What Now For The McCartney Family?

For six months in 2005 their story covered newspapers and television screens worldwide, it even knocked the war in Iraq from top spot in CNN's coverage for a day.

Invited as special guests of George Bush at the Whitehouse St Patrick's Day celebrations, regular visitors to Downing Street and a cause celebre of the world's media it seemed the McCartney family's story had captured the world's imagination.

Their brother, Robert, was stabbed and beaten to death by IRA members in a Belfast bar on January 30th 2005.

He was the 3721st person to die in a Troubles related incident, and unfortunately not the last, but by any measure his death received far more attention than any other event since 1969.

Outside Paula McCartney's small terraced home in the republican Short Strand area of east Belfast the global media waited eagerly for any development in the story.

Hollywood came knocking with film offers, publishers beat a path to the door with book deals.

Today, 19 months after the murder, the phones have gone quiet and the McCartneys have moved out of the Short Strand, a community, which they say, shunned them.

Two men have been charged in relation to the murder inquiry, which at its height paralysed politics in the North and forced the IRA and Sinn Fein onto the backfoot like no other event.

So shaken were the IRA by the media backlash that they publicly offered to shoot the IRA men involved in the murder.

An unprecedented development at a time when the group was officially on ceasefire.

However a question which remains unexplored is why the McCartney murder got such attention and was given such importance when a multitude of other murders went un-noticed by a disinterested media and the political establishment in both England and Ireland.

Many in the North died horrific deaths, some were tortured and mutilated for days beforehand, but Robert McCartney's story was told, and re-told, around the globe.

Nor was the response to the McCartney killing a breaking point, a cry for 'no more'; seven months later a Catholic teenager was stabbed to death by loyalists, yet there was no meetings with George Bush for his family, no rallies calling for the UVF to disband.

Indeed in the summer of 2005 loyalists began a shooting war in Belfast, young Protestant men were killed, whole communities terrorised, again the response was, at best, muted.

"The political climate did play a factor in the publicity surrounding Robert, but they are the sort of things that we don't analyse," says Paula McCartney, the instantly recognisable face of the campaign.

"We were just focused on getting justice for Robert and couldn't see beyond that, so the rest was just details".

Paula and her sister Catherine, spearheaded the campaign, and both now feel they haven't grieved for their brother because of it.

But both are also adamant that if the trial of Terence Davidson, which is expected to start in the Autumn, doesn't deliver the verdict they want, a fresh campaign will be launched.

The European parliament has already earmarked funding for such a civil action, if the criminal case collapses or is seriously weakened.

"We don't want to go down that road but we will," insists Paula.

"It makes me so angry when I see what this has done to my family.

"My father is destroyed by it, I haven't seen him so bad as he has been in the past few weeks.

"He goes down to Robert's house in the Short Strand to stay the night by himself.

"It was the family home where we all grew up then it was sold to Robert when he started a family of his own. It is so sad".

Like any murder of a young person on the cusp of life, the death of Robert McCartney has had a huge impact upon his family.

His sisters say they will consider going into counselling, his partner Bridgeen Hagans, is learning to live as a widow with two young children.

The devastation of a murdered relative is a feeling that many in the North know well.

In the Short Strand, a tiny nationalist enclave, surrounded by hard-line working class communities 29 people were killed between 1969 and 1994.

The publicity given to the McCartney murder touched a raw nerve amongst many in the local community.

While some took a hardline decision to stay loyal to the IRA at any cost, most people empathised with the McCartneys and understood the family bonds which pushed them forward. However many were angry and cynical over the media treatment of the death.

For many it seemed that the media and political establishment's treatment of Robert McCartney's murder less of a genuine expression of outrage than an attempt to pursue a political agenda, IRA decommissioning through other means.

The McCartney family admit this.

"Of course his murder was used by politicians for their own interests and ends, we knew that, but we didn't really care," says Paula.

"They all do it, Sinn Fein uses victims of collusion for its own purposes and Robert's murder was used by other parties for their own ends.

"We aren't naïve, we know all too well that nobody cares about Robert, except for his family.

"We just didn't care where the support was coming from as long as the issue was being raised".

Other murders, which took place after the ceasefires and which were more sensational in their own right barely got any attention.

In 1997 Bernadette Martin, a Catholic teenager, was murdered as she slept in her Protestant boyfriend's home.

The murder barely got a mention in the press.

Other high-profile murders such as that of Robert Hamill, kicked to death by a loyalist mob in Portadown as an RUC landrover looked on, received scant attention also.

The murders of James Morgan (a Catholic schoolboy beaten to death and mutilated by a UVF mob) in 1997, Ciaran Heffron, (a Catholic student strangled ant mutilated by an LVF gang in Antrim in 1998), or Thomas Devlin, a 15 year-old Catholic stabbed to death by a UVF gang in August 2005, were largely over-looked by the media.

So to was the murder of Andrew Kearney, killed by the IRA in July 1998 because he beat-up the IRA's north Belfast commander.

Undoubtedly the McCartney murder was pushed onto the agenda by a confliguration of events.

Just four weeks beforehand the £26.5M Northern Bank robbery had taken place, and many blamed the IRA.

The political process had stalled in November 2004 when a potentially historic deal between Sinn Fein and the IRA collapsed over Ian Paisley's demand that republicans should wear 'sackcloth and ashes'.

The pendulum of blame had already swung toward republicans before Robert McCartney's life was brutally ended.

His murder fitted neatly into an already established narrative of IRA criminality and oppression of working class Catholic communities by paramilitary 'godfathers'.

The McCartney's campaign echoed previous examples of 'people driven' initiatives throughout the Troubles.

In 1976 the Peace People emerged in republican west Belfast following the death of two children as a direct result of an IRA and British Army confrontation.

In the early days the movement mushroomed, supported by clerics on both sides, and given due prominence in the media.

However the refusal of the Peace People to condemn state violence quickly alienated it from working class nationalists, more often than not the victims of such violence.

The undoubted support it received from the British government made it susceptible to allegations that it was a front in the 'war' against the IRA.

In the 1980s Families Against Intimidation and Terror (FAIT) emerged.

Its sole purpose was to highlight the plight of victims of IRA punishment beatings.

Again it received huge support from the British government and the media, at a time when community groups, often working with the effects of drug dealing, were marginalised by the state.

A few years later it self-imploded amidst allegations of corruption and, ironically, intimidation of its own members.

The support given to the McCartney's campaign, appeared to follow a similar pattern, especially after it emerged the SDLP's deputy leader, Alisdair McDonnell, privately funded their trip to the US on St Patrick's Day.

Undoubtedly the McCartney murder showed the influence the IRA has in working-class areas and the danger of having the organisation in existence at a time when its own political leaders had essentially rendered it redundant.

The gang who attacked Robert McCartney contained at least four men who had more than ten years experience of IRA activity.

Men who have at best been brutalised by a life in the IRA, and at worst who enjoy inflicting violence on anyone who crosses their path.

Catherine McCartney says republicans have been oppressing the Short Strand since the 1994 ceasefires.

"Once they stopped fighting the British army they turned their attention to us, anyone who got in their way knew the consequences," she argues.

"They oppressed the community in the Short Strand and in other areas, they are thugs".

However the picture painted by Catherine McCartney is hard to understand, given her previous statements.

Her own family admit that they supported Sinn Fein in the Short Strand up until their brother's murder.

Everyone, except Sinn Fein, acknowledge the close ties the party has with the IRA.

The murder, and subsequent campaigning, have irrevocably changed the McCartney family's own self-perception and relationship with the community they grew up in.

"We don't have a history anymore," says Catherine.

"It is as if we have no past, it is as if our whole childhood never happened.

"The Short Strand is an alien place to me".

The McCartneys lost not only their brother, but their community.

Robert's best friend, Brendan Devine, who was almost killed in the same attack hasn't contacted them in over a year either.

He is currently in jail, convicted of slitting a doorman's throat in Belfast, an offence which took place before the events of January 2005.

"If we relaunched our campaign I don't think we would get as much attention this time round," says Paula.

"To be honest we were surprised by the attention it received first time round".

Two republicans are due to stand trial this Autumn in connection with the murder.

Terene Davison is charged with murder. He is currently out on bail.

Jim McCormack, initially charged with the attempted murder of Brendan Devine, has had his charges reduced to causing an affray.

The McCartney's believe that up to 15 people were involved in the murder.

Despite the scale of their campaign only one man is looking at a serious jail term, the family are not satisfied.

It seems that the real consequence of the campaign has not been to catch all of his killers, but to force the IRA into decommissioning.

Less than three months later Gerry Adams publicly asked the IRA to 'put all arms beyond use', few believed his call would go unanswered.

Today though the McCartney's believe their campaign is far from over.