February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Murder squads stalked the bleak streets of this archipelago of Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, making it the most dangerous place in Northern Ireland. Hundreds died in murderous attacks over the years, including uninvolved Catholics and Protestants, as well as soldiers, police officers and members of the various paramilitary organizations. But it is the events of one night on the New Lodge Road in February 1973 that are currently the focus of a community inquiry that is to be held on Nov. 22 and 23, events which left six Catholics dead and many more wounded. But the shootings also left a host of questions that the community feels have still to be answered.
The six men died in confused circumstances involving both the British army and loyalist paramilitaries belonging to the Ulster Defense Association. At the time, the UDA was the most violent of the loyalist groups. A spate of UDA killings at the beginning of the year had provoked calls from the Catholic community to have the paramilitary organization declared illegal, like the Ulster Volunteer Force and the various factions of the IRA.
The UDA leadership, meanwhile, was worried that the authorities would start interning loyalists as they had been doing to republicans since August 1971. As of Feb. 3, 1973, 364 people were being held without trial. Not one of them was a loyalist, though the UDA and, to a lesser extent, the UVF had been engaged in a vicious murder campaign since December 1971 which had claimed the lives of more than 100 people, the vast majority of them Catholics. Because of their anxieties about internment, the UDA leaders had called off their murder squads for three weeks in January
However, the UDA struck again on Feb. 1, with a hand grenade attack on a bus carrying Catholic workers in East Belfast. The IRA killed two Protestants the following day, one of them a teenager in North Belfast. On Feb. 3, the British picked up two UDA men for questioning. They would be the first loyalists interned. A loyalist protest march was organized, demanding their release, and loyalists began to mass in the Tiger