‘Quis Separabit?’
Quis Separabit? The Short Strand/Markets UDA
Big Sam, Artie and me were drinking in the Lawnbrook Social Club. It was discussed that we go out and get a Taig … I remember Artie hitting him with a hatchet and telling him to keep quiet … I reached down and cut his throat with a butcher’s knife
- Shankill Butcher Billy Moore
Anthony McIntyre • 29 May 2005
It is not as if republican society lacked some early warning system. It wasn’t - nor did it have to be - state of the art, even mildly sophisticated, but it was there. So dispirited were local republicans in South and East Belfast that some had taken to terming the local IRA the ‘hallion battalion.’ Almost a year before sadists and psychopaths converged on Robert McCartney, murder in mind, the Times Ireland correspondent David Lister boldly asserted that:
In the Short Strand and Markets areas, “justice” is dispensed by an IRA unit which counts among its ranks a rapist, a paedophile, a former joyrider and a man who once attacked a woman by burning her breasts with an iron…
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