Fine Gael Senator Billy Fox: Only Oireachtas member murdered in Troubles was targeted by IRA because he was Protestant, ex-fiancee says

The 33-year-old Protestant was shot by the IRA when he visited his fiancee at her home in Tircooney outside Clones in Co Monaghan on 11 March 1974.

The IRA then proceeded to burn the border Protestant family out of their home.

On Sunday Taoiseach Simon Harris joined 500 family, friends and dignitaries at a commemoration event at a park named in his honour - Billy Fox Memorial Park - in Ballybay, Co Monaghan.

A memorial service also took place at nearby Aughnamullen Church of Ireland and a local GAA club.

Every Monday night Mr Fox visited his fiancee Marjorie Coulson at her family home. Then 34, she was a matron in a boarding school in Belfast. It was her only night off.

Fox arrived as usual but did not know that 13 IRA men lay in wait. He was shot twice.

The IRA issued a fake claim of responsibility in the name of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF).

However five IRA members were jailed three months later.

His former fiancee, now Marjorie Beattie, said Mr Fox was motivated by fair-mindedness in his life. “He wanted justice for everybody. It didn’t matter what denomination you were. He was trying to do good for both sides," she told the Irish Times.

The IRA alleged that they had burnt her house down because they had heard rumours that the UVF were using it to store weaponry.

But there was no truth in the IRA claims that her brother, George Coulson, was a quartermaster in the UVF.

“He didn’t even know what a quartermaster was,” she says. “The wider community knew that the Coulson family had absolutely nothing to do with any paramilitary organisation.”

She believes the attack on her family was a sectarian act and that Senator Fox was deliberately targeted and not, as the IRA claimed later, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The IRA murdered him, she said, because of his friendship with then minister for justice Paddy Cooney, who had cracked down hard on the IRA.

In 2005 Fine Gael TD Brian Hayes told the Oireachtas: "He was killed for no other reason than being a Protestant who lived along the Border."

The Dictionary of Irish Biography, a flagship research programme at the Royal Irish Academy, says that the "blatantly sectarian killing caused outrage, which the IRA attempted to defuse by claiming the Ulster Freedom Fighters were responsible".

It added: "Before Fox's arrival one of the raiders had burnt the Coulson family Bible – a traditional anti-protestant sectarian gesture.

"Some commentators believe Fox was deliberately targeted, as he was known to visit the farm every Monday. Some commentators also linked his death to the killings of several Protestants on the northern side of the border in this area in subsequent years."

South East Fermanagh Foundation Director Kenny Donaldson added: “Billy’s murder was yet another example of The Provisional IRA’s ruthlessness. They were prepared to murder anyone who got in their way, who did not subscribe to their narrow, fascist ideology."