A room has been opened in a GAA club to take calls from young people considering taking their own lives after two friends killed themselves. Two other local groups have also set up 24-hour phone lines.
The Irish National Liberation Army is being blamed by some after several of those who took their own lives were revealed to have suffered so-called “punishment attacks” at its hands.
The local parish priest, Fr. Aidan Troy, said the figures are “terrifying” and that the entire community centered on his Ardoyne parish is in a state of shock.
One young man took his own life just hours after the funeral of his friend, hanging himself from the scaffolding of Fr. Troy’s church, Holy Cross, where the earlier funeral had taken place.
Suicide among young men in Northern Ireland is the highest in the UK, although not as high as in the Republic, and cuts across all classes and creeds but is highest in working class areas.
In Belfast some have blamed a lethal cocktail of deprivation, depression, hopelessness, unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, combined with a ghetto lifestyle.
Anthony O’Neill, aged 18, was another recent suicide victim. A friend said he was “a nice young lad, but he wouldn’t let the paramilitaries push him around. That’s what they didn’t like.”
The INLA had left him down a manhole for hours, according to his friends, then beat him with sticks.
“After that he hasn’t been the same, he just went paranoid,” his mother, Audrey O’Neill, said. “He went out sometimes but it took him to have a bit of drink to go out. When the drink wore off he’d no confidence at all.”
O’Neill’s sister Patricia said: “My brother killed himself because he had a lot of psychiatric problems after he was attacked. He thought his life wasn’t worth living.”
O’Neill, the youngest of nine children, was buried 10 days ago, after a large and emotional funeral. A few hours later, one his friends, Barney Cairns, 18, was found hanging in the church grounds. Cairns was the victim last year of an INLA “punishment” shooting.
A teenage cousin of Cairns’s said: “I told my mates I knew it was coming. Getting shot messed him up in the head. He didn’t really talk anymore, walked about by himself, wouldn’t answer you. He’d just look at you — it’s as if he was in a wee world of his own.”
One worker voiced the continuing nightmare: “I’ve been inundated with calls from young mothers with sons. They’re going through hell — they don’t know what they’re going to find when they go up the stairs.”
Special efforts will be made over the next six weeks to tackle the lack of facilities for teenagers, with talk of opening local halls in the evening to give young people somewhere to gather.
The Sinn F