Posters advertising commemoration of IRA men send chill throughout Co Tyrone say victims group

Hugh Heron and John Patrick Mullan were shot dead by the Army in Ardboe on 16 October 1972.

To mark the 50th anniversary of their deaths an event isn planned for The Diamond in Ardboe on Saturday, October 15. Posters have been put up throughout the county for ‘Tyrone Volunteers Day 2022’.

Kenny Donaldson, a spokesman for Innocent Victims United, said: “We have been contacted by significant numbers of victims/survivors and others who live in towns and villages across Tyrone, who have expressed their dismay and disgust at the presence of these posters which promote an event organised to remember those who were terrorists, who subscribed to a code which promoted the murder of one neighbour by another on the basis of warped sectarian and ethnic related reasons.

“These posters create a chill effect for those from a non-Irish Republican background. Across the county Irish Republican terrorists murdered their neighbours – Protestant, Catholic and dissenter and this was equally true of their counterparts in loyalism.

“We acknowledge that families have the right to grieve a loved one irrespective of what that loved one committed in life but this does not extend to public showing of terrorism idolatry which also has the impact of propagating the minds of a further generation of young people who have little to no concept of the realities of violence and the devastation it causes.

“We appeal with proscribed organisations, political parties linked to them and others in roles of influence to commit to a new way of being; stop promoting or facilitating the lie that violence was necessary or inevitable in this place; it was not – it was a choice made to supposedly advance or defend a political objective, it was morally and politically wrong and it was also unjustified.”