Northern Ireland Troubles legacy: ‘I watched IRA gang shoot my dad in our kitchen but I can’t get a Troubles pension’

Jeanitta McCabe’s father Peter McCabe was shot by an IRA gang in the kitchen of his Newry home in 1990.

However, the board overseeing the Troubles Permanent Disability Payment (TPDP) has denied Jeanitta's application, saying the shooting was not a "Troubles-related incident".

She said her family had to effectively go on the run for five years after the attack, and that she has been re-traumatised by the decision

Ms McCabe witnessed the attack along with her mother but only her mother has been approved for a pension.

On the night of the attack, six masked and armed IRA men barged past her 12-year-old sister "breaking the sanctuary of our home".

They took her sister at gunpoint upstairs to find her parents, who were both asleep in bed.

In order to keep him calm, they told her father they only wanted the keys to his van. But then they shot him in the leg and ordered him to leave the country within 24 hours.

The family fled to Scotland where a relative later rang them to say the IRA expulsion order had been lifted and he was free to come home.

But because no explanation for the attack was ever offered, he did not believe it was safe to go back to Newry.

Jeanitta quotes from a book written by a former Newry IRA man about the attack.

He wrote: "Clearly this was another personal vendetta, or score to be settled or a reputation to be upheld under the veneer of Ira housekeeping."

He said they asked her father for his van keys to put him at ease so that they could shoot him more easily. They did not make any attempt to take his van.

The ex-IRA man said the injustice of the shooting was later confirmed when, out-of-the-blue the IRA reversed the expulsion order.

He ex-IRA man said: "Apparently an IRA friend of his put in a good word and that was that. This proved to me that IRA justice wasn't administered on the basis of what a person did or didn't do. It was dished out to those who weren't connected to the gilded circle, to those whose faces didn't fit. The IRA was the playground bully and I was a sneaky little helper."

Jeanitta now suffers from Obsessive-compulsive disorder, due to the need to exert control in her life.

"Because I had no control on the night in question of anything that happened, ever since I've felt a strong need to be in control."

She also suffers from PTSD and cannot sleep at night or be in the dark. She mainly sleeps during the day when her children are at school.

"Again, it's a fear of nighttime and what might happen, I'm very I'm hyper vigilant all the time "

Her biggest fear is that transgenerational trauma will damage the lives of her children. For her, the pension would help treat her mental health problems and support her children’s education and university.

The pension application process retraumatised her, she says. It required her to give all addresses she lived at for the five years they were "effectively on the run" from the IRA.

"Those sundry addresses included service stations, relatives' floors, bed and breakfasts. We even slept outside the police station in the car - all seven children and two adults - because it was the only place that we found safe."

"But for them to tell my dad he was shot by the IRA but it wasn't a Troubles related incident - but that it was for my mother - I thought that was particularly cruel. They will not explain how my mother qualified.”

Her father was refused, she said, because he could not prove why he had been shot.

However Jeanitta says she was not given a reason for her refusal.

"I did witness a Troubles related incident, the evidence was there," she added.

A spokesman for the Victims’ Payments Board (VPB) responded that it is committed to "conducting the most comprehensive and exhaustive assessments of applications from victims of the Troubles”.

He added: “While the VPB is unable to comment on individual cases we can confirm that every avenue will have been explored before a determination is arrived at by a panel."

He also referred to VPB guidance, which says paramilitary-style attacks do not qualify as a Troubles-related incident and that incidents where paramilitaries act as vigilantes should not fall within their remit.