Jim Gibney

Jim Gibney: I don’t have any Republican history at all in my family. And probably the way I would define my family would be Catholic, Orthodox Catholic family, and that’s how we were brought up, in a very strict faith, expected to do what Catholic families were expected to do in those days, which was attend church regularly. And fulfill your religious obligations. There were no politics discussed in my home as I grew up as a boy.

I was born in Roth … which is a predominantly Protestant housing estate on the outskirts of north Belfast. My friends would have been Protestant, grown up boys, of that age in the mid-to-late ’50s, early ’60s. And a sense of difference was around then and I would represent it this way. But boys being boys, we were adventurous and so bonfires would have been collected, for the Twelfth of July bonfire.

In ’69 was a year whenever I think my life began to slightly change. In that there were riots in different parts of Belfast. You were aware [of] those. The Short Strand, itself, began to become involved in a minor way in that young lads, including myself, used to be on the corner of the street, you know. At that stage, I remember my father would have been part of the defense of the area, and not that they were in any way armed. They would just stand at the corner of the streets watching for people who might throw petrol bombs at their homes. There weren’t any thrown at that time, but there was an atmosphere that there was a possible threat to the district. …

But never quite adding anything up in terms of my own, what am I going to do about it or anything like that. And it isn’t until I suppose June of 1970 –what is known in Republican history as the battle of St. Matthews. And I think that was the second significant event in the history of the early formation of the IRA, because the IRA and the local citizensdefense committees defend the Short Strand, on the 27th of June from sustained attack by the loyalists.