The Ballymurphy Precedent is a documentary film made by Callum Macrae for Ffilm Cymru Wales in association with Channel 4.  It will be shown on 1 August during the Féile an Phobail at St Mary’s College, and on 30 August in many cinemas across Ireland, North and South, and in Glasgow and London.  Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow will chair the Q&A at the London showing at the Curzon Soho.  It will also be shown at some point on Channel 4.

“Men fear women will mock them; women fear men will kill them,” is a line from a recent episode of A Handmaid’s Tale.  In The Ballymurphy Precedent, the newly released documentary about the eleven killings in August 1971 by British soldiers during the first three days of internment, the intriguing suggestion is made that Joan Connolly, mother of eight, was shot because of her non-violent resistance to the presence of the British army in Ballymurphy.  “There’s one here for you,” a soldier is said to have threatened her a few days before she was shot and left to bleed to death in a field.

Sunday 10 December 2017, the day of the annual Mass for victims of the massacre, filmed for the documentary, was a bitterly cold day. The streets of Ballymurphy were sheathed in snow and dangerous black ice.  The frozenness makes for stark drone shots of Belfast and a fitting metaphorical backdrop for the story of the Massacre and the eleven victims’ families’ almost five decades-long search for truth and campaign for justice – potentially to reach some measure of closure with the inquest due to start on 11 September this year.

The feature-length documentary tells a gripping story. There is an impressive cast of interviewees:  two former Royal Greenjackets, James Kinchin White and Richard Rudkin, who served in Belfast, Fr Des Wilson, the Catholic priest who has lived in Ballymurphy for over fifty years, Dr Geoff Bell, an historian of Protestant background, residents, and many relatives of the victims.  The “star” is Briege Voyle, one of Joan Connolly’s five daughters, who chairs the campaign group.  Ballymurphy, which lies in outer West Belfast, under Blackmountain, was seen as a Catholic ghetto by outsiders, but as a much-loved community and neighbourhood by its occupants.

The film starts with the story of the civil rights marches, which began 50 years ago this autumn.  It rightly suggests that if a political solution had been sought to address the anger and inequalities of the Catholic minority, the following decades might have passed very differently.  Its well-chosen archive material shows why the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, introduced the disastrous strategy of internment and includes a chilling clip of Brigadier Frank Kitson making his inane comment that “It is sometimes necessary to do unpleasant things which lose a certain amount of allegiance for a moment.”  The eponymous “precedent” is that, having acted with impunity in Ballymurphy, the First Parachute regiment went on six months later to be responsible for the 13 deaths on Bloody Sunday during the anti-internment march in Derry/Londonderry. There could have been no better recruitment mechanism for the IRA.

The documentary highlights the role of women who, like Joan Connolly, initially welcomed and made tea for the soldiers but who, when it was realised that they were there to restore and reinforce the “avowedly sectarian protestant status quo”, became active resisters, breaking the curfew to bring bread and milk to their children, banging bin lids in warning, mocking soldiers in the street.  It also features a clever, forensic, bloodless reconstruction of the precise chronology of the murders.

The Ballymurphy Precedent will be shown on 1 August during the Féile an Phobail at St Mary’s College.

At the time of the murders, the army published an account of their “gunbattle” with the IRA in the Belfast Telegraph – perhaps an early example of “fake news”.  Ballymurphy was considered a hotbed of Republicanism, partly because, although the film doesn’t mention it, Gerry Adams was born and reared there.  Whatever IRA there were before internment, which was not a lot, had been tipped off about the raids and were well away – giving no protection to the innocent residents of Ballymurphy, they recall with some bitterness.  Incredibly, it was twenty-seven years before the families, frozen in grief and silence, learned of one another’s’ existence at a 1998 conference for relatives of Troubles victims and began their campaign to unbury the truth and win official recognition of their loved ones’ innocence. They engaged in exhaustive research of their own to establish how each one died, and have collected 130 witness statements, enabling them to campaign successfully for an inquest.

The film’s publicity speaks of the Massacre as an unknown story.  Channel 4 News journalist Alex Thomson tweeted, having seen the trailer, that it was “simply astonishing it has taken more than a generation to get the Ballymurphy story told.”  It has actually been repeatedly retold in previous documentaries – for example, one made in 2015 by Relapse pictures – and in thousands upon thousands of column inches of newspaper articles, mostly within the vacuum of the Northern Ireland press but including a 2014 article in The Guardian by Ian Cobain.

In his book Making Peace with the Past? Graham Dawson has suggested that the lack of British media coverage of Northern Ireland, in particular of events for which state forces were responsible, is a “cultural manifestation of denial and disavowal” which supports a “state-organised forgetting” of the British state’s role as a culpable perpetrator in the conflict. I would argue that the failure to acknowledge the role of British state forces in the conflict is one of the flaws of the Good Friday Agreement and continues to be an impediment to achieving further progress in the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Prime Minister David Cameron did make two lengthy and eloquent statements acknowledging responsibility following the Saville enquiry into Bloody Sunday (15 June 2010) and on collusion in the murder of Pat Finucane (12 December 2012).  This week, it emerged that Whitehall officials had last year prevented files relating to the Finucane murder from being made public by the National Archives under the 20-year rule.

On 23 March this year, High Court Judge Sir Paul Girvan found DUP leader Arlene Foster had unlawfully blocked the release of legacy funding – to complete the 50+ outstanding Troubles legacy inquests — while she was First Minister.  He directed the Secretary of State and Northern Ireland departments to reconsider its provision.  Although the Ballymurphy families have successfully campaigned for their inquest to go ahead nonetheless, it may be hampered by the ongoing lack of extra funding. The question must be asked what impact the Tory/DUP pact is having on progress of all these matters.  With luck and a fair wind, The Ballymurphy Precedent will be widely seen and will help to raise the profile of Northern Ireland in today’s media.

Click here for screenings & tickets. There is a special screening of The Ballymurphy Massacre at Clapham Picturehouse at 11am on Saturday 29 September – sign up here.