He would be a good age now, but any surviving member of the Shankill Butchers may well have been back out on the streets of Belfast last night. There were no roadblocks for them as they cut throats from ear to ear for seven years, earning themselves the longest combined prison sentences in the legal history of the United Kingdom.
The Shankill Butchers were largely drawn from the Ulster Volunteer Force, a proscribed terrorist organisation. Yet last April, hundreds turned out, and 30 marching bands played, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Wesley Somerville. "UVF" adorned many of the wreaths laid in honour of a man who had accidentally blown himself up while perpetrating the Miami Showband massacre. In 2024, those same elements rioted side by side with the Tricolour-wavers who returned their hospitality in Dublin, also last April. They even brought their own flags, as their hosts had done as guests. Such are the connections formed in and by the overlapping worlds of British intelligence and organised crime. All cultures have wrong 'uns. Are these new ones muscling in on carefully carved up turf?
One of the speakers was Dublin City Councillor Malachy Steenson. A Special Criminal Court convict, Councillor Steenson has been associated with the proscribed Official IRA, with the proscribed Continuity IRA, with the proscribed Real IRA, and with the proscribed INLA. He boasts that, "I was never a member of the Provos." But Steenson is a Planter surname, like Adams, McDonald or McGregor. Whereas the leader of the Shankill Butchers, eventually taken out by those same Provos, was called Lenny Murphy. Think on.
Murphy shot dead by the IRA but set up by his fellow Loyalists
ReplyDeleteBates shot dead by a fellow Loyalist who suspected him if murdering his father during a Loyalist feud
Moore died alone apparently he drank himself to death
Of course Murphy’s brothers never did a day in jail for their crimes despite being the ringleaders of the gang
One of the brothers died later in a horrific road crash
Yet Jim Allister talks about "an alien culture". He has been a criminal barrister for 50 years, so this would not be alien to him anywhere, never mind there.
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