- 23/06/2025
Ken Funston launching his book about the fate of border Protestants at the hands of the IRA, Ulster University, Belfast, June 23, 2025
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00:00Maybe touch on what Liam mentioned in relation to serial killers and I'll start probably at something that maybe to certain extent sucked me into this type of work 41 years ago.
00:19Ciarán Flemming, some people who served or worked up in the north west of an entire direction would have known of the Flemming family from Goldman scale.
00:31Ciarán Flemming was a maze escapee. He had murdered a part-time RUC constable called Linda Bagley in 1976 for which he received obviously a life sentence.
00:46As I said, he escaped from the HMP maze on the 23rd of September 1983 and resumed his murderous activities along the Donegal border with the counties of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh.
01:01Obviously again using the Irish Republic as a safe haven.
01:06Why am I talking about Ciarán Flemming?
01:09Well Flemming eventually ended up in East Donegal with an army council directive to cause mayhem in North Fermanagh which at that stage had become rather benign as far as militant republicanism was concerned.
01:24There was a concerted assault along the border obviously as I said with Flemming's gang in North Fermanagh and South East Donegal.
01:35We had Seamus McElwain living in County Monaghan with his group with Sean Lynch attacking South East Fermanagh, sometimes ably supported by McEarney and Lyna.
01:51Obviously McEarney and Lyna and obviously McEarney and Lyna who met their demise in Lough Gaul.
01:56They were also attacking sort of South West Armagh up into South Tyrone and right up into East Tyrone.
02:09On the morning of 13th March 1984, Flemming and his gang with a local guide crossed the border by foot near Pettigo.
02:19Pettigo if you don't know it is one of the few villages divided by the border of the river.
02:25Turn it runs through the village in Northam on that.
02:28Pettigo in the northern part is called Tullyhoman.
02:31Crossed the border by foot, as I said just south of Pettigo, they waited for Ronnie Funkson, my brother.
02:41I have two sisters here as well.
02:47I'd always be catching people a bit, sorry.
02:51Ronnie was going out to feed his cattle and they shot him in the back and as he sat on the tractor.
03:05Our mother heard the shooting and ran to the scene but her son had already died.
03:10She saw the two gunmen running up the field towards the border, sharing their evil deed.
03:15Now, years later, the Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O'Neill has stated that those gunmen had no alternative.
03:27Now I know obviously, my sisters obviously, but there are other people in the audience here today who also have had troost relatives who have died during the Troubles.
03:35And a violent and sudden death in a family at the hands of criminals is something that is difficult to comprehend and almost impossible to forget.
03:45When Ronnie was murdered, I was a professional soldier in the Royal Marines.
03:50I was faced with alternatives.
03:54Same alternatives that the gunman who shot him did have.
03:58I could have done nothing.
04:00I could have sought revenge and did what they did.
04:04Or I could have made a positive decision to do something that would help our divided society.
04:09I made the decision to join the OEC.
04:12A number of people in this audience did the same.
04:15We decided to fight the scourge of terrorism from whatever quarter, and I mean from whatever quarter.
04:25The people of Northern Ireland deserve better.
04:28And let's face it, most of the population saw there was no alternative to terrorism.
04:3441 years after Ronnie's murder, people are not being murdered for the sake of a political ideology.
04:42But those innocent victims are being airbrushed from history.
04:46This is certainly something that Cillian and I had recognised in this book, alongside the work of South East Manor Foundation and others, have attempted to redress the situation.
05:03Conducting these interviews in the book, snippets that are in the book, was not particularly easy.
05:09I recognised the trauma, the pain and the suffering many had to endure.
05:19It was something they carried for years in silence.
05:24The Church of Ireland actually did what's called a hard gospel project in 2008, which is probably a seminal project at that stage.
05:32And they parodied the Seamus Heaney poem, whenever you say, say nothing.
05:39It identified at that stage, the reticence of the victims and survivors of a public and tarot from Allah to speak out about their experiences.
05:47It was as they said, keep your head down and carry on.
05:51The threat remained amongst us at that stage.
05:54Here we are in 2025 and after many years of hard work, the Innocent Victims and Survivors Organisation SAEF, who I mentioned, have empowered many now to speak out, tell of their experiences.
06:10Whether that was direct attacks, whether it was the murder of a dear relative, intimidation, coercion, attacks on their property or themselves surviving a murder attempt.
06:23There was so much in these interviews, it was impossible to include everything.
06:28I wish to, both in the PhD and the book, to say a lot more, but obviously we are always limited by words and space.
06:35However, there were those recurring themes.
06:38Totally let down by successive Republic of Ireland governments and to a less extent by British governments.
06:44The total erosion of a British way of life in border areas.
06:48The sense of abandonment and the never acknowledged plan by their array to effortlessly cleanse the border areas of Protestants and Unions.
06:57Thereby giving those Republicans a free reign to act without impunity and a so-called free zone, or as some people talk about it, border creep.
07:09The front cover of the book exposes the reality of their intentions.
07:14If anybody doesn't know, door card took it down again.
07:18The front cover of the book, who have got it in front of them, that was a picture I took three years ago of the Boys Brigade parade in Tullyholman village.
07:33So on the 8th of November 1987, the same day as the Unionskilling bomb, they had left three times the size of a bomb in Tullyholman village to murder, wipe out a generation of children.
07:47And we're not meant to talk about that.
07:49Some of you obviously have the book, some of you haven't read the book yet, some of you hopefully will buy the book, or say the online version that Liam talked about.
08:05And Liam didn't get the note from myself and Killian.
08:08There's a sneaky half price code, Liam.
08:11So they'll get it for a really cheap price of £52.
08:15And if you still want to buy it, we'll pass on the code.
08:21What I want to do is mention a few passages in the book, passages that I've used in the past when I've been doing presentations.
08:28A few passages that have resonated with me over the years.
08:32There was a family in South Managh, on the border near Rossley, and they had a similar name to the serial killer Seamus Mac Elway.
08:44They had been attacked a number of times on their border farm.
08:51There was only possible family in the area.
08:53No connection whatsoever with the security forces.
08:56Until it came to head one night.
08:59Roughly twelve member IRA gunmen came to the house, rural farm.
09:06They took the family out of their beds.
09:09Children were in their beds in their pyjamas.
09:11Lighted them up against the wall outside.
09:13And Mr. McElwain stated later that he thought they were all going to be shot.
09:18His daughter interviewee stated to me, they threw paper bombs into the house, into all the rooms.
09:27They ran us down the lane in our nightwear, and the whole house was on fire.
09:31The animals burned alive, and after that the fire began and everything arrived.
09:36But everything was gone, ruined at that stage.
09:39We got a mobile home and stayed there until we got things sorted.
09:43And then we got the house in Liston Ski, and we've been there ever since.
09:48Cleansed from the area.
09:54Liston Ski, I don't know, a lot of people here probably are townies and above.
09:59Never been to the villages of probably Liston Ski, etc.
10:03Up until the recent years there was a Protestant high school in Liston Ski.
10:08And they had the distinction for having the most parents from any school killed in Northern Ireland.
10:16And this interview, at that stage, she was obviously an island woman.
10:21But when she was fourteen, she always remembered.
10:26And they tried to kill her father three times.
10:29And on the last occasion, they murdered him.
10:31And she used to explain the situation in Liston Ski High School.
10:36And what she said was, when the townhouse system, the loudspeaker went off in the school,
10:42and they said a name, for example, Ken Funston, please go to the principal's office.
10:48And it was the black spot.
10:51Everybody knew what that meant.
10:53It meant that somebody had been murdered in the family, somebody attacked in the family, something particularly happened.
11:00She tried to portray the fear and dread that affected the children as soon as they heard her name being announced,
11:07especially when it was their own name, until the day they called out her name.
11:12Another gentleman, a very successful businessman, determined to stay.
11:24He's passed away in recent years.
11:27But he mentioned, our shop had been bombed directly ten or eleven times, but it carried on and had two shooting incidents and some near threats.
11:37God was good to me, and my faith was involved.
11:40One particular day, in February 1981, someone fired five shots at me from about four feet away.
11:47The bullets deflected and missed.
11:49He was never known to leave anybody alive.
11:52Goleman was Seamus McIlwain.
11:55This following snippet is actually by a lady whose mother was killed in the Inniskillen bomb.
12:07And even thinking the bigger picture of the Inniskillen bomb that day.
12:14And this is what she said to me.
12:17It was part of the moral abyss of our country that Tulli-Homin and the Evo planned there has been sparsely reported on our largely Kabatman.
12:27I am sure the main reason for the small bomb at Inniskillen for the same morning was to stretch the emergency services
12:34so that there would be no more dead children than Tulli-Homin and their policy at border creep would be advanced.
12:40Another family, they owned a garage, a small shop, down near the border of Newton Butler.
12:58No connections again with the security forces.
13:01IRA gun team entered the house, beat her husband in front of her until he was almost unconscious.
13:09Then grabbed her son Peter and said he would be driving a human bomb into a checkpoint at the border.
13:16They said to Peter, drive this bomb.
13:22And Peter said, I am not driving any bomb.
13:25They said if you don't, we will shoot your father and you, but we won't shoot her.
13:31We will leave her to bury both of you.
13:33Ian actually had to go ahead and drive the bomb.
13:38He beat his legs until he couldn't actually walk and drove the bomb into the checkpoint.
13:43The bomb which at that stage was the biggest in the round, three and a half thousand pounds.
13:49The detonator went off as he drove it into the checkpoint and the soldiers pulled him out of the bomb.
13:55And they all escaped with their lives only because the detonator didn't put off the main explosives.
14:01I mentioned quite a lot and Cillian may mention it later on as well.
14:10Power astrology was somewhat exposed when in 1986 they stated the wider definition of what they deemed as a legitimate target.
14:18The civil service, the field contractors, the catering firms, the transfer companies, BT, those who delivered bread and milk.
14:27That's these are all legitimate targets.
14:30But what it was, it was a way to legitimise killing civilians.
14:34And it legitimised killing those civilians in the eyes of the electorate because in their way they were collaborators for the British war machine.
14:43And it's still Tony Holland exemplified that in 87. Even children were fair again.
14:50As you can recall when I finished the PhD and the newsletter ran a story on it,
14:55Philip, the journalist in the room, I found someone depressing to see the number of either disgusting or dismissive comments.
15:02It would seem, again, after another piece on the book being published a few days ago,
15:08they would want us to shut up and go away.
15:13And it comes back until Cillian starts chapter 1 and makes it celebrated author George Orwell.
15:21Who controls the past, controls the future.
15:24Who controls the present, controls the past.
15:27They have to suppress books of this nature.
15:30In their minds, Tony Holland didn't happen.
15:33And this game was allowed to happen because the Brits allowed it to happen and there was a conspiracy.
15:40And all their attacks were legitimate.
15:43You could almost right the professional behaviour.
15:47Ignore the abuses of the past.
15:50Any possible future apologies for those abuses for the professional movement will ring hollow.
15:57And I will repeat again what one of the leaders said.
16:00They had no alternative.
16:02Where does that sit alongside reconciliation?
16:05An often used term that essentially is a buzzword.
16:10Without meaning or understanding.
16:12We still as a society have a long way to go.
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