A bomber loyalists will find difficult to forgive and forget

If Seán Kelly is back in the IRA, Alan McBride will be deeply disappointed

If Seán Kelly is back in the IRA, Alan McBride will be deeply disappointed. Susan McKay reports on the controversy over the reimprisonment of a Shankill bomber.

Kelly murdered McBride's young wife, Sharon, and her father, Desmond Frizzell, when he bombed Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road in October 1993. Ten people died in the no-warning blast.

McBride campaigned for a Yes vote in the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement. "I didn't like the fact that the prisoners were going to be released," he said, yesterday. "But I knew I had to live with it for the sake of peace.

"I pushed hard for the agreement and invested a lot of emotion in it.

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"Kelly got his second chance. A lot of prisoners, republican and loyalist, have done great things in the community since they got out, but if he's gone back to terrorism, he deserves to be back in prison," he said. "The government needs to come clean, though. They need to say what they have on him. If the situation isn't transparent, Kelly can be presented by Sinn Féin as a kind of folk hero."

Kelly, who was given nine life sentences in 1995, was released just five years later, in July 2000. The judge at his trial described the Shankill bomb as "one of the most outrageous atrocities endured by the people of this province in the last quarter of a century".

Kelly and his accomplice, Thomas "Bootsie" Begley, had carried the powerful bomb into the shop on a Saturday afternoon, when the Shankill Road was, inevitably, packed with shoppers. It exploded almost immediately, killing Begley along with nine local people, and injuring nearly 60 others.

Unionists were outraged when Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams carried Begley's coffin. Republicans would have been outraged had he declined to do so.

Kelly, who was rearrested in Belfast on June 18th on the orders of the Northern Secretary Peter Hain, is a figure about whom feelings are just as polarised.

"It is a blatant injustice. Seán Kelly was a champion of the peace process," said Sinn Féin chairman Mitchel McLaughlin, who led a picket demanding his release in Derry last Saturday. The DUP MP whose constituency includes the Shankill, Nigel Dodds, said Kelly should "never have been let out in the first place".

The IRA claimed the Shankill bomb was intended to kill loyalist paramilitary leaders who had been using rooms above the shop for meetings. In republican circles, the bombers were regarded as having shown great courage in attempting to do this.

Shankill man Raymond Elliott was one of those who, in the immediate aftermath of the bomb, dug with their bare hands in the rubble to find the dead and the injured.

"It haunts me yet," he said. ... "I am still seeing a psychiatrist every six weeks. Kelly should never have got out. I wouldn't be responsible for my actions if I met him. I wish he could see what he did. These do-gooders who talk about forgive and forget. I'll never forget what I saw that day."

Relatives of the victims claimed Kelly sneered at them as he was led from court to begin his sentence.

Weeks later he wrote to a nationalist newspaper reiterating the IRA's claim that the bomb was intended to kill UDA men.

"I deeply regret the loss of innocent life," he said.

Michelle Williamson, whose parents, George and Gillian, were among those murdered, was devastated when she learned Kelly was to get Christmas parole in 1998. She handcuffed herself to the prisoners' exit at the Maze prison in an attempt to confront him.

In a letter to Kelly, Williamson said he had shown no mercy, and she believed he was without remorse. She said she would never forgive him.

"You are like a disease in my bones and the only cure is justice," she wrote. "To say I hate you does not begin to describe how I feel about you."

She campaigned to have Kelly kept in prison, but stopped because of the destructive effect it was having on her own health and well-being.

Since his release in 2000, Kelly has been a ubiquitous figure at Sinn Féin events as well as at riots involving republican youth. Unlike other notorious IRA ex-prisoners, including the Brighton bomber, Patrick Magee, he has not given interviews about his past. Nor has he publicly discussed his views on the peace process. When approached by journalists, he has walked away. "Different strokes," said McLaughlin.

"Seán demonstrated his commitment to peace on the streets as part of a team of stewards at contentious parades. He has been lifted because he is a hate figure to unionists and this has been done to appease them."

Unionists regard Kelly's presence during riots in north Belfast as evidence that he was a trouble-maker. Sinn Féin's Free Seán Kelly leaflet has a quotation from a PSNI chief inspector on its cover, regarding Kelly's role in a riot in June.

"There is nothing to suggest he was breaking the law. No further investigations are being pursued," he is quoted as saying, five days before Kelly was rearrested.

The PSNI has since stated that these comments related solely to Kelly's role in street disturbances. The leaflet is illustrated by a photo of Kelly as a family man, holding a baby and with his small children beside him.

Alan McBride reckons Sinn Féin should use "a bit of savvy" in relation to Kelly. "Given his profile, maybe appearing at interface riots isn't the best use of him," he said.

McBride said it would give him "no satisfaction" if Kelly was found to have re-engaged with the IRA. "It would prove to me that the peace isn't working," he said.