Member's statement: Garvaghy Road: Remembering Those Who Died
Member's statement by Mr John O'Dowd on .
- MLA
- Mr John O'Dowd
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 5 October 2026
- Type
- Member's statement (made as a minister)
- Business
- Members' Statements
- Heading
- Garvaghy Road: Remembering Those Who Died
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5773886
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I place on the record of the Assembly the names of those who have died as a result of the demand by the few to march down the Garvaghy Road over the past 30 years to ensure that they are remembered: Michael McGoldrick, a young father and taxi driver, murdered as a birthday present for LVF leader Billy Wright; Dermot McShane; Darren Murray, a 12-year-old boy knocked down after being chased by young loyalists; Robert Hamill, whose name has been heard before in the Chamber, kicked to death in Portadown town centre; Sean Brown, a GAA leader murdered in Bellaghy, whose family continues to demand truth and justice; Gregory Taylor; Bernadette Martin, barely 18 years of age, shot dead in her bed beside her Protestant boyfriend; James Morgan, 16 years of age, snatched from the roadside, butchered and thrown into a cattle pit; Gerry Devlin; Seamus Dillon, shot at his place of work; Philip Allen and Damien Trainor, Catholic and Protestant friends shot dead in Poyntzpass; Adrian Lamph, from Garvaghy Road, shot dead at his council yard workplace; Ciaran Heffron; and Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, children burned to death in their beds. At the time, there were those who tried to blacken their family's name by accusing them of being involved in drug dealing. More recently, a similar attempt has been made. Those children were murdered for no reason other than that their mother was a Catholic. There was Frank O’Reilly; Brian Service; Rosemary Nelson, the legal representative of the people of the Garvaghy Road, murdered when a booby trap bomb was placed under her car; and, finally, Elizabeth O'Neill, who was killed in her home by a blast bomb. What was her crime? She was a Protestant woman married to a Catholic. All those names are part of the dreadful, awful history of the campaign to force a supremacist march through an area where it is not wanted. I appeal once again to those who have influence over the Orange Order and other sections of society to bring this to an end. The history of that march is awful, steeped in violence and murder, and inflicting it on the community again is wrong. I will end with this: a young mother stopped me the other night —
— and said that she woke on Friday morning in tears.
Let us not have that repeated.
396 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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