A graveyard memorial erected to honour a Co Donegal-born RUC officer that was vandalised within weeks is now the centrepiece of an exhibition recalling the Troubles.
The deep gashes left by the angle grinder used to deface John Doherty’s marble headstone took time to inflict, but those who stole it from his grave at Castlefin St Mary’s Church in Co Donegal in 2023 had plenty of that.
The damaged headstone, along with a memorial quilt commemorating some of the Troubles’ dead, formed part of an exhibition at the Church of Ireland‘s Synod in Naas, Co Kildare, which finished on Saturday.
The headstone was erected on October 28th, 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of the killing by the IRA of Mr Doherty, a Catholic Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, as he came home to visit his mother at their home near Lifford.
‘Nobody knew things were going to get so bad’: Catholic RUC officer’s defaced headstone at centre of Troubles exhibition
Former Supreme Court judge Catherine McGuinness: ‘I would love to see a united Ireland before I die’
A former British army officer and author on former IRA members opening up to him: ‘Trust is a huge issue’
A numbers game: Why are there so few cross-Border romances?
Within days of being erected, it was stolen under cover of darkness. A month later, similarly in darkness, it reappeared with the inscription defaced, with the harp and shamrock symbol of the RUC bearing cut marks.
On the back, a text had been carefully chiselled: “Remember All The Victims of RUC Collusive Behaviour and loyalist Paramilitaries. RUC/PSNI Sectarian Police – Enforcing British Rule in Ireland. Not Welcome”.
The final line of the text on the back of the stone, which had been unveiled just weeks before in front of senior Garda and PSNI officers, had been filled in with the colours of the Irish Tricolour, with “Up The ‘Ra” written in green, white and orange.
“There’s a casual cruelty about that that, isn’t there? It’s dark. Death is always supposed to be sacrosanct in Ireland,” says the exhibition’s organiser, Kenny Donaldson, director of the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF).
Mr Doherty had joined the Metropolitan Police in London a few years before the Troubles erupted, but transferred to the RUC in late 1969 to be closer to his five brothers, six sisters and parents at their Ardnasool home.
His brother Terry, who served for more than 25 years in the Irish Army, said: “Nobody knew when he decided to come back that things were going to get so bad.”
He told of how the family’s home came under surveillance for nearly 18 months before his brother was killed, and his girlfriend wounded, as he turned his car on the narrow laneway on a Sunday evening. His mother rushed out to find him.
A man with no obvious reason to be in Ardnasool had travelled the quiet country road so often in the months beforehand that he was given a nickname – the name of a country music singer – by Mr Doherty’s siblings.
“John was a target for the IRA, but he loved getting home to see our mother. We always feared for him, but you always hope that trouble won’t come to your door,” Terry said.
His Catholic background had condemned him: “By killing him, the IRA frightened a lot of other Catholics from joining the RUC, or frightened those who were already in it to quit,” Terry added.
Nobody has been held responsible for the desecration. “The guards did their best, but there was no CCTV and these spineless individuals operated in darkness, as they always do,” Terry said.
The headstone and the memorial quilt were exhibited by the SEFF, which helps people on both sides of the Border who are suffering due to traumatic experiences caused by terrorism.
The quilt, the eighth completed so far, honours, among others, the Quinn children killed by a loyalist paramilitary firebomb in 1998, along with Ross and Ann Hearst, a father and daughter who were killed by the IRA three years apart.
The quilts are brought by SEFF before schools and groups to tell the stories of those who were lost and who were left behind, including places where people “may have perceived that we would have had difficulty, but that wasn’t the reality”, said Mr Donaldson.
Last year, the organisation went to Latton GAA club in Co Monaghan, the home club of the late Fine Gael senator Billy Fox, who was murdered by the IRA in March 1974 when some of its members raided his girlfriend’s house in Tircooney.
[ 50 years on: Murder of Senator Billy Fox is remembered by his then girlfriendOpens in new window ]
One of the earliest exhibitions took place in St Mary’s College in west Belfast a decade ago, where some of those who visited “struggled” when faced with emblems of Orange Lodges, GAA clubs, the RUC and the Irish Army on one quilt.
Mr Donaldson recalled one young woman’s initially negative reaction. “I said nothing and let her continue to look. Then, she worked it out. She said to me, ‘It’s because they’re all innocent, isn’t it?’.”
The quilts never knowingly commemorate anyone involved in the IRA, or other republican groups, or loyalist paramilitaries.
“And they won’t be,” Mr Donaldson added. “Those individuals signed up to a code which enabled them and empowered them to go out and to murder their neighbours. That’s the difference. There’s human choice.”
The checks are, he said, “easier to make in some cases than others”.
“Sometimes there is a challenge to doing so, but we have built an organisation on the basis of its safe space that it offers to victims and survivors.
“If we overnight were to introduce a perpetrator into that, it totally changes the dynamic of everything. Do I have, on a human level, sympathy for everyone killed? Absolutely, yes, I do,” he went on.
“These were young men or young women who were misguided, who were ideologically used by others. Often, they were the cannon fodder who went out and did what they did. But they are not innocents and cannot be classified as such.”
