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Prisoners of Thugs who rule by Rods of Iron:
by Ruth Dudley Edwards
"They're not going to murder him for nothing. Throw him in a dirty, stinking lift, let him be murdered and forgot about.. That won't happen to my child. I didn't rear him for that. And he was a good, decent human being."
Maureen Kearney had been crying when I rang, for she had just finished watching a television programme about paramilitary human rights abuses. "They took away Andrew's human rights when they murdered him. They took away my human rights when they murdered my son."
'They' are the IRA, whom 33-year-old Andrew Kearney, who was not prepared to be pushed around, annoyed once too often. His capital offence was to take on and knock out the local IRA commander when he was beating up a 17-year-old in a bar. "Andrew was no angel," says Maureen, "but he always stuck up for people. And he knew how to handle himself'.
Two weeks after that fight, Andrew Kearney was playing with his tiny daughter, Caitland Rose, on the floor of his living-room on the sixteenth floor of a Belfast tower block when the door was kicked in and seven masked men and a woman dragged him away from the baby and into a lift, lie was shot several times in the legs and ankle: a .45 calibre revolver held against his calf discharged a bullet and destroyed an artery. To make sure he had no chance of survival, his murderers ripped out the phone and disabled the lift. As An-drew bled to death, his girlfriend was running down flight after flight of stairs to look for help.
Andrew's murder took place last July. "The dogs in the street knew who'd done it", says Maureen a lifelong republican. Grimly she marched down to local IRA headquarters, asked some questions, and was told the shooting had been sanctioned by the 0/C of the Belfast Brigade. It was implied with some embarrassment that the intention had merely been to cripple Andrew. Maureen didn't believe that, for the surgeon is certain they had intended to kill him.
"It was especially hard to have him murdered by his own people. If it had been the security forces. Or the loyalists. Or the police. But to have him murdered by the people that I was born and raised among. Them as were our protectors in the height of the Troubles."
Maureen went to the RUC, who could do nothing for the lack of hard evidence: in the ghettos, people rarely bear witness against their tormentors. But Maureen is determined to fight. "I'm not afraid of them. Because my son died, his family don't get
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