Susan McKay
Last Updated: Friday, January 15, 2016, 01:00
When Sarah Reavey was in her first year at Our Lady’s Grammar School in Newry, Co Down, in 1999, her English teacher asked her class to write a poem.
“Everyone else wrote about their pets and going on holiday and silly, fun stuff,” she says.
“I wrote this big, long serious thing called Questions about how nobody tells you anything. The teacher read it out to the class and cried. I remember being really embarrassed.”
Reavey grew up with questions, which all traced back to a winter night in early January 1976 before she was born when death came to the door of her family’s house in Greyhillian, Whitecross, in south Armagh. Continue reading
Alan Black, the sole survivor
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 6, 2016, 01:00
The rain fell relentlessly and the sky was dark as relatives and friends of the 10 Protestant workmen murdered at Kingsmill, Co Armagh, stood on Tuesday morning under a huddle of umbrellas and wept.
Forty years ago, their relatives, driving home in a minibus from work at Glennane Mill, were flagged down by a man waving a red torch – the same type then used by the British Army at checkpoints. Continue reading
Kelly and Rachel O’Toole
Fran O’Toole was murdered in the Miami Showband Massacre in 1975. Rachel and Kelly search for their connection to the charismatic and beautiful young man who was their father, allowing themselves to imagine what might have been.
Listen to the documentary here.
Last Updated: Saturday, December 19, 2015, 13:30
Fran O’Toole would have been 70 next February. In photographs of the Miami Showband in the 1970s he is a slim and beautiful young man in blue denim , bright-eyed and brimming with fun and music and confidence in himself and in the future.
Fran O’Toole and his fellow band members were shot by a loyalist gang on July 31st, 1975. Fran and two other members died in the attack, which became known as the Miami Showband massacre and is one of the most notorious incidents of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Continue reading
The torture centre and the ‘hooded men’ Weekend read: In 1971 the British army took 14 men to a secret location in rural Co Derry and subjected them to a horrific interrogation from which they have never recovered. First published:
Sat, Jul 25, 2015, 02:30