In the wrong place at the wrong time

LET THE BUSY WORLD BE HUSHED

In his column this week, Fr Jason Murphy remembers a very special Cavan son who was murdered

She looked at her watch as we sat around the table talking, ‘it’s coming up to the moment, fifty years ago when Jimmy died’. An air of silence settled in the room as we remembered her young husband who was killed a half a century ago that night.

She had been out walking with her sister in law earlier that July evening along the banks of the river and, having met my mother by chance, they came home with her for cup of tea and a chat. I was so glad to see them walking through the door in the duskish of the evening, our friend Kathleen Mulligan and her sister in law Kay McGerty whom I had only ever met once in passing, 10 years previous at a mass to mark the 40th anniversary of her husband’s death.

She was from Omagh in Co Tyrone and she had met Kathleen’s brother Jimmy McGerty at the Astoria Ballroom on a summer’s night in Bundoran in the late 1960s. Jimmy was then a dapper young man in his early 20s, the head barman in the newly-refurbished Seven Horseshoes Hotel in Belturbet, the ‘in place’ for young people at the time to gather before a night of dancing in the Palais Ballroom.

That Sunday night in the summer of 1967, Sonny Flynn, a local hackney man brought Jimmy and some friends to Bundoran to meet with some local lads billeted at Finner Camp and it was on that night out that he met a student teacher, Kay Smith, and taking a chance he asked her out to dance and so began a cross-border romance as he travelled over and back Aghalane bridge to meet his love whom he married in the September of 1970.

In those first days of marriage, it seemed that all things were possible as the whole expanse of their lives spread out before them. The months passed quickly by living in the midst of the Troubles and, to escape the turmoil of Belfast, they moved to the town of Antrim in 1972 where Kay took up a position as a special needs teacher and Jimmy opened a little shop to escape the unsocial hours of bartending.

In the April of the year sadness befell their young lives when Kay gave birth to a stillborn baby, little Catherine, for whom they had longed, leaving them completely adrift, but somehow they managed to pick up the pieces and hoped and prayed for a family yet to come.

As we sat listening to Kay tell the story of a love she had known those years ago, she was interrupted by the sound of cups clattering as we turned and noticed that darkness had fallen outside the window, it was then she looked to her watch, checking it with the clock on the wall. We sat in wait for each carefully spoken sentence, each like the moving segment of a film reel projected on to our minds, knowing only too well how the story would end and yet caught in the illusion that somehow in the retelling of the story it would change course and reach a happier ending.

For on the afternoon of July 26, 1972, Jimmy McGerty set off from their home in Antrim town to buy stock for their newly-opened shop in a wholesalers in Belfast. Having bid goodbye, Kay expecting him to return for his tea around half past six that evening, but with no sign of him coming through the door as the 6 o’clock news ended, dominated by previous week’s killings on Bloody Friday, she became a little worried. Seven o’clock came and half seven as one hour borrowed another. As the time approached 11 o’clock, Kay telephoned the local police station who seemed unconcerned as no reports of incidents had come across the wires.

At twenty minutes to twelve, she looked to her watch she screamed aloud in prayer and petition to Catherine, her stillborn baby, ‘wee baby Catherine, please send your daddy safe home.’ But in that instance a terrible feeling came over her, letting out a scream from deep within, a knowing that ‘he’s not coming home’.

Indeed in the moments to follow, on Summer street in East Belfast, a car was found ablaze with the bound and tortured body of Jimmy McGerty lying on the back seat, the body of another man dumped in the boot.

Kay, with tears in her eyes, went on to relive the story that was to unfold in the hours and days that followed. Jimmy earlier that evening, unbeknownst to her, had been stopped on entering Belfast at a loyalist checkpoint. Both he and another man Frank Corr, a 52-year-old handy man, married with five children from the Turf Lodge area of Belfast, who was driving in a different vehicle, were pulled from their cars without any explanation but for the fact they were they in the wrong place, at the wrong time; reprisals for the bombings of Bloody Friday. Jimmy nor Frank had the slightest affiliation to any organisation, republican or otherwise. They were both tied up, after being abducted, brought to a disused premises and shot several times in the head, their bodies were then dumped in Frank’s car, which was set light at ten to twelve on that July night of 1972.

As we listened to Kay retell the story of her husband’s death and watched as the tears fell from his sister Kathleen’s eyes, we couldn’t help but feel the devastation that was to befall the McGerty family in the days that followed that Wednesday night fifty years ago.

Jimmy’s funeral mass was read and he was buried with his grandparents at the rear of Staghall church, his parents never having seen his body as he was identifiable only by the buckle on his shoe.

In the fifty years since, Kay and all the McGerty family have tried to pick up the pieces of their lives, Jimmy’s parents both went to their graves without knowing the why of his death.

So as we freely live and move and have our being, in a time of relative calm each side of the border that we cross without a thought, let us cherish this fragile peace that was hard won, as some pull at the threads of the Good Friday Agreement, for the sake of those that innocently lost their lives such as young Jimmy McGerty.

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