'They Don't Like it When the Irish Rise Up'

By Nell McCafferty

  DAVID Andrews went into the parochial house attached to the church, after the funeral. As he took tea with the Northern Ireland Office and the judiciary, one of the 60 priests who had come from all over north Antrim and mid-Ulster to help bury Rosemary Nelson, asked him to meet a deputation from the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition, which was frantically waiting in the church grounds. Breandan Mac Cionnaith had a patch over his eye -- an RUC officer had smashed his glasses into his face the night before, while Mac Cionnaith was trying to stop a riot. A policeman had also batoned Mac Cionnaith's deputy chief of the coalition, Councillor Joe Duffy, fracturing his arm. Rosemary Nelson, Mac Cionnaith and Duffy were the foremost figureheads in the coalition, and the people of the besieged Garvaghy Road were living in pure terror after what had happened to their leaders.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs said he would see them after he had finished his tea -- he had flown North at 10am, it was now after 12 and the cup of tea and biscuit was his first refreshment. The young priest became angry. Mac Cionnaith had been up until dawn in hospital. "It would be in your interest to come now," the priest squared up to Andrews. As he led the minister by the arm past the startled grandees, President McAleese said "Calm down, father, calm down."

Whatever about Andrews the attendance of the president at Rosemary Nelson's funeral mass sent out a strong and reassuring message to nationalists who live in the heart of what is known as "the murder triangle," an area bordered by Lurgan, Portadown and Dungannon in mid-Ulster.

The president, a former lawyer, has been through their experiences. she and her family have known bomb, bullet, assault, sectarianism, and lack of protection. As a private citizen in Belfast, she was at the funeral of Pat Finucane in 1989. Ten years later, as president, she represented, in her quiet, quieting presence at the funeral, the ability of northern nationalists to win their human rights within the parameters of law. Rosemary Nelson, whom citizen McAleese knew professionaly, had also successfully taken on the state on its own turf.

Opinion has it that she was killed as much for her national and international victories as for her local sectarian reasons, and that there were what Seamus Mallon has called "shadowy" forces behind the ramshackle, inept paramilitary group, which planted a sophisticated bomb with such precision under her car. He was forced to intervene after David Trimble suggested, ridiculously, that republicans had killed Nelson for reasons of black propaganda. These things are never a matter of formal collusion, expounded a republican at the funeral, who has deep knowledge of warfare. The evidence in Lurgan supports his thesis to an alarming degree. "Security is lax after the army and RUC have swept the area. So you set up a situation to bring them in and strike after they've gone."

The RUC confirms that it swept the area around Rosemary Nelson's home, with military back-up, on Saturday, Sunday, and the Monday morning when she was killed. She had spent that weekend in Bundoran with her husband and daughter, celebrating a delayed Mother's Day (the previous weekend she had packed her two sons off on a school ski-trip to France). She used her own car, and arrived back in Lurgan late on Sunday evening. The RUC press officer says that security forces entered Victoria Street, adjacent to the militantly nationalist Kilwilkee estate, which abuts the private development where the Nelson family live, at 5.50pm on Saturday afternoon, in response to a call that a suspicious object - a paper bag - had been left in a doorway there. The object was gone when they arrivedand, the police claim, they came under attack from locals.

This is a common ploy in some nationalist areas of Lurgan, the RUC press office says. On Sunday, the RUC received another call that a suspicious object had been left in Lake Street, which extends in a loop from Victoria Street (Where Nelson's offices are located). This too, was gone after they arrived and swept the area. There was no attack on them that Sunday. There was a helicopter 'spy in the sky' surveillance of the district late on Sunday night. On Monday mroning, the police returend early to the Lake Street area for a "follow-up" saturation search which lasted until 10.30am. Rosemary Nelson got into her car just before 1pm.

The RUC says the Saturday and Sunday calls came from "members of the public" whose identites are known to it. The follow-up operation was routine. "Who made the calls and why?" asks the experienced republican. "Were a patsy's strings pulle by a rogue cop element, or a securocrat, maybe? Both had reasons to halt Nelson in her tracks. the results of an inquiry into alleged RUC threats against her wre due to be published, she was pushing security force collusion in the Finucane murder, she had testified against cops and army at the UN, her stand for the Garvaghy Road residents and the people of Newtownbutler in Fermanagh against sectarian Orange coattrailing got up securocrat noses. Never forget that the British government is often at odds with its MI5-security advisers. Securocrats cooperate on an internatoinal level against freedom movements -- none of them like to see an uprising rewarded, and from Gerry Adams to Rosemary Nelson, trooping into Downing Street, the White House, the UN, the plaudits were rolling in for the Irish who rose up."

Sympathy notices in the Irish News testify to the deep and wide involvement of Nelson in the Northern nationalist community. Though her practice embraced both traditions, especially in family law, and she also worked - exceptionally for a Northern lawyer and in the tradition of Gareth Pierce -- beyond her courtroom brief in speaking out for the political people and causes she defended, 70 grateful testimonies bore witness to a huge range of other concerns.

Thanks were offered from the Lurgan Council for Voluntary Action, the Lurgan Community Project, the Lenadoon Community Forum, the West Belfast Community Forum, the local Family Community Group, the Craigavon Travellers Support Committee, the Craigavon Support Services Agency, the Ardmanagh Family Community Group, the Mary Ann McCracken Historical Society, the Nexus Research Cooperative, the Greater West Belfast Community Association, the Falls Community Council, and the local primary school where she served on the board of governors.

Human rights do not mean much without "access to the courts to enforce those rights," observed Michael Mansfield, the famed London-based barrister who flew over for the funeral. "It's people like Rosemary who are able to represent the community...that tragic loss will accentuate the need for more people like Rosemary to ensure taht fight goes on - to translate rights into action."

Bishop Francis Brooks, in his homily from the altar, pointedly described Rosemary Nelson as "a committed Catholic" who strove for "established political and legal means for righting grievances." The parish priest, Kieran McPartlan, went further before a congregation which included Mo Mowlam's junior minister Paul Murphy, insisting that an independent inquiry into Nelson's death supercede that set up by the RUC. The anti-establishment tone inside and outside the church has not been felt since the civil rights movement 30 years ago. Albeit there was no formal alliance between those interest groups come together to mourn Rosemary Nelson, there was an unprecedented sense of unity, purpose and analysis -- that an attempt is underway to make the Croppie lie down in the murder triangle, with a hoped for domino effect across the North. Clergy, leaders of communities opposed to forced Orange marches, an expanding Catholic middle class, Catholics from deprived areas of Lurgan, nationalist and republican politicians, and even primary school children comprised the massive cortege.

During the wake, said one of Nelson's six sisters and brothers, she could not but notice the legal eagles, in good suits with flashes of gold from their wristwatches. Rosemary herself had cheerfully complained of relentless dressing-up to suit her role in a burgeoning middle-class. He had learned more about politics in the days since her death, says her husband Paul, than he ever realised in his career as an accounant. He has steadfastly refused pressure to make a public statement. A modest, sturdy man, he was fetched from his office in the small town to sit with his dying wife in the car until the ambulance arrived and the surgeon set up emergency medical care in the street. "Rosemary kept asking to be taken out of the car."

"I knew when people rushed up the garden path," says the sister who lives behind the Nelson house, who had come home from the primary school for lunch, who ran upstairs to check whether the dull, small sound was that of a television set toppling off the bureau. "I ran down, sat in with her, told her to breathe, she said 'It's too hard', and I said that had never stopped her before."

Rosemary Nelson was born in 1959 near the railway tracks that bisect Lurgan. During a childhood marked by the struggle for civil rights, she had undergone surgery to remove a birthmark which left one side of her face paralysed, the skin unnaturally stretched, one eye pulled down. She became the first woman to open a solicitor's practice in Lurgan in 1989. Her funeral was attended by Brid Rodgers of the SDLP and Bairbre de Bruin of Sinn Fein, both tipped as ministers in the North's first potentially inclusive parliament. "I was proud of her," her 71-year-old mother Sheila says simply and fiercely about her daughter's mould-breaking role. Rosemary Nelson's father, Tom, wept silently, freely, as he received mourners into the house.

Breandan Mac Cionnaith, one of the many chosen to shoulder his defender's coffin through Lurgan, was incensed when he was finally allowed to meet David Andrews. "The minister pointed out that his people had met the Garvaghy people 10 days before the funeral," says a spokesman. Yes, minister, but... Nelson had since been killed, Mac Cionnaith and Duffy been batoned by the RUC as they tried to quell their people, who had been incensed beyond sufferance by the sound of Lambeg drums sounding over Garvaghy the night before Nelson's funeral.

The Corcrain Orange Hall is situated 100 yards from the road. They were having a St. Patrick's night musical competition, explains Davy Jones, mild spokesman for the Portadown brethren. It was organised by Peter Berry of Paisley's DUP, the youngest elected member of the assembly. "A ticket event, for a stew night," Berry truthfully explains the fundraiser and morale booster for Orangemen camped at nearby Drumcree -- and nearby Garvaghy. Perfectly legal, and confined to the open grounds of Corcrain Hall, a police officer explained to telephone caller Martin Farrell at 7.30pm.

Farrell complained in vain that the brethren had left the hall and grounds, had spilled over the low wooden fence and surrounding pavement, were now standing outside his front door, the first house in Corcrain Mews, and were demanding he vacate his home or else. The death of Rosemary Nelson had spiced the Orange stew. One-eye was dead, they chanted, the hate-filled chorus led by a woman. Farrells' wife was at work, his son at a disco, his daughter at mass, the baby in his arms. He left the house, got shelter in his sister-in-law's home on the Garvaghy Road. Word spread, and Garvaghy rioters converged on Corcrain Orange Hall. Mac Cionnaith and Duffy were "accidentally" batoned, the RUC has explained.

The next night, hours after Rosemary Nelson was cremated, while Mac Cionnaith and Duffy recovered from their injuries, young nationalists petrol-bombed Corcrain Orange Hall. The Farrells moved out yet again; they are negotiating the sale of their home to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, under emergency legislation devised for precisely that purpose; and this writer, whose car was hijacked over three times over 24 hours in the murder triangle by young people deprived of restraining hands, drove to the safety of the South. A torch is passing, at the peril of all, to the next generation.

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