Thirty-two years after Henry Cunningham was killed in an ambush, his brothers hope the PSNI's Historical Enquiries Team can answer their questions, writes Susan McKay.
Henry Cunningham had a date on August 9th, 1973. He was to meet his girlfriend, Elizabeth Deery, at the Lilac Ballroom in Carndonagh near his home on the Inishowen Peninsula in Co Donegal. He was 16. He'd left school two years earlier to work as a plasterer. He and a team, which included several of his brothers, were working that summer on a site in Glengormley, outside Belfast.
He never made it to the dance. At 6.30pm that evening, the van in which the Co Donegal men were travelling home was ambushed on the M2 near Templepatrick, Co Antrim. Henry was shot dead.
Thirty-two years later, his older brother, Robert, breaks down in tears as he recounts the events of that terrible evening.
"Ninety-nine times out of 100, it would have been me sitting in the passenger seat," he says. "But I was to play in a country band that night so I was having a lie-down in the back. I always think I put Henry into my seat."
Thirty-two years after they made statements to the RUC, the Cunninghams now hope that PSNI's new Historical Enquiries Team will provide answers to some of the anguished questions that have haunted their lives.
There were six men in the Bedford van. Some days, there would have been 11. One of the other men received a serious facial injury. The others were splashed with blood. Another of the Cunningham brothers, Herbert, probably saved five lives when he managed to keep driving the van through the hail of bullets. A bullet grazed his arm.
"We passed a slipway and I saw three men up on the flyover ahead of us," he recalls. "Next thing, I heard a noise like a shower of hail and I could see the flames coming flying from their guns. Henry cried out: 'I'm hit' and he went very white and he fell down over me.
"I kept driving towards the gunmen. There didn't seem anything else to do. At the next flyover, there were two men in a car pulled over and they were leaning out, looking at us. I thought: 'Oh no, this is it.' I was out of my mind with fright. I was sure they were coming after us."
The tyres of the van were punctured and Herbert stopped soon afterwards. They tried to get passing motorists to stop, then headed across fields.
"We made our way to a house to get help. We had to leave Henry in the van. We knew he was dead."
That night, Robert and Herbert gave statements to the RUC in Co Antrim. Some of the family drove over to collect them. "We had to go home the long way: it was the anniversary of the binlids - what do you call it - internment, and there were riots in Toome."
The next day, they brought Henry home. Near Derry, a strange thing happened.
"A man on a motorbike cut in behind the hearse and in front of the car in which I was driving my father," said Robert. "He stayed there the whole way back to a few hundred yards from our home place, and then he stood and watched a while. Then he went off." They still don't know who that man was.
Henry's funeral was one of the biggest for many years in Carndonagh. "We're Presbyterians but there were Protestants in the van that night and Catholics too. We were always a mixed crowd and we still are and we always will be," says Robert. "We're nothing to do with Paisley's crowd, by the way." By Protestant, he means Church of Ireland.
The local priest did a collection and brought £100 to the bereaved family. The family never heard from the moderator or any senior figure in the Presbyterian church, and they are still hurt and angry about this.
"It's not as though there were many Donegal Presbyterians killed," says Herbert.
HENRY WAS, HIS brothers agree, a "happy-go-lucky sort of young fellow". The Cunninghams were a law-abiding, "good living" sort of family. There were eight boys and five girls. The youngest, Ruby, was 10 when Henry was murdered.
"My father was a small farmer and he also worked in the alcohol factory. He would always hire a car on Sunday to bring us to church," says Robert. "He was strict - if you came home from school and said the master strapped you, he'd say, well, it wasn't for doing your lessons."
In summer, the family would be "out to the hill to work at peats". The boys all left school to work as soon as they could.
Derry is less than an hour's drive from Carndonagh but, says Robert: "We never thought anything of the Troubles. We'd nothing against anybody. We had to work in the North because there was no work here."
The brothers had worked in Creggan in Derry when it was a no-go area for the security forces. "We had to go through the army checkpoints to get in, and the IRA used to be training across the road from us. The day the police came in, we went and sat down on the road in protest along with everybody else. You had to. I remember so well, the foreman said to us: 'You're wasting your time. This'll be going on for 25 years'." That was July 31st, 1972.
On January 1st 1973, the Troubles encroached on Inishowen when loyalists murdered a young Catholic couple at Burnfoot. The garda in charge of the case later criticised the RUC for failing to co-operate at the start of the investigation.
"People around here were really stunned by those murders," says Herbert. "Things were very bad at that time. But we never saw any danger. When the company we worked for moved to Glengormley, we went. We'd been working [ in Glengormley for] three months. If anybody had approached us and said: 'You shouldn't be here', we wouldn't have been there."
A month after the ambush, the family was called to Belfast for the inquest. Although they didn't know it, this indicated the police had decided that no one was likely to be charged with the murder.
"We were like dummies in the court," says Herbert. "We just sat there. We had no say."
An open verdict was returned. The compensation hearing was similar. "We sat in the canteen and someone came out and told us Herbert and I would get £300 each and Henry's funeral expenses," says Robert. "Nobody asked us our opinion. My parents were the kind of people [ who] wouldn't want a fuss. If they'd been told we were getting nothing, they'd have gone away."
And that was that. The RUC never contacted the family again. Nor did the Garda. Nor did the Irish government or any of its agencies.
"From the day Henry was killed it wasn't too long before my father took ill with his nerves. He never talked about it but he never got over it. He died not long after," says Herbert. "I took MS and my mother said to me: 'the day that Henry was killed was no help to you'."
The family had no idea who was responsible for the attack. "Ninety-nine per cent of the family thought it was the IRA, but we never blamed anyone or got bitter. I think my parents were afraid of bringing more trouble to our door."
Tragically, Henry's girlfriend was knocked down and killed by a car six weeks after his death. His mother died 10 years ago.
IN 2000, HERBERT was working in the Long Tower chapel in Derry. The priest had put the book Lost Lives on display. This tells the stories of all who died in the Troubles.
"I went up to the lectern and I opened it to check that Henry's name was there," Herbert says. "There it was printed that it was the UVF that murdered Henry. Nobody had ever told us that. The police must have known. We were dumbfounded. We didn't even know when we went there that Glengormley was a strong loyalist area."
Robert says the family now assumes the UVF just saw the Co Donegal registration and saw it as "just a matter of getting a wheen of Catholics". The Lost Lives revelation galvanised the family into an angry determination to find out more about the circumstances of their brother's murder, the inquiry into it, if there was any, and the way it seemed to have been so quickly forgotten by officialdom.
"We know we'll probably never get who did it," says Robert. "But we want to know at least was somebody looking about it at the time. Sometimes we feel we've let Henry down waiting so long. It is bad enough the RUC and the politicians in the North, but our own government seems to have done nothing at all, and they are duty bound. Henry was an Irish citizen."
The brothers heard about and visited the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry, where they learned that they were entitled to €15,000 from the Irish government's Remembrance Commission. They are full of praise for the centre. They also heard about the Historical Enquiries Team.
"We want to do something in memory of Henry," says Herbert.
"Henry's lost. It maddens us how we've been treated. We'd like to bring this to an end. We don't want to be dwelling on it for all time," says Robert.
"We have to let people know that even if the people who did it have forgotten about it, we haven't," says Herbert. "We want justice. My mother said to me one time: 'Murder is a thing that never lies - it'll come up some time'."
Murder mystery: in search of truth
The establishment of the Historical Enquiries Team was announced by the British government in March. It is a PSNI initiative, which has been given £24,500 million (€35,890) for six years.
It will review the 2,000 or so unsolved Troubles murders carried out between 1969 and 1998, when the Belfast Agreement was signed. The then Northern secretary, Paul Murphy, said its aim was to bring closure to the families of victims.
The team will be headed by a recently retired commander of the London Metropolitan police, Dave Cox, who took over the lead of the Stevens Inquiry when Hugh Orde left it to become chief constable of the PSNI.
As chief constable, Orde has overall control of the team, but he has stated that it will require a "substantial degree of independence". The team is still recruiting officers from the PSNI, other UK police forces and the Garda.
A "special cases" unit within the team will investigate murders allegedly carried out by members of the security forces, and murders in which there are allegations of collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. The unit won't include past members of the RUC or serving members of the PSNI.