Guardian
When Craig McCausland was gunned down by loyalist paramilitaries this summer, he was more than just another innocent victim of the Troubles. His mother was also killed by them 18 years ago. So has anything changed in Northern Ireland? Angelique Chrisafis reports
Tuesday November 15, 2005
The Guardian
Craig McCausland - photo from Justice for Craig, where you can read more about the murders of Craig and his mother Lorraine
All his life Craig McCausland hated paramilitaries. He loathed their gold jewellery, their Mercedes cars that smugly cruised the working-class Protestant streets of north Belfast. He hated their “junior wings” in the primary school playgrounds. He lobbed stones at the windows of their flashly decorated homes.
When he was two, his mother Lorraine was battered to death with a breeze block by a loyalist paramilitary gang at an after-hours drinking club. She was a 23-year-old single mother who ran a mobile shop. As a child, his family recalls, it never made sense to him how the “defenders of the faith” could kill an innocent Protestant woman and get away with it. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, detectives told her family; the men that killed her were “psychopaths”, they said. It was 1987, the height of the Troubles, after all, and she was not the only woman whose battered corpse was mysteriously found dumped after a drink at a loyalist club. Following a familiar pattern, everyone knew who killed Lorraine, but no one was ever charged.
So during this year’s Protestant marching season, masked loyalist paramilitaries burst into 20-year-old Craig’s house and shot him dead in front of his girlfriend and her two children, it seemed history was playing a sick joke. The Ulster Volunteer Force, Northern Ireland’s oldest loyalist paramilitary group, was deep in a murderous feud with breakaway loyalist drug dealers, the Loyalist Volunteer Force. Craig’s killers were UVF gunmen and his murder was put down to the feud - another LVF scumbag cleared off the street. The only problem was that Craig, according to police, his family and the LVF, wasn’t a member. He was just an unemployed labourer on jobseekers’ allowance. Wrong place, wrong time again, just like his mother. And, in the cruellest twist, Craig also left a two-year-old son.
That was only one part of the horror his murder has left. It was his girlfriend’s children, aged six and nine, who were splattered with blood when the gunmen came back to finish Craig off as he lay dying on the stairs. Those awful minutes when they tried to stem his wounds with towels from the laundry basket have left their scars.
Craig’s murder is more than another grim statistic of the Troubles; it is a telling example of how, in many ways, Northern Ireland has not moved on - and how trauma is being passed on now to a third generation. Even as delegations from Iraq, Bosnia and Macedonia are trailed around Belfast to learn from this model peace process, the real curse of the Troubles - the way paramilitaries have been allowed to utterly rule communities - continues, 10 years after the first ceasefires.
All his life, Craig’s family did everything to stop him becoming a victim like his mother. His grandparents moved him and his five-year-old brother out of their working-class north Belfast estate because they didn’t want them pointed out as orphans of a gruesome crime. The boys were sent to one of the city’s few integrated schools, where Protestant and Catholic children were taught together.
Their grandfather was a part-time member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, the locally recruited branch of the army. “He had no time for paramilitaries. He was an independent man who believed in law and order,” says Craig’s aunt, Cathy McIlvenny, who runs a hairdressing salon on the Shankill Road. “When Lorraine was murdered, it left the whole family numb. No one talked about it, there were no photographs of her up because every time my father saw them, he broke down. All my parents focused on was bringing up these boys never to get involved with, or associate with, so-called paramilitaries.”
Craig continually asked questions about his mother, and whether he had seen her in her coffin. But her body was so battered she was unrecognisable and the coffin had to be closed. “Many of his questions were never answered because we didn’t know the answers,” Cathy says. All they knew was that on a Saturday night in March 1987 Lorraine had gone for a drink at the local community centre, which was run by the Ulster Defence Association, Northern Ireland’s biggest loyalist paramilitary group. Her half-naked body was found face down in a nearby stream the next morning. “Her injuries were horrific. Her liver was split in half, her skull fractured several times and her lung had exploded. She was beaten with a breeze block and a gas canister by a gang of more than three people,” Cathy says.
There was a trail of blood from the community centre to her body. The UDA never claimed the murder as a sanctioned killing, but everyone believed their members were to blame. The 20 people allegedly in the club at the time said they saw nothing. Her father placed an advert in the Belfast Telegraph offering a £1,000 reward for information. “Strictly confidential. Genuine. Someone knows - please help.” No one came forward.
Like every working-class teenager in Northern Ireland, everywhere Craig looked while growing up he saw paramilitaries. “He hated every one of them, he had no respect for them,” says Nichola McIlvenny, Craig’s cousin, who remembers how their group of friends would be constantly harassed by paramilitaries. “There is nowhere to go when you’re 14 or 15, so you stand in an entry, talking, drinking something, and the UVF or UDA threaten to shoot you for standing there. They sell dope to the kids on tick on a Friday or Saturday saying they don’t have to pay until next week. They give them more and more and when they owe £250 or £300, and they can’t pay it back, the paramilitaries tell them the choice is to get shot, beaten or join their organisation. In playground scraps, if one kid says they are from the junior wing of a paramilitary group, the other kid feels he has to club together with another group for protection. You either have to idolise them or keep away.”
Craig resented the local hardmen telling him what to do. He would smash their car windows and throw stones at their houses. “It became a game of point-scoring,” Nichola says. “He saw them all as his mother’s murderers.” Never good at school and angry at the world, Craig dabbled in anti-social behaviour and petty crime. At 15, the local UVF told him he had a choice: either they gave him a beating or he joined their organisation. If he had politely turned them down, he would simply have been battered in an alleyway at an arranged time. Instead, says Nichola, he answered back “in a right cheeky way,” and was shot in the leg and forced to leave north Belfast.
For five years, he lived in the east of the city where he had his son Dean with a girlfriend. He did a short spell in a young offenders’ institution for a minor offence, but after his son was born vowed to sort himself out. Then, early this year, his grandfather had a stroke. Craig needed to help the family care for him, but it meant returning to north Belfast.
“He kept a very low profile,” Nichola says. “He tried to stay in his house or got lifts everywhere. He never used any of the local taxi firms. He never went out to the shops, he never had a drink at any of the bars, which were all owned by the UVF or UDA. He didn’t want to be seen.”
Craig moved in with his new girlfriend, Kathy Gibson, an English care assistant, and her two children.
On July 10, at the height of the Protestant marching season, as red, white and blue bunting criss-crossed the streets, and children put the finishing touches to the 60ft bonfires that celebrate Protesant King Billy’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne, Craig went for a drink with relatives at a neighbour’s house. He went home before midnight, slightly drunk, and sank into a deep sleep. Kathy woke first when the fierce hammering on the front door began. He leaped up, dragged his jeans on and went to answer the door. By then, the children had come on to the landing in their pyjamas. When Craig was halfway down the stairs, two men burst in and fired a volley of shots. They ran back out but their getaway driver asked if they had “done him right”. All three then came back in and opened fire again for good measure.
Craig had been shot five times. He had been hit in the neck but was trying to speak. Kathy grabbed a towel from the laundry basket to stem the blood from his wounds and the children tried to help. They were sent to their father’s house nearby, covered from head to toe in blood, talking about what happened as if they had been watching a Hollywood film. The night-time panics and bed-wetting began later.
At the time of Craig’s death, Belfast’s latest loyalist feud was in full swing and the UVF and LVF wanted dead bodies to keep up their scores. Hours after Craig was killed, another man in his neighbourhood had to jump out of a first-floor window as masked men tried to smash down his door.
The next night, the UVF staged a show of strength at a council-sponsored bonfire in Belfast. Five masked men in combat fatigues got up on to the DJ’s stage and fired a volley of shots into the air.
“Here, when you see there has been a shooting on TV, you think, ‘Live by the gun, die by the gun’. We would have been guilty of thinking like that too,” Cathy McIlvenny says. “But we knew he wasn’t a paramilitary because of the way his mum was killed.”
Hours before Craig was killed, a local man, David Hanley, was shot several times by the LVF as he walked his dogs past a bonfire in north Belfast. Like Craig, he was not a paramilitary. It seemed to have been a case of mistaken identity. Left blind and unable to walk by the attack, he has contemplated suicide.
The McCauslands don’t know why Craig was killed. They wonder whether a UVF commander bore a grudge over Craig’s rude refusal of his order to join the organisation, and used the cover of the feud to have him murdered.
Four months on, several people have been questioned but no one has been charged. As often in Northern Ireland, everyone on the street says it’s obvious who did it but no one has been caught. The family say witnesses are too frightened to come forward.
After the feud’s death toll reached four and many families were forced from their homes, the LVF last month announced its members had been “stood down”. But the LVF is a small, peripheral group and bigger loyalist organisations remain. “When people keep getting away with murder, how can anything else in Northern Ireland move on?” says Cathy. “My mother always had a fear that what happened to Lorraine would happen again.”
It was not until two years ago, when her mother was dying of cancer and said she would be seeing Lorraine again soon, that the McCauslands sat down and talked about her murder. Lorraine’s father went to the police ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, and asked her to investigate the police handling of the case.
When Craig was killed and the family were again faced with bringing up another two-year-old boy who could never understand the murder of his parent, they refused to stay quiet. They wrote to every party on Belfast council for help. The only person who didn’t reply or come to meet them was David Ervine, the leader of the Progressive Unionists, the political arm of the UVF, who had killed Craig. Ervine, who once served five years in the Maze on explosives charges, is credited with trying to steer the UVF away from violence. If he doesn’t have the courage to help them, the family says, then there is no hope.
Ervine told the Guardian: “What can I possibly do for them? They want justice for the murder of their loved one and I understand that. But what elements of justice can I deliver for them? Justice is a matter for the police and the courts. Should I storm into the middle of the UVF and demand the killers be handed over? It would be easy but it’s highly unlikely to succeed.”
Craig was one of four people killed by the UVF in its six-week summer murder spree. The government’s ceasefire watchdog, the Independent Monitoring Commission, blamed the UVF for the murders in a special report in September. But the Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain did not move to declare the group’s ceasefire had broken down until later that month, after UVF men had opened fire on police and army with automatic weapons and crossbows during the worst rioting in a decade.
The McCauslands want to meet Hain but he has so far declined to see them. He wrote to the leader of the Alliance Party, David Ford, saying “a meeting at such an early stage in the police investigation would offer [the family] little benefit.”
Ford says: “This is typical of the way the government currently operates in Northern Ireland. They are utterly lacking in any moral fibre.”
At Craig’s funeral, where his favourite Dido and Coldplay songs were played, his friend Johnny Sloan said they had both discussed leaving Northern Ireland to get away from paramilitaries. “Craig had friends everywhere who loved him. We had talked of getting away from it all. Now I wish we had”.
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands