The IRA does everything...

[Seany]

I wouldn't say anything to the like of him, 5 Times because like most people, I avoid totally the type of thug that Quinn was.  I stay away from pubs that him or his like might frequent and I drive very carefully in case I might him or his ilk driving on the wrong side of the road in a car who some law abiding person saved up for.  I, like other people live in the constant dread that a member of my family might unwittingly run into him or his friends, either on the road, or out at night.  A fellow thug actually did kill an innocent man a couple of months ago when he was on the wrong side of the road.  Wasn't this the straw that broke the camel's back in Cross a few weeks ago and prompted the locals to come out onto the streets.  No Quinn didn't kill anyone.  Just pure luck.
   I wouldn't say anything to him or his likes because they might come to my house late at night and cause thousands of pounds worth of damage.  They are known to do that type of thing.  No.  I spend my life trying to avoid that type of person and the type of person also who beat him to death.  

[pintsofguinness]

aye fivetimes, we'll stand around waiting on the police to do something 


When the police won't do anything, murder may not be the answer but a good beating is!

[pintsofguinness]

Pints, although you may not like it, the people who murdered Paul Quinn are todays IRA, ceasefire soldiers as you call them, but no matter who or what they are they dont have much regard for a human life.

They may call themselves the IRA, we all know they're nothing but a criminal gang.

Now, like me you probably dont like the fact that Sinn fein have signed up to policing, but the fact of the matter is that they have, it is up to your "Community Leaders" to work with the Police to rid the area of anti-social behaviour. These community leaders can no longer take the law into their own hands, last Saturday is not the way forward for anyone.

I'd be happy for the police would do something and I think the community would welcome it.
You go into Cross any weekend evening/night and see what's going on in the sqaure, 100 yards from a police station, and tell me why the police will not arrest the thugs speeding around the square on the wrong side of the road, mounting footpaths, doing handbrake turns etc. That's not talk of the break ins and robberies. 
I believe Cullyhanna is worse. 

What do we do about all this?  Just accept it?
(I asked this question before on this thread and it hasn't been answered - so you tell me!)

[pintsofguinness]

well it's better than having some innocent person killed.

[deiseach]

well it's better than having some innocent person killed.

Bloody hell. Who decides the guilt or innocence of people?

[Solomon Kane]

It's a pity SF took so long to sign up to policing. The local Right Honourable Member was able to categorically rule out republican involvement before the murder victim's body was even cold. Surely such thorough investigative methods could help find out who did actually murder the fella...........

[asitis]

 

[pintsofguinness]

well it's better than having some innocent person killed.

Bloody hell. Who decides the guilt or innocence of people?

I'm sure where you live, you know who the local thugs are and who's simply going about their life. 

It was only a matter of time before someone died, I'm rather it be him than some innocent that met him on the wrong side of the road or disturbed him breaking into their house. 

[Evil Genius]

well it's better than having some innocent person killed.

Bloody hell. Who decides the guilt or innocence of people?

I was reminded of an incident back during the "Armed Struggle" were an IRA "Police Squad" went to the Belfast house of an alleged child molester - an aged pensioner, as it happens - and administered their unique brand of "Community Justice". After they left him tied to his toilet, they ripped out the telephone line and warned neighbours not to intervene, so that by the time emergency services got to him, he had bled to death. It later transpired that the IRA had, in fact, gone to the wrong address and so got the wrong man entirely.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the incident on Google, but I did come across this interesting piece which also deals with the IRA and the subject of Crime and Punishment:

McCartney's killer a part of 'untouchable IRA first family' of sadists and perverts

By Jim Cusack
Sunday May 08 2005

THE IRA man who stabbed Robert McCartney to death may hold the distinction of being the youngest mass killer in either British or Irish history. By the time he was 12, he had managed to kill six people.

A wayward and troublesome youth, he was prone to vandalising property, stealing things and starting fires. On Saturday, January 16, 1984, he set fire to a pile of foam mats in a storeroom in the Maysfield Leisure Centre, beside the Central Station and the Catholic Markets area of Belfast where he lived. As he left the building, the fire took hold, and toxic smoke began belching from the storeroom, filling the leisure centre's maze of corridors.

Six people perished, including 29-year-old Lorraine Gibson, and her two daughters, Angela, 9, and seven-year-old Julie. The other victims were a 16-year-old boy and two men aged 33 and 64.

The young killer was eventually tracked down and questioned by the police but he was a convincing liar and there was no proof that he started the fire. There were no security cameras inside the building to catch him coming from the storeroom, and no witnesses.

Undeterred, the young killer set off on a life of delinquency and soon earned a name as a vicious bully and thief.

A neighbour recalled how the future murderer of Robert McCartney was one of a gang of teenagers who used to wait near the train station for Protestant school children - who were, like all grammar-school pupils, easily identified by their uniforms.

The neighbour watched one day as the gang pounced on a smaller boy from the Royal Belfast Academical Institution - or the Inst, as it is known - who was carrying a violin case. The young Markets thugs kicked and punched the boy the ground, took the violin out of the case, and smashed it over his head.

The young killer then took up joyriding, and is remembered in the Markets for an incident in which he drove a stolen car at speed into the front room of a terraced house. Luckily, the family was watching TV in the back room or they could have been added to the young thug's list of victims.

Had he been anyone other than a working-class Catholic teenager, he would almost certainly have been taken up an alley and shot in both legs or beaten with baseball bats until he was permanently disabled. But, in Belfast, there are circumstances where such juvenile delinquency can be overlooked. It occurs when the young thug involved happens to be a member of a 'republican family'. And this thug just happens to be part of an extended family in the Markets and Short Strand areas that comprises most of the local IRA leadership. This is a family which, if its members were living in Texas, would have a chainsaw-massacre movie made about it.

The killer's principal reputation in the Catholic enclave is not so much for the people he killed in the leisure centre or his joyriding, but for his violence against women. He is a sadist. During a row with a girlfriend, who happened to be doing the ironing at the time, he beat her to the floor and was in the process of kicking her senseless when the unfortunate young woman's sister came into the house and tried to intervene. He grabbed her, tore off her blouse and pressed the red-hot iron against her breast. She still bears the scars.

In another incident, he forced his way into a flat on the Ormeau Road and kicked a heavily pregnant young woman in the stomach so hard that she lost her baby. Everyone in the Markets and Short Strand knew about the incident. No one said a word.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, this man comes from a family notorious for knife-wielding butchery. In an eerie prequel to the murder of Robert McCartney, the uncle of the prime suspect was part of a drunken Provisional IRA gang that beat and stabbed to death Francis Joseph Benson in November 1973.

Benson was punched in an unprovoked attack by the uncle in a bar in the Markets, then others joined him. They dragged the unfortunate Benson, a 28-year-old docker, into an alley off Stewart Street and butchered him, dumping the body in a derelict house. Benson, local people recall, had done nothing to deserve the assault on him. He happened to be in the wrong bar at the wrong time when the local Provos' blood was up.

While local people knew of what happened to Benson and of the other acts of extreme violence perpetrated by the local IRA, few have ever spoken of it before now. They are talking a bit now, though, albeit sotto voce. They are beginning to realise that they have allowed the republican 'family' to grow and prosper in their midst - the head of the local IRA unit reputedly owns five houses - to the point where it is untouchable.

As they begin to talk, a picture is emerging of the vicious, dysfunctional people who comprise the local IRA leadership. One of the family, now dead, was not only the head of the local IRA unit but also one of the IRA's very top men in Belfast in the Eighties.

Despite being married with two children and fond of portraying himself as a macho kind of guy, he was also a closet homosexual or, in Belfast rhyming slang, a 'bullroot' (fruit), as the locals described him.

He was notorious among the young tearaways for the way he liked to 'punish' them for aberrant or 'anti-social' behaviour, as the IRA put it. The young hoods were ordered round to his house, where they were, often as not, forced over his knee, had their trousers taken down and spanked. One youth was summoned to the house to find the Bullroot wearing only a towel as he prepared for the 'punishment'.

This punishment was humiliating and usually painful - although he could be quite forgiving with good-looking boys - but it was almost always less damaging than the kneecappings and beatings dispensed in the alleyways of other Catholic areas.

Like his younger relative (once removed - it is a somewhat complicated family structure involving some consanguineous relationships), the Bullroot was also fond of going to Maysfield Leisure Centre. He went there on almost a daily basis, spending an inordinate amount of time in the weight-training room and the men's sauna.

It was in the sauna that the RUC Special Branch reputedly placed a spy camera that captured the stocky and remarkably ugly IRA boss engaged in distinctly unrepublican behaviour with a rent boy, possibly sent there for the purpose by the Branch.

Confronted with the X-rated evidence of his proclivities and threatened with exposure, he reputedly became one of the Branch's biggest touts in Belfast. It became quite clear as the Eighties wore on that almost every major bomb-run by the IRA in Belfast was being stymied by very, very good intelligence.

Though dozens of young IRA members were to spend large parts of their lives in prison because of him, the Bullroot remains a revered figure on the list of republican dead.

However, he was by no means the only big tout operated by the security forces from the Markets and Short Strand.

Possibly the biggest ever tout operated by the British Army also came from the Markets and, naturally, was part of the extended IRA family, by marriage. He was the IRA's 'Witch-finder General', charged with seeking out informers and handing them over to a gang in south Armagh that had earned itself the charming soubriquet 'the Nutting Squad'.

They enjoyed their work, spending days, even weeks, torturing victims until they 'confessed' to their betrayal of the republican cause. The victims were mostly near death by the time they were taken to lonely roads in south Armagh and shot - some of them possibly welcoming the release death would bring.

ONE of their last victims was Caroline Moorland, a 35-year-old single mother who also happened to be suffering from cancer of the spine. She was accused of giving information that led to the capture of an IRA squad on its way to murder a top detective in east Belfast.

However, it is almost certain that Moorland knew nothing of the plot but was murdered after being forced into giving a confession to hide the identity of the real tout - the same Witch-finder who had accused her of informing.

Moorland was snatched from her daughter, taken to a house on the Monaghan-Armagh border and there interrogated and tortured for more than a week before being shot dead. The murder took place less than a month before the IRA called its ceasefire.

Since the sisters and partner of Robert McCartney decided to speak out, other people from the Markets and Short Strand have begun to think and talk a bit more analytically about the IRA.

They have begun to think and even speak more openly than ever before about the people who went to Magennis's Bar on the evening of January 30, 2005, after returning from Sinn Fein's annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march in Derry, where they had joined the marchers led by Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and the rest of the party leadership.

They have begun to talk about the local IRA boss (a family member, naturally) reputed to have ordered the murder of father-of-two McCartney and the near murder of Brendan Devine.

The boss's family includes not only the Bullroot but another man who was forced to flee the Markets area some years ago after it emerged that he was a paedophile and serial child abuser.

He was long suspected of 'fiddling' with children but his close connection to the family prevented him being accused or attacked. People let it happen in silence. Unfortunately for him, his last victim was the younger sister of a young woman with equally strong connections to another IRA family.

There was a bit of an outcry and he decamped to Dublin where, it is believed, he was taken in and looked after by the IRA gang in north inner Dublin that runs the truck heists out of Dublin Port.

The boss's uncle is believed to have been the man, aged in his mid-40s, who was seen kicking and then jumping on the head of the dying Robert McCartney in Market Street, around the corner from the pub. He reputedly only stopped when someone shouted: "Stop, he's dead!"

This man, a person capable of kicking the prone body of a man who had already been slashed with a carving knife and stabbed in the heart, is, not surprisingly, yet another violent sexual deviant.

He has a reputation for violence against men and women, and though married and living with his wife in the Short Strand, is a familiar figure on Belfast's cottaging circuit.

He is also a fairly prominent Sinn Fein electoral worker. So is his nephew and so is the knife man who repeatedly stabbed and slashed McCartney and his drinking companion Devine. So is the man who beat McCartney and Devine with a sewer rod, gathered, with the knife, from the storeroom in Magennis's Bar in Belfast city centre.

Adams and other Sinn Fein figures have stated that the murder of McCartney was not an IRA operation. To the extent that this has any limited meaning, it is correct. There was no sanction of the murder by the IRA leadership.

But it was ordered by the local IRA boss who made a stabbing motion with his hand as he walked away from Devine after stabbing him in the throat with a broken bottle. He also ordered that Devine's T-shirt be torn off to prevent the discovery of any DNA evidence if the garment fell into the hands of the police.

He also ordered his men to follow and attack Robert McCartney, who had been no part of the dispute which led to this 'glassing' of Brendan Devine, as he helped his friend from the bar.

He was present when the weapons were taken by his men. He was also present - before being whisked away in a car - when the men then ordered the forensic cleaning of the bar to remove any evidence that might connect them to the murder and maiming.

One of his men shouted: "This is IRA business," as the rest of the punters in the bar were ordered to "say nothing" and stay inside until they were allowed out.

It is also believed that one of the IRA gang brought an IRA gun to Market Street and was holding it to Robert McCartney's head when he was stabbed.

And it was the same members of the IRA who later went to speak to eyewitnesses and tell them, in one man's words, that it would be "better for them" if they saw nothing.

The murder may not have been premeditated or officially sanctioned, but the cover-up which immediately swung into operation was 'IRA business' and took a lot of organising. It was the IRA who took Robert McCartney's jacket and put it in a shopping bag, which was then taken away in a car to an IRA pub in west Belfast, where it was handed over to other IRA people who burned the evidence.

It may not, in Adams's view, have been an IRA operation - he has even described it as a "crime" - but the current IRA officer commanding in Belfast has made a point of showing solidarity with the man who ordered the stabbing of Robert McCartney and Brendan Devine. He has appeared publicly in his company on several occasions, laughing and joking.

And, despite Adams's weasel words, it is Sinn Fein that is behind the campaign of vilification directed against the McCartney sisters and Robert's fiancee, Bridgeen Hagans. Even before the women's meeting with US President George Bush, they were orchestrating a whispering campaign: that the McCartney girls were being financed and manipulated by the SDLP and anti-Sinn Fein people.

The media handlers were sidling up to journalists at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis before the women arrived and telling them that Robert was "no angel", nor was Brendan Devine. They were hinting that McCartney and Devine started the fight and though the lads might have overreacted a bit, these things happen.

The smear campaign got worse when the family returned from Washington. There were hints and allegations about the funding for their trip, and stories in pro-Sinn Fein newspapers. The sisters are quite open about the assistance they received and have never attempted to conceal anything.

Then Bridgeen and the sisters were physically assaulted while handing out slips of paper announcing a vigil for Robert. A local man who witnessed the incident said the sisters were clearly accosted with the intention of provoking them into a fight.

Despite being subjected to disgusting sexual taunts, the sisters resisted the temptation to hit out - luckily, for the confrontation was being filmed by a cameraman hidden in the upstairs bedroom of a nearby house and if the sisters had struck out, there is little doubt that the images would have quietly been released to the media by Sinn Fein.

Later that same night, a female member of the IRA family called to Paula McCartney's house and told her that she and her husband and five children would have to get out of the area. Bridgeen, too, was told to leave.
http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/mccartneys-killer-a-part-of-untouchable-ira-first-family-of-sadists-and-perverts-467661.html

[Tony hawks]

Completely right 5ivetimes

[Smokin Joe]

I presume we aren't to ask what you were doing there 5times?

Unlike other posters, I have witnessed punishment beatings first hand. Two in fact. The first was a child molestor, probably the most despicable species on this earth. I saw that man getting his fingers broke one by one, then his arms and legs, probably his ribs as well. He took a hell of a hammering and he wasnt a young man. The second was a man in his mid twenties who was known for joyriding, stealing Ifor Wiliams trailers etc. He took a savage beating with iron bars, I cant remember his injuries but they would have been pretty severe, certainly plenty of broken bones and bruising. When his beating was over, I clearly remember one of the men dishing out the punishment throwing him 10p so he could call an ambulance.
Both acts were sickening truly gruesome, I actually felt sorry for both of them afterwards. I knew the second person quite well. If the posters who are supporting the beating and subsequent murder of Paul Quinn had witnessed either of those beatings I am sure they may feel a hell of a lot different now. The people who carry out these beatings are no better than the people they maim for life.

[pintsofguinness]

I presume we aren't to ask what you were doing there 5times?

No, I think that's what he wants.




EG, I don't understand your point.

[Puckoon]

I presume we aren't to ask what you were doing there 5times?

No, I think that's what he wants.




EG, I don't understand your point.

EG has no point in this last post. Lets all start pasting passages from the numerous loyalist/IRA books out there and see which side comes out of it worse. Fultility at its finest.

[Evil Genius]

I presume we aren't to ask what you were doing there 5times?

No, I think that's what he wants.




EG, I don't understand your point.

EG has no point in this last post. Lets all start pasting passages from the numerous loyalist/IRA books out there and see which side comes out of it worse. Fultility at its finest.

This is a thread about a Murder which many people consider to have been carried out by IRA members, whether officially sanctioned or otherwise. As part of the general debate, other posters brought up e.g. the case of Keith Rogers, without you or anyone else querying its relevance or futility.

In direct response to the following rhetorical question by Deiseach: "Bloody hell. Who decides the guilt or innocence of people?" , I posted what apperared to be an authoritative article which analysed the make up of some of the most notorious members of various IRA "punishment" squads, including where the victims (sorry, the Guilty) were allegedly abducted in Belfast and sent to South Armagh to be despatched by the local "nutting sqad". If this is true, it is entirely possible that the same sort of people battered Quinn to death.

As someone who knows a little about some of these peoples' victims who came from "the other side", I regard these killers without the rosy-eyed view that some on the Republican side appear to have adopted. But if you wish to start a thread about similar atrocities carried out by (so called) Loyalists, then go ahead - you'll not hear me trying to condone or defend their actions - quite the contrary, since I consider there to be no difference between one set of pyschopathic murderers who appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner and any other gang which does the same. 

[Puckoon]

I presume we aren't to ask what you were doing there 5times?

No, I think that's what he wants.




EG, I don't understand your point.

EG has no point in this last post. Lets all start pasting passages from the numerous loyalist/IRA books out there and see which side comes out of it worse. Fultility at its finest.

This is a thread about a Murder which many people consider to have been carried out by IRA members, whether officially sanctioned or otherwise. As part of the general debate, other posters brought up e.g. the case of Keith Rogers, without you or anyone else querying its relevance or futility.

In direct response to the following rhetorical question by Deiseach: "Bloody hell. Who decides the guilt or innocence of people?" , I posted what apperared to be an authoritative article which analysed the make up of some of the most notorious members of various IRA "punishment" squads, including where the victims (sorry, the Guilty) were allegedly abducted in Belfast and sent to South Armagh to be despatched by the local "nutting sqad". If this is true, it is entirely possible that the same sort of people battered Quinn to death.

As someone who knows a little about some of these peoples' victims who came from "the other side", I regard these killers without the rosy-eyed view that some on the Republican side appear to have adopted. But if you wish to start a thread about similar atrocities carried out by (so called) Loyalists, then go ahead - you'll not hear me trying to condone or defend their actions - quite the contrary, since I consider there to be no difference between one set of pyschopathic murderers who appoint themselves judge, jury and executioner and any other gang which does the same. 

Im not interested in condoning or defending the actions of anyone involved in ANY paramilitary/thug behaviour, on either side. The futility of it is that articles like the one you quoted arent of much use to anyone, it just seemed too long winded with a little bit of hersay thrown in for good measure. Id rather make my own mind up than read stories like that.