Band of sisters confronts IRA's long rule of silence

BELFAST -- Paula McCartney pulled back the curtain in the living room of the family home last week and pointed down the narrow, graffiti-scarred alleys of the Short Strand, a Catholic enclave on the knife-edge of this city's sectarian divide.

''He lives right over there. Everybody knows he's a full-time IRA man. Everybody knows he's the one who killed my brother," said McCartney, 40, a righteous anger rising in her voice as her four sisters gathered around her, nodding in agreement. ''We're going to get justice here, IRA or not. We're not afraid."

The McCartney sisters have stood together to break the long, unwritten code of silence in Belfast by publicly demanding justice in the brutal slaying of their brother, Robert McCartney, 33, by a known local leader of the Irish Republican Army and several of his associates.

McCartney, a father of two young boys who supported Irish nationalism but studiously avoided the sectarian violence that surrounded him all his life, was stabbed to death in a barroom brawl Jan. 30.

The local IRA leadership's alleged responsibility for the murder, along with allegations of a coverup and a campaign of witness intimidation, has ignited fury and division in the republican community.

Sinn Fein, the political party historically affiliated with the IRA in the struggle to end British rule in Northern Ireland, opened its annual party conference in Dublin yesterday with an attempt to defuse the crisis over the McCartney killing.

The McCartney sisters attended, along with Bridgeen Hagan, McCartney's fiancée and the mother of their two children.

The McCartney family has challenged Sinn Fein to use its influence to call upon those who saw the killing to come forward, so that the Police Service of Northern Ireland can solve the murder.

That kind of defiance used to get people killed in the old Belfast. That was before the 1998 Good Friday agreement, which set in motion a peace process that in the past seven years has emboldened the people of Northern Ireland to stand up to the old power bases -- Protestant and Catholic -- that have perpetuated the cycle of violence.

The McCartney sisters' collective plea for justice may prove to be a defining moment in post-Good Friday Northern Ireland. Their act has unleashed a backlash against an increasingly undisciplined IRA, which many on both sides think has transformed into an organized crime operation that answers to no one.

The McCartney family's stand has shaken the political landscape in recent weeks in Northern Ireland, with hundreds of republican supporters joining them in a protest march last month demanding that the killers turn themselves in.

With Sinn Fein under enormous political pressure to respond to their demand for justice, it invited the sisters to attend the Dublin conference, where they were welcomed by delegates and visitors with a standing ovation.

In his speech to the gathering, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams vowed, ''I am not letting this issue go until those who have sullied the republican cause are made to account for their actions."

But family members are not waiting for politicians' promises. They are leafleting their neighborhood to urge eyewitnesses to come forward to help police. One of the sisters said she even jammed a leaflet in the mail slot of the IRA man that the family is convinced did the killing.

The man, Gerard ''Jock" Davison, was detained by police for questioning last month. According to reports in the republican press in Belfast, he was expelled from the IRA along with two others over the killing. Davison has been quoted denying he ordered the killing. He was released by police after several days. Police say that without witnesses, they have insufficient grounds to charge him.

The McCartney family's courage to demand justice has put intense pressure on Sinn Fein.

The party was already strained by a storm of media and political criticism directed at a $50 million bank heist before Christmas that British and Irish politicians and police have said was carried out by the IRA with the knowledge of Sinn Fein's senior leadership.

Adams announced Thursday that the party would suspend seven of its members who allegedly witnessed or took place in the killing and the ''cleaning" of the crime scene -- an IRA practice of wiping fingerprints, destroying security surveillance cameras, and issuing death threats to silence witnesses.

What angers the family most is that Robert McCartney, who they describe as a gentle giant, was a Sinn Fein voter. The huge crowd at his funeral attested to his popularity in the republican Short Strand.

In the 30-year sectarian conflict known as The Troubles, the Short Strand has been a volatile area where a small community of Catholics lives surrounded by a larger Protestant neighborhood in which Loyalist paramilitary groups have long ruled the streets through intimidation and fear.

In Catholic sections like Short Strand, where the McCartneys have lived for more than four generations, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or RUC, was almost completely Protestant and viewed with great suspicion by Catholics who saw it as an extension of Protestant power. So in these areas, Catholics grew to rely on the force of the IRA to protect them and to mete out rough justice.

Under the Good Friday accord, the old RUC was renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and internal overhauls sought to make it more responsive and representative. And under the agreement, paramilitary groups, like the IRA, were to stand down and decommission their weapons.

For the McCartney family to call on witnesses to go to the Police Service of Northern Ireland reflects what observers say is a growing trust of and need for the PSNI in Catholic areas.

The threat the McCartney family faces for taking this stand became chillingly apparent Friday afternoon. Two police knocked on the door and reported that an anonymous call to a local newspaper had said that a bomb was planted in the house. Police searched the house and left.

''It's a pathetic attempt to silence us," Paula said. ''What the IRA is saying is, 'If you speak out, we will kill you.' . . . They are completely out of control."

The sense of an IRA out of control was in the air on the night of Jan. 30. According to family members who have collected witnesses' accounts and been in close touch with the police, McCartney and a friend, Brendan Devine, walked into a Belfast bar and were having drinks. Several women nearby said they were offended by their language. The women were accompanied by several purported IRA men, including Davison.

McCartney apologized. But the situation escalated. Davison allegedly attacked Devine and when McCartney tried to intervene, the mob of IRA men turned on him. Both were repeatedly stabbed, their throats and chests cut open, and they were left for dead. Devine lived. McCartney was dead on arrival at the hospital.

''In the past, this kind of violence could be attributed to the conflict . . . but not any more. There is no conflict now, and this is a civilian killing of an innocent man," Paula said.

The McCartneys, a tough, intelligent, and outraged band of sisters, have become almost folk heroes in Belfast. Paula, a mother of five, has recently returned to college for a degree in women's studies; Gemma, 41, is a nurse; Donna, 38, runs a restaurant; Catherine, 36, is a history teacher; Claire, 26, is a teacher's assistant. They have 20 children among them.

For the sisters, the movement they started is a women's movement. ''Yes, absolutely this is about women standing up," Paula McCartney said.

''The men tend to huff and puff and the egos come into play, and it goes round and round, and it always ends in more violence. . . . But we want real justice, not more violence. And for that we are willing to stay focused and be patient."