Jim Loughrey atrocity: ‘As a child, there are no words… mayhem’

Education was a watchword for James ‘Jim’ Loughrey, a young Catholic for whom job opportunities were few and far between in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“He was very interested in education. One of the things I still do today is play chess. He taught me to play when I was seven. We always had books around the place. He was very into helping us with our homework,” says Johnny.

Jim’s people were from Portstewart originally. There was a tradition of service with the British Army in the family like many nationalist families of the era.

“My granda had been in WWII. My great-granda Loughrey died at the Somme. It was a way out of Portstewart, I suppose, to join the army as a young kid. My father rose to the rank of corporal.

"He learned from his own experience. His way out was going to the army and he got out of that the first opportunity that came along, once he had a bit of a trade behind him. But, for us, he was thinking there has to be another route. It was going to be different for his children.”

Jim had trained as a toolmaker. Under the old Stormont regime, work wasn’t easy to come by. He often had to leave home in order to provide for his family.

“He was hard-working. I remember a period when he was going off to Killybegs. Obviously, in the north, there weren't many jobs for Catholic men. He was going off to Killybegs to work during the week and coming home at the weekend.”

Johnny has fond memories of happy family times in the early 1970s.

“He loved his sport. He used to take us to our soccer and football. He used to take us to watch Derry City back in the day. My mammy's cousin was a very famous footballer who started off at Derry City and he used to take us to Derry City games.

"He was just your average da. A bit of a disciplinarian at times but he always had time for you. We always had days out. We had an old Ford Anglia. Those were the days you could put eight children in a Ford Anglia and get away with it.

"We had a very stable family life. He was there for us in different ways. He took an interest in each of us and also had time for his community.”

Having been forced out of economic necessity to enlist in the British Army, Jim was politicised amid the campaign for civil rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“He was very much into civil rights and human rights. He was a shop steward with the union,” says Johnny, who has followed in his father’s footsteps and is now a community worker and SIPTU representative in Castlegregrory where he lives on the Dingle peninsula in Kerry.

Sean Dalton and the Good Samaritan bomb victims remembered: ‘He was good crack, full of fun, a typical Derry man’

Johnny was just nine years old on the evening of Sunday, November 14, 1976. He remembers passing an army checkpoint at the entrance to Greysteel as they made their way home after attending six o’clock Mass at Star of the Sea in Faughanvale.

They were about to settle down to a favourite entertainment of the boys of the family, Subbuteo, when they got in.

"Normally, we would have put it out on the fold-out table but we put it out on the floor and began to play. The knock came to the front door. My da left the kitchen where we were to go and answer the door.

"That's when the shooting started. It was more like firecrackers, nothing like the movies. It is a strange thing. I do remember a sense of something different in the air.

"He turned and ran back towards the kitchen. They followed him, two of them, firing as much as they could. There were bullets going through the door, through the windows, hitting the walls, hitting him obviously.

"He came back into the kitchen and they followed him in there and shot him eight times… as a child, there are no words for it really… mayhem. I followed him. He went back into the hallway. He collapsed there. I followed him in there. Then we were all whizzed out of there by neighbours.”

Jim was rushed to Altnagelvin Hospital where medics did their best to save his life.

"The injuries were too traumatic for him to survive. He fought for 11 days but never regained consciousness and passed away on November 25. He was never conscious again.

William McGreanery anniversary: ‘The impact on our family was colossal. It broke my father’s heart’

"When he collapsed in the hallway floor, my mother was with him and we were taken out. I never saw him again until the funeral.”

Jim was the innocent victim of an Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) gang.

As he was fighting for his life, the terror group issued a statement claiming he had been shot in retaliation for the murder of Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) member Ronald Bond. Mr. Bond died on November 7, 1976, after being shot by republican gunmen at Harding Street on October 28, 1976.

Jim Loughrey was 36. The UFF – a cover used by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – robbed his widow Mary of a loving husband and his eight children – aged between 4 and 15 years – of a doting father.

Johnny says the sectarian killing devastated the family and him personally.

"In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, I stopped eating entirely until they started getting quite worried about me. I slowly started to eat potatoes or bread,” he confides.

He couldn't sleep and lived with dreams of being killed for years afterwards.

"I spent all my time in school thinking about whether my mother was going to be alive when I got home. Trauma is not rational.”

Ten years after Jim’s murder, in 1986, a loyalist prisoner named Leonard Campbell admitted his involvement in the murders of Mr. Loughrey and John Toland, aged 35, who was shot dead while working in The Happy Landing Bar on November 22, 1976, while Jim was still fighting for his life.

Bloody Wednesday 50: Annie’s Bar remembered - Barney Kelly

The Historical Enquires Team (HET) later established that one of the guns used to murder Jim was also used in the murders of Mr. Toland and Kevin Mulhern who was 33 when he was shot dead by the UFF at his home in Knockwellan Park on October 3, 1976.

Campbell named eight people as being involved in the planning of Jim’s murder. He said the UDA Brigadier in Derry at the time – a former B Special – had ordered the killing.

Johnny believes his father was singled out because of his trade union and civil rights activism.

"They were clearly watching him. He was going to civil rights marches. He was a union activist. He was a community activist. I don't think it was random.

“He was a soft, easy target. They went to a small Catholic village surrounded by loyalist enclaves and picked out a Catholic man who was an activist in the community.

"He had been arrested about three or four weeks before that and they told him, ‘if you want to be an activist for civil rights, you can go on into Derry’, basically because he wasn’t going to be doing it out there. They had threatened to kill him. So they carried out their threat.”

50th anniversary of Seamus Cusack and Desmond Beattie murders

Astonishingly, the Loughreys didn’t see nor hear from the RUC for a decade after Jim’s murder.

"My mother says herself that, from the night my da was killed, she never saw another policeman for ten years until Campbell was arrested.

"There was no investigation after my da's murder in terms of nowadays or even then. The first thing they would have done would have been house to house inquiries. ‘Did you see these men?’ There was absolutely nothing after the night itself.”

Families to mark 30th anniversary of Greysteel massacre

Forty-seven years later, Johnny has mixed emotions following the court settlement.

"First of all, you are elated because we have won. We are vindicated. Because there is always this cloud that hung over it - ‘they deserved it somehow or they asked for it’. You do feel like you are vindicated when they settle with you.

"Then, you are like, well, it is still not the truth. It is still not justice as such but, then, it is as close as you are going to get probably in this situation.”

Johnny is full of awe for his mother Mary, now aged 81, who managed to carry on in the face of such a brutal atrocity.

"She raised a family of eight. Now there are 30 plus grandchildren and great-grandchildren. After my da died, there was no money for anything. She is an amazing woman. She raised eight of us at the same time going to work full-time in a shirt factory. It's phenomenal what she achieved.”

Greysteel and Ormeau Road victims killed by weapons imported in 1987 despite RUC intelligence