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The Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) will host a webinar on Sunday, February 28 at 2 pm EST. The event is free and open to the public.
The AOH s live webinar discussion Sean Graham Bookmakers Atrocity will consider the PSNI s harassment of survivors and families of victims of an infamous loyalist atrocity and will be streamed from 2 - 3:30 pm EST on Sunday, February 28:
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Ahead of the webinar, Martin Galvin, the National Freedom for All Ireland chairman, issued this statement on behalf of the AOH: Twenty-nine years after a sectarian attack claimed the lives of five nationalists, including a 15-year-old boy, at Sean Graham s bookmakers shop on Belfast s Ormeau Road, the PSNI constabulary s treatment of survivors and victims relatives holding a wreath-laying memorial has provoked a major crisis in confidence in the PSNI.
The families and survivors affected by the Ormeau Road atrocity of 1992 still live in the terraced streets that surround Sean Graham s bookies.
Every day they pass the scene where, less than one minute after two UDA gunmen entered the small building, five lay dead and seven critically injured.
James Kennedy (15), 18-year-old Peter Magee, Jack Duffin, Willie McManus and Christy Doherty were instantly killed. James Kennedy s mother died of a broken heart less than two years later. Of the seven injured, five have died prematurely directly as a result of the injuries sustained that day.
On the gable side of the bookmaker s is a well-preserved piece of granite remembering the dead. Inscribed in stone are the words of James Kennedy s father when his wife died: Bullets do not only travel distance, but also through time . The smell of cordite has never left the nostrils of those who survived and those who mourn.
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On August 7, 1994, three weeks before the IRA ceasefire, in the picturesque Tyrone townland of Brackagh South near Creggan, horror visited the O Hagan family.
Kathleen O Hagan (38) was home alone with her five young boys. Seven months pregnant, she stayed home while her husband Paddy went out to a function. The family had been concerned that Paddy and Kathleen s home, an isolated bungalow, might be attacked by loyalists, as other republican homes had been.
Roseann Mallon (78) had been killed weeks earlier just outside Dungannon and mother of two Theresa Clinton had been killed in April in Belfast. Republican homes were being targeted and the new reality was that family members were being killed, not just the usually male republican activists.