Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

What the press has refused to report

Danny and Debbie Devenney led off the series of meetings being held all over the country to tell people, who live far away from Belfast, just what has happened in the Short Strand over the summer. The video is violent and frightening. It is the story that the press has refused to report.

"Me and Debbie, we've lived right through the last 21 years in Short Strand. We've seen all the pogroms, the raids, the orchestrated attacks that our small community has endured. I myself have been shot twice, but nothing has been as bad as what our community has gone through this last summer in Short Strand."

The video, which Danny and other residents have made, tells the story. No one can controvert what it shows. You see loyalist/unionist youths, right beside the PSNI police, all dressed up in their riot gear, with lines of vehicles pointing into the little nationalist enclave. The youths pelt the houses with a continuous stream of ball bearings, 'fireworks', petrol bombs, pipe bombs, and shrapnel of every kind. The PSNI makes no attempt whatever to discourage them, leave alone remove their weaponry or arrest anyone."

"People were crying, 'Please protect my home'. Instead the PSNI launched an attacks on the nationalist people in the Short Strand. It has been a nightmare for all of us. Our children were simply robbed of their summer. No one could go out, or play. It was far too dangerous. Every bang caused your heart to leap," said Debbie.

It was orchestrated violence, orchestrated by the UDA and UVF serving Trimble's agenda to attempt to force the IRA into armed conflict to defend the people under siege. The clear intent was to end the Good Friday Agreement and pull down the institutions that enable power sharing and progression of the Equality agenda.

"For us, it was back to the '20s, the pogroms. 3,000 nationalists, a quarter of whom live in mixed marriages; 60,000 unionists/loyalists, and police chief McQuillan says it is 'street violence orchestrated by republicans'!

"It was clear from the start. On 31 May, loyalists (UVF) cleared the 23 houses in Cluan Place of the few old people living there, blamed us for driving them out, and then used these houses as launch pads for the relentless attack on our streets. One jeep could have stopped it," says Debbie.

You see it all happening in the video. You feel almost a part of the panic to put out the flames, to rescue the old people, the shouts and screams against continuous noise of firing and bursts of so call fireworks. It is, as Danny and Debbie said, "a frightening situation in which we were powerless.

"It was terrible. We went everywhere with our film, we went to all the media - they just wouldn't run the story. We went to the Catholic Church to ask for help. We went to the ombudsperson. We went to the British government, and we went to the government in Dublin. They all knew exactly what was happening. They refused to help us. We were left on our own. No one would run the true story of what was happening."