Top of the Hill bar shooting


On 20 December 1972, during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles, a mass shooting took place at the Top of the Hill bar in a small Catholic enclave of the majority Protestant Waterside area of Derry. Five civilians were shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries from a unit of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, which is a part of the Ulster Defence Association. The shooting is also known locally as the "Annie's Bar massacre".

Background

The UDA was formed in September 1971 during one of the most violent phases of the Troubles, immediately after internment without trial was introduced, when a number of Loyalist Defense groups combined. They formed a paramilitary wing, the UFF, in 1972 so that the organisation could use the UFF name to carry out violent acts and kill people while the UDA itself remained uninvolved in the attacks and thus legal. The UDA/UFF claimed to be combating the Provisional IRA, but the overwhelming majority of its victims were Catholic civilians.
The UDA carried out its first killing on 20 April 1972, shooting 22-year-old taxi driver Gerard Donnelly in Ardoyne, Belfast. In October, the group was responsible for the deaths of two small girls, aged 4 and 6, when they detonated a car bomb outside an Irish nationalist pub in Sailortown, Belfast.

The shooting

On 20 December 1972, the Top of the Hill bar along the Strabane Old Road was packed with customers watching a football match. At about 10:30 pm two men from the UDA burst into the bar, one carrying a Sterling submachine gun and the other holding a pistol. Both were wearing hoods to disguise their identities. The men instantly and indiscriminately sprayed the main room in the bar with bullets. The attack was reported to have lasted less than a minute, but five people were killed and four others wounded. Those killed in the attack were all males: Charlie McCafferty, Frank McCarron, Charles Moore, Barney Kelly and Michael McGinley.
At the time this was the largest and most deadly attack carried out by the UDA; they did not carry out another attack of this size until February 1992, when they shot dead five civilians and injured nine in the Sean Graham bookmakers' shooting on the Lower Ormeau Road, Belfast.
1972 in Derry began with Bloody Sunday in the Bogside and ended with the Top of the Hill shooting. Nobody was ever charged in connection to the Top of the Hill bar murders, although in recent years relatives of those murdered have been calling for a fresh investigation.