On This Day / August 31, 1920

The Very Devil

Preaching last night in St Patrick’s Parish Church, Newtownards Road, the Rev John Redmond, Vicar of Ballymacarrett, said he was grieved beyond words for all the acts of looting and burning and other lawlessness that had taken place in the parish.

When the unspeakable murder [of DI Swanzy] was committed in Lisburn that terrible retaliation had taken place, not against the murderers, but against other people who had not committed murder and it had spread from Lisburn to Ballymacarrett and beyond.

Since these troubles began he had been in the thick of them and he had seen certain things that had impressed him.

He had been a witness of boys of seven or eight years of age starting the destruction and the firing of property in Ballymacarrett.

And so it seemed as if the very devil had entered into the boys of seven or eight.

Another thing that impressed him was evidence that there was some clever, wicked mind behind the burnings that were going on, in some secret or subtle way making use of the irresponsible youths to work out some nefarious, systematised plot.

He saw respectable men and women, especially women, looking on at children from seven to twelve years dug up cobblestones to provide ammunition.

Time and again he had seen respectable men and women standing at their own doors and watching the burning of furniture in the middle of the street.

He had no doubts that if three or four respectable men had raised determined protests, the burnings and wreckings would not have taken place.

Five shot dead in Oldpark

Scenes of a tragic nature were enacted in the early hours of yesterday morning in the Oldpark district resulting in the death of five men.

The area of fighting centred around the Church of the Sacred Heart as a pitched battle erupted. At one o’clock the mobs made what was obviously a pre-concerted attack, inflamed with looted drink.

It was evident that the mob had come well prepared with firearms. The military then opened fire.

Among the dead was a Mr Cassidy who had just emerged from his shop at Glenpark Street when he was shot by a sniper.

[Note: By late August 1920 Belfast was firmly in the grip of sniper-fire and sectarian violence with the Catholic enclaves in Ballymacarrett and the Oldpark suffering mob onslaughts. Rev John Redmond, a former Great War chaplain widely praised for his peace-making efforts, suspected the violence was being orchestrated. Both the well-armed UVF – ‘Carson’s Army’ – and a new Loyalist paramilitary force, the ‘Imperial Guards’, were active while the local IRA and Nationalist ex-soldiers mounted a defence.]