Catholic unionist Tory: My family was directly threatened by UVF boss – he said ‘we know the routes your boy takes to school and your granny takes to mass’

Mr Burns – a north Belfast native who is currently a Tory minister in the NIO (see full interview with him here) – said his dad received the warning inside Long Kesh prison where he was on the Board of Visitors.

“The move was prompted by two things. One was that my father had gone to the top of the company he was working for here and there was an opportunity in London which coincided with a conversation my dad relays he had while he was on the Prison Board in Long Kesh.

“And a fellow who was and is still well known, Gusty Spence told my dad he knew the route that I walked to school, he knew the route that my granny walked to Mass every day on the Antrim Road and where my mother taught on the Somerton Road,” the Minister recalled.

He said he always remembers his dad saying at the time in the 1970s that “this was not a place to bring up children if you had kids”.

North Belfast during the worst years of the Troubles was a notorious killing ground with almost a quarter of all the deaths in the conflict occuring in the north of the city.

As a child growing up in this arena of sectarian murders, bombings, intimidation and what later became known as ‘ethnic cleansing’, Mr Burns was asked if he could remember the violence around him:

“Of course I do. I can recollect a knock on the door in the middle of the night and we were all taken onto the street and moved away from it because there was a suspect car in Castle Gardens. I remember the sight of the army was common place in residential areas.

“My mum once reminded me that when we went to England after just a couple of months I told her that I didn’t feel safe because the policemen over there didn’t have guns.

“Even at eight years of age I already thought the kind of society where police were armed and troops patrolled the streets was perfectly normal.”

In England Mr Burns said he thought about Belfast “intensely all the time” and yearned to return to see his relatives.

“As soon as I turned 16 I started going over every Easter. I missed it so much.”

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