IRA's 'ethnic cleansing' of border Protestants - Ken Funston completes PhD on subject

Ken Funston, a former Advocacy Manager with the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF), has interviewed about 50 families and sifted reams of data from local knowledge, SEFF, historical files and media reports.

The seeds for the Ulster University doctorate were sown with the murder of his brother Ronnie, who was shot in the back while driving a tractor on their border farm at Pettigo in 1984.

He says that border town Newtownbutler in the early 1970s was about 40% Protestant, with a lot of Protestant businesses in the village.

"But now there are no Protestant businesses left and the Protestant population is around 10%,” he said.

“South Fermanagh as an area in the early 1970s was 35-40% Protestant. Now it is well below 20%”.

He gives three examples of the IRA using Protestants as human bombs in Fermanagh.

"In two cases the IRA sought out isolated Protestant families and forced them to drive a human bomb to army checkpoints while taking their family hostage.

"But they had to pass many Catholic farms to single them out. There was also a Protestant lady in Belleek village who was forced to carry a bomb to the front of Belleek RUC station.”

He cites another case of how the IRA passed over two single UDR men to repeatedly attack their civilian neighbour who wished to pass his farm to his sons.

In another case in 1988, Jillian Johnston and her fiancé Stanley Liggett drove into the yard of her parents’ home near Belleek and were shot 40 times. Again, there was no security force connection.

He also contends there was high level IRA planning in attacks on Protestant civilians.

He refers to an intelligence report quoted in The Irish Times. It indicated that three days before the Enniskillen bomb, Martin McGuinness and three other PIRA were stopped by Gardaí on the Donegal border. The newspaper quoted renowned BBC journalist Peter Taylor as saying: "The subsequent intelligence assessment was that McGuinness was going to be briefed on the Remembrance Day attacks [before they happened]."

But the Enniskillen bomb was only a fraction of the deaths the IRA had planned for civilian Protestants the day of the Poppy Day bomb, he notes.

Twenty miles from Enniskillen in the village of Tullyhommon, forensic tests showed that the IRA sent an electric current to trigger a bomb four times bigger than the Poppy Day bomb. It was targeting a Remembrance Day Boys and Girls Brigade parade, but failed to explode.

He cites Mervyn Rowe, Captain of Pettigo Boys’ Brigade, as saying: “If the bomb had gone off it would have wiped out the young Protestant people in the area for a six-mile radius”.

Ken also noted that Tomás Mac Giolla, the president of the Workers’ Party, spoke of "the genocidal butchery of 200 small farmers and workers in Fermanagh without retaliation".

He believes his research had made a solid case that the IRA conducted ethnic cleansing along the border.

"I had to present my research to two independent professors who both passed my research.”

Together with Ulster University Politics Lecturer Dr Cillian McGrattan, he now intends to publish his research as a book.