been brought in in a suitcase by Edward Kane.
Consequently, the investigation was meagre. Eyewitness accounts were rejected, nobody was ever convicted, while Edward Kane’s reputation was trashed.
Mary Kane’s older brother, Eddie, who was just seven when his father was killed, “began to cry a lot and draw gory images of blood-spattered coffins”, particularly upset, his mother Bridget believed, by having to pass the bombed-out pub on his way to school.
Often, he told his siblings that he dreamed frequently of running to the pub to save his father, only to wake up distraught. Younger brother Billy “cried a lot, too, and began smearing excrement over his bedroom walls”.
Years later, Billy joined street riots that were a near-daily occurrence. He never joined the IRA but he later had ties to the Irish National Liberation Army. Even today, his sister is unsure whether or not he joined the latter, given that he had never wanted to be under anyone’s control.
Unemployed, as always, he came back to back to the family’s house on Upper Meadow Street in the New Lodge at 4pm on January 15th, 1988, taking off his pullover before falling asleep on the couch in the livingroom.
Just two hours later, his mother heard a strange noise as she was cooking. Coming out to the sittingroom, she saw three masked men standing over Billy, one of them with a gun pointed at his head. He fired several times.
The gunmen were about to shoot his short-haired younger sister, Carol, who had also come into the room, apparently mistaking her for a man. “Please, don’t. She’s a girl, she’s a girl,” begged her mother. The gunmen fired more bullets into her son.
The gunmen’s flight from the scene was helped by the fact that the street lights on Upper Meadow Street were out that night, the only street locally in darkness. The lights did not come back on until the following day.
Two men were convicted of the killing, but it was unclear which of the brothers had been the target, or whether both of them had been listed for death. The parts of Eddie Kane’s life that had not unravelled by then fell apart. He died a broken alcoholic in 2019.
Equally, Dillon captures the story of Tracey Coulter, who in 1994 fell in love aged just 16 with Stevie “Top Gun” McKeag, who was eight years older and already a notorious killer in Johnnie Adair’s notorious Ulster Defence Association (UDA) C Company.
Coulter was from a loyalist area of west Belfast, the youngest of three daughters of Jackie Coulter who was a senior UDA figure in the area. He was one of those who had survived the IRA’s 1993 Frizzell’s fishmongers bombing.
Knowing McKeag’s unstable temperament, her father disapproved of his daughter’s relationship with McKeag, who had earned the moniker “Top Gun” for the number of Catholics he had killed under Adair’s orders.
By the time she was 18, Coulter had left home and had started to live with McKeag, giving birth to a daughter.
Later, her father discovered that McKeag was abusing Coulter. By now, the younger man was drinking heavily and had become addicted to painkillers after he was badly injured in a crash on the Shankill Road, an hour after buying a motorcycle.
Her father went to Adair, seeking the latter’s “permission” before his daughter could go to the courts to get a court exclusion order against McKeag: “My daddy was crying when he went to appeal to Johnny,” said Coulter. “I could say that Johnny Adair saved my life.”
But he could not save her father. In August 2000, Jackie Coulter was shot six times as he was sitting in a car with his friend, Bobby Mahood, who was also shot dead. Coulter had been the target; Mahood was simply unlucky. Several weeks later, McKeag was dead too. However, unlike many of the deaths in The Sorrow And The Loss, his was not the result of conspiracy; he died of an overdose of cocaine and opioids.
The Troubles affected women not just in the North but also elsewhere. In Dublin, Dillon spoke with Bernie O’Hanlon, one of those left badly injured by the Talbot Street bombings in the capital in 1974.
While working in Joe O’Neill’s shoe shop, she heard the first bomb go off, in Parnell Street, but did not know what it was. However, her employer did, and told her to retreat into the shop – but before she had a chance to do so, the second bomb exploded.
Following decades of painful surgery, her right eye was finally removed 24 years after the bombing. Her 80-year-old mother came with her to the hospital; it was “a traumatic event”, she recalled.
Throughout her interviews with Dillon, O’Hanlon spoke about the bombing as “the accident”, which he discovered was the language that was also used by others affected by the bombings.
“I couldn’t believe it. I swear to God I could not believe it that after so long someone was talking about it as an accident,” says Dillon.
Within weeks, British Embassy officials in Dublin reported with surprise how the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan had retreated into the Irish public’s mind, provoking little of the anger that they would have expected.
Today, Dillon believes Dublin was afraid to look too deeply into the bombings for fear of what they would find, though he does not believe the British authorities orchestrated them.
However, he does believe they had penetrated the loyalist gang responsible, and knew of their intentions to target the Republic, even if they did not have specific details of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
“Agents don’t always tell their handlers everything,” says Dillon. The same thing happened in reverse, he believes, in the killing by the IRA of Belfast widow and mother of 10, Jean McConville because, Dillon claims, a Garda informer, was present when she was killed.
“The gardaí might not have known about Jean McConville’s murder because their agent might not have told them,” he says, though he states his belief that the person he believes to have been the informer was later allowed to move to the United States.
Dillon says The Sorrow And The Loss will be his last book on Northern Ireland, although he admits he has been decades late in coming to understand the suffering of women in The Troubles.
“In many ways I’ve been guilty of ignoring it, the suffering that these women had gone through and that they are still going through decades later. It’s only now that I am coming to it,” he says.
“But I am never going into that morass again. The past comes back at you. Memories come back into the subconscious. They trouble you when you’re sleeping. Emotionally, it’s not worth it.”
