The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest who armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money by Jennifer O'Leary

Author:Jennifer O'Leary [O'Leary, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785374647
Publisher: Merrion Press
Published: 2023-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

SWISS TIMERS

The young sisters drew their last breath as they slept. Nine-year-old Bernadette and three-year-old Carol McCool were in the upstairs bedroom of their home in the largely Catholic housing estate of Creggan in Derry in June 1970, when an explosion in the kitchen propelled a fireball through the house. A suffocating mix of hot gas and toxic fumes stilled the two children in their slumber. Their mother, Josie, and three siblings only managed to escape the blaze because they were in the downstairs sitting room; their torment began seconds later.

A thundering crackle and hiss of flames roared in fury over the screams of fifteen-year-old John McCool, who desperately pleaded with those whose arms were gripped around him to let go; he wanted to run back into the burning house to try to save his sisters. Neighbours eventually had to sit on the teenager to hold him down.1

Thick black smoke bellowed and swirled into the midsummer night sky as fire crews arrived to an unfolding scene of horror. In the kitchen they found the bodies of two men: the children’s father, Thomas McCool, and Joseph Coyle. A third man, Thomas Carlin, was found badly burned in a neighbouring garden and later died from his injuries.

The passing of minutes was a cruel measure of the brutal ferocity of the blaze that turned the McCool family home into a smouldering, blackened ruin. An eyewitness said the house at Dunree Gardens was ‘gutted within three minutes of the start of the fire’.2 Earlier that evening, Bernadette had taken a pair of green tartan bows from her hair and placed them on top of the family’s television before she ran upstairs to bed.3 Just hours later, firemen carefully carried her lifeless body down the steps of the scorched staircase. Carol, the baby of the family, died in hospital the following day.

Shock and grief numbed the tight-knit community of the Creggan on a night when a visceral rage had already spilled over in nearby streets. Built on a windswept hill high above Derry, the housing estate overlooked the Bogside, another Catholic area of the city, from where, for hours that night, the distinct, pepper-like smell of tear gas drifted across the city.

A wave of rioting had broken out following the arrest of the civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin. The twenty-one-year-old, who had been elected in April to the House of Commons for Mid-Ulster, had failed in her bid for leave to appeal to the House of Lords against a six-month prison sentence for her part in rioting during what became known as the Battle of the Bogside in 1969. ‘I was involved with people in defending their area. They were justified in defending themselves and I believe I was justified in assisting their defence,’ she told a press conference before her detention that day. ‘If the same circumstances rose again I would have no problems helping them again.’4 Devlin planned to address a meeting of her supporters in Derry that evening before handing herself in to the police, but was detained at a roadblock four miles outside the city.

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