The Five Demands

Shankill victims in Greysteel tribute (UTV)

Victims and families from the Shankill community in Belfast were among those paying respects on Wednesday to those killed in the Greysteel shootings exactly 20 years ago.

Eight people died and 11 were injured when UFF gunmen sprayed the Rising Sun Bar with 45 bullets on Saturday 30 October 1993.

One of the killers burst into the bar, where patrons were celebrating Halloween, armed with an assault rifle and shouted: “trick or treat!”

Two of those killed at the bar were in fact Protestant and one was from a mixed background.

The eight people who died were John Burns, Moira Duddy, Joe McDermott, Victor Montgomery, James Moore, John Moyne, Stephen Mullan, and Karen Thompson.

In the wake of the massacre, the UFF claimed that the shooting had been a revenge attack for nine Protestant people killed in an IRA bomb on the Shankill in west Belfast a week earlier.

The families of those killed in the blast had appealed for no retaliation.

And they paid their own tribute on Wednesday, as included among wreaths laid at a plaque remembering the Greysteel victims was one tribute labelled from the “victims and people of the Shankill”, adding “forever remembered”.

Also there to mark the anniversary was Mark Rodgers, whose father was killed at Kennedy Way council depot, another retaliation shooting by loyalists several days before the one in the Co Londonderry village.

In the week that followed the Shankill bomb, six other people – all Catholics – were also targeted and killed by loyalist paramilitaries before the Greysteel shooting was carried out.

At St Mary’s Star of the Sea Church in Greysteel, the priest conducting the memorial mass said the killers failed to drive a wedge between communities.

The service is followed by an interdenominational service near the Rising Sun to remember those who died there two decades ago.