‘I still wake up from dreams about being shot’ - Troubles victim

Gary Kelly, who was just a teenager when he was shot in July 1996, said that he will be applying to the Troubles Victims Pensions Fund, and criticised the exclusion of thousands of former prisoners and others whom he said have a right to the same treatment as all the other victims of the Conflict here.

Mr Kelly was hit by one of the almost 1000 plastic bullets fired by security forces in the Bogside and city centre over the weekend of July 12/13 1996, as trouble erupted the north following loyalist violence at Drumcree and Portadown.

Over the course of a weekend of intense rioting it was later estimated that 1,200 petrol bombs were thrown while police and soldiers fired a reported 946 rounds.

On the same weekend, just yards from where Gary Kelly was shot at the junction of William Street and Rossville Street, 35-year-old Dermot McShane the Brandywell died after being crushed by a British Army Saxon armoured vehicle which had rammed a barricade at Little James Street behind which Mr McShane had been positioned.

Recalling the night he was shot, Mr Kelly said: “We were in Fusion nightclub in the Embassy building in the town. We just came out the front of the building and the army and the cops were everywhere. We didn’t know what was going on until we got up and round the corner.

“It was about 1am. We were walking and at the corner of William Street. I got hit in the mouth. My bottom four teeth went up through my tongue and split my tongue in half.

“I had to go to Letterkenny Hospital as we heard cops were waiting on people at Altnagelvin Hospital and battering people.

“It was a nightmare. I had to get an operation on my tongue to get it all sewn back up again.”

Mr Kelly described how he lost a lot of weight over the following year as his injuries meant he couldn’t eat solid food. “I was just taking soup and that. I lost four teeth along the bottom and have a big scar on my tongue and a scar underneath my tongue. Even now if I took a cup of hot tea it would burn my tongue and open up the scar again, and it is killing me then for a couple of days. That’s to this day.”

As well as the legacy of physical pain, there has also been the mental scarring caused by what happened to him. “When you go down the town now you think of all the things that happened here, and every time you walk past there where you got hit it reminds you of it.

“The worst about it was the dreams after it. There’s nights I would wake up crying my eyes out, dripping with sweat, dreaming about just getting shot. To this day I still have dreams about it.

“It put a lot of fear into me afterwards - I could have been dead. For a couple of years after my head wasn’t the same. To this day if I was lying somewhere and heard a bang I would jump. It’s just a nightmare.

“When I got hit I had a rubber taste in my mouth for ages and ages but sometimes you taste it in your mouth.”

The violence that weekend is believed to have included the most plastic bullets ever fired by the security forces in the north during a single operation.

Mr Kelly said he is backing a new campaign for all victims to be allowed to apply for the Victims Pension Fund and is supportive of the campaign being led by Derry Republican ex-prisoners organisation Tar Abhaile to have the restrictions on who can apply rescinded.

The restrictions imposed by the British government, as they stand would bar thousands of former political prisoners and internees from applying.

Mr Kelly said he believes everyone who was personally impacted by the Troubles should be eligible for the pension scheme, whatever community they came from, and including ex-prisoners and former combatants on all sides.

“Everybody was in this war that happened and nobody should say, ,he or she can’t get it,. Why not? They were there too. There are thousands of people badly affected in some way. There were people on all sides affected.

“My own brother was inside for years. The prisoners went through a lot and that needs to be acknowledged.

“It’s unreal the impact the war had in Derry. Still to this day there are a lot of ex-prisoners who are badly affected by what happened and to say they are not allowed a pension or that they are not victims is a disgrace,” Mr Kelly said.