UVF Ballymurphy claim could spark more rumours of collusion: veteran

Alan Barry, a former member of the Grenadier Guards who was posted to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, wondered “what’s in it for the UVF to say this?”

Born in Dublin and raised in Birmingham, Mr Barry, who helps organise the ‘Justice For Northern Ireland Veterans’ campaign, told the News Letter: “You can imagine what Sinn Fein will say. They’ll basically come out and say ‘collusion’.

“Any killing by loyalist paramilitaries, Sinn Fein will always try and link that with the British state, and I totally resent that.

“You can only surmise that even if the UVF come out and say they did this, I’m sure republican elements within Sinn Fein will try and link this to some element of collusion.”

He stressed that there had been rioting in the area around the time of the shootings.

Whilst there is “a lot of anger, and rightly so, among the Ballymurphy families”, he added: “But in the middle of a war, innocent people will die. And that’s the tragedy. It’s wrong and no-one can condone that. But if the IRA hadn’t have started this war in the first place, none of us would be grieving our loved ones.”

A statement from IRA bomber-turned-Sinn Fein policing spokesman Gerry Kelly said: “There is already a volume of evidence that the British Army were behind these killings and there would be a suspicion that this is merely aimed at deflecting from that. Equally, people would not be surprised to learn that, while the British Army were firing on civilians, so too were the UVF.”

The SDLP’s Dolores Kelly, meanwhile, said it was “a welcome step by loyalist paramilitaries to come forward with information pertaining to truth”.