Bloody Wednesday 50: Annie’s Bar remembered - Barney Kelly

"We talk about Barney every day. He was a comedian. He was a very good young fellah, carefree. He was ‘our wain’ as they say in Derry. We were a very close family. We all lived near each and we all lived near Annie's Bar,” his sister Bridie O’Donnell tells the ‘Journal’ as his family prepare to mark his 50th anniversary.

Barney, aged 28, had only got married to Miss Marie Dalzell from Creggan in September 1972. They were living in Mimosa Court.

The week before Christmas that year the newly-weds received the joyous news that a baby was on the way.

On December 20, 1972, Barney, who worked at Lec Refrigerators Ltd., had happened to down tools as part of an industrial dispute between the workers and management. It stands out in the memory.

“They were out on strike that day,” recalls Bridie, who at the time was living up in Mountainview.

The street – on elevated ground up behind Annie’s Bar and right on the interface between Top of the Hill and the predominantly unionist Irish Street estate – had been at the centre of sporadic skirmishes over the previous years.

"The two groups always met at the bottom of Mountainview, very close to my house. They would threw stones and break windows. We had cars wrecked and windows broken. We had a bomb left at our front door. It was just a bad spot,” says Bridie.

Though used to occasional rioting, nothing could have prepared the Top of the Hill community for what was about to unfold.

"It was a Wednesday night and Barney went down for a couple of pints. I lived not very far, just up the street from Annie's. I heard the shooting but it was a normal thing.”

Bridie explains how the sound of gunfire would reverberate between the hills on either side of the River Foyle. Rounds fired in Creggan or the Bogside would be heard clearly in Gobnascale and vice-versa, so it wasn’t usually a cause for alarm.

"I lived in Mountainview, which was on a height and you would have heard everything, shots from over the town you would have heard. So we never thought anything of it,” says Bridie.

The dreadful news that the shooting had occurred just a stone’s throw from her home, down at Annie’s, soon arrived.

"I was putting the children to bed. We had been putting up the Christmas tree. Bobby [Bridie’s husband] was out. He came in and said there has been a shooting in Annie's. He said, ‘Your Barney was in it but he is alright because he walked into the ambulance’.”

In a panic Bridie quickly got someone to look after the children and hurried to nearby Altnagelvin Hospital with her husband.

“Whenever I walked in that hospital door two priests came forward to me and one of them took each arm. I knew by their faces there was something wrong. 'Don't you tell me our Barney's dead...’

"They couldn't speak. Barney was dead. He was only married since September. They only realised that week that Marie was pregnant.I don't remember anything after that. It seemed unreal.”

Barney was the youngest of five innocent men – four Catholic and one Protestant – who were shot dead by loyalist gunmen while they enjoyed a drink in their local pub that night.

Charles Moore, aged 31, of Spencer Road; Charles McCafferty, aged 32, of Anderson Crescent; Michael McGinley, aged 37, of Anderson Crescent; and Frank McCarron, aged 58, of Strabane Old Road, were the other victims.

The men died when loyalist gunmen fired 20 shots – 15 from a Sterling sub-machine gun and five from a pistol or revolver – indiscriminately around the packed pub where between 40 and 50 people had been watching a midweek football match.

The Ulster Defence Association (UDA) has long been suspected of having carried out the attack.

It is believed this may have been in retaliation for the murder of 28-year-old Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) man George Ellis Hamilton, who worked for the Derry Development Commission and was shot dead by an IRA sniper at the Croppy Hill reservoir that day.

However, it denied involvement at the time.

The Derry County Command of the UDA issued the following statement after the killings: “We were stunned at yesterday’s news of the six appalling murders in Londonderry. We have now a civil war situation staring us in the face and it would do not section of the community any good.”

The ‘Journal’ described December 20, 1972, as ‘Bloody Wednesday’.

The murder of the five men in Annie’s Bar bereaved an entire community and Bridie says it has had a profound impact. Christmas, for example, could never be the enjoyable time it is for most families.

"I have to take to my bed at Christmas these 50 years. I never let them put up the Christmas tree until after the anniversary. When I see Christmas trees it really gets to me,” she says.

Like the families of the other victims Bridie too feels that what happened in Top of the Hill that night is one of the forgotten atrocities of the recent conflict.

"It is never mentioned. It's hurtful too you know. It's just like they were nothing. We'll never forget them but it's never mentioned among the worst atrocities. But we talk about Barney every day.”