‘UDA could not have picked worse target’: remembering the murder of primary school teacher Cyril Murray in east Belfast exactly three decades ago

Cyril Murray, a Catholic living in largely-Protestant east Belfast, was shot dead by the UDA on July 8, 1992.

According to the book Lost Lives, Mr Murray had turned 51-year-old the previous day and after having lived in the area for 30 years, had been due to move house to Randalstown a fortnight later.

A colleague who worked with Mr Murray for over two decades, Peter McGrath, says that the loyalist killers “couldn’t have picked a worse target” - a quiet, apolitical man who had been “devoted” to his pupils.

Mr McGrath first knew Mr Murray as a student; he was training as a teacher at the time and was tutored by Mr Murray.

Then from 1968 onwards the two taught alongside one another at Holy Cross Boys’ Primary School in Ardoyne - a republican-dominated north Belfast estate and one of the epicentres of the Belfast IRA.

Mr McGrath recounts frequent bodysearches by soldiers based in Flax Street, remembers that in 1969 five classrooms were given over to Catholic families who had been burnt out of their homes, and recalls a IRA team close to the school once hid a bazooka in a pram which they fired at nearby soldiers.

In his own classroom, Mr McGrath’s blackboard was pock-marked with bulletholes.

But although the times were politically-charged, Mr Murray wasn’t.

Now aged 75, north Belfast man Mr McGrath (who left Holy Cross in 1997) said: “He wouldn’t have been at all interested in politics. Most of us weren’t to tell you the truth.”

However, Mr Murray was intensely interested in art, poetry, and in classical music, and spent much time ferrying members of the school football team to matches.

Unmarried and with no kids of his own, he retired on medical grounds sometime around the turn of the 1990s.

Mr Murray lived in Kerrsland Drive in the Ballyhackamore district with his sister, and on the day of his death a trio of UDA men broke down his front door, chased him upstairs, and hit him “several times at close range in the chest” with shotgun blasts, according to Lost Lives.

Two UDA men were jailed in the subsequent investigation.

Initially the UDA had claimed Mr Murray had been involved in a republican murder some years earlier (a claim “dismissed by security sources”, says Lost Lives) then changed its story to say the gunmen had intended to kill a neighbour of his, but had blundered into the wrong house.

The reaction upon hearing the news of the killing was “nobody could believe it” said Mr McGrath.

“It was unbelievable that it happened. He wasn’t a political animal in any way at all,” he said.

“He was quiet, reserved, shy. He’d given his whole career to the children.

“That was his life – the school was his life. He was dedicated to his school and the children.

“When I look back on it, I think it was an awful waste. A terrible act. And, really, they couldn’t have picked a worse target.

“Because he was absolutely nothing to do with that kind of action that was going on at the time. A very innocent target.”

His name lives on in a footballing trophy, the Cyril Murray Cup, given to school pupils.

For the stories of more such lesser-known Troubles victims by this reporter, see here:

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