Murder most foul has never helped humanity surmount complex problems. Back in 1914 one triggered a world war. Earlier, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln opened the door for a US President who actively paved the way for a new form of white supremacy in the South for the following 150 or so years, a domination that continues to plague a USA where Donald Trump asks those imbued with the same ideology to stand by.
In Belfast, the murders of Matilda Gould, John Scullion and Peter Ward in May and June of 1966 by the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force were the first in the 30 plus years of the Troubles. The killers were motivated by the confrontationist bigotry of the self-appointed fundamentalist Protestant pastor Ian Paisley, then a performing flea on the extremes of Northern Irish Unionism, but after the dust settled on the years of conflict, the region’s first minister.
It is easy for those who never lived in Catholic housing areas of Northern Ireland to think that the whole affair of the Troubles was just a matter of the IRA. Those first murders tell us that a very different can of worms was actually involved and that without taking it into account no one can make sense of what followed, of how the gun took over from mass demonstrations for civil rights, an end to discrimination against Catholics and democratic reform of a corrupting system. Violence and the rhetoric of confrontation locked out real change. So the flea became the boss.
