Remembering those killed in the Troubles who devoted their lives to saving others
JOHN CROWN, Sunday Independent, November 16th, 2025
Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a leading cancer specialist, was murdered by the IRA, and so were many nurses, writes John Crown.
Each one of the approximately 3,600 deaths that occurred as a result of the Troubles was a tragedy for the individual concerned and for their families and communities. Some, however, struck a loud chord that resonated farther afield and, in some cases, echoed around the world. The anniversaries of two such deaths occurred recently.
October 23 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a leading British cancer specialist and researcher who was the only medical doctor to die in the conflict. He was killed by a bomb that exploded near his house in London while he was walking his dog in October, 1975.
Aged 45, he was the first ever university professor of medical oncology in the UK. Historically, the treatment of cancer had been reserved for surgeons and for doctors who treated cancer with radiotherapy, a speciality we now call radiation oncology.
At the time, the concept of treating cancer with drugs was a new and radical idea, and the need for a separate speciality, medical oncology, was not universally recognised by those older, more established disciplines.
Britain was famously slow to adopt this model, and cancer survival rates there were generally recognised as being somewhat disappointing.
Such cancer drug research that existed was then dominated by chemotherapy, a frequently toxic and usually only partially effective treatment.
Like most contemporary oncologists, Prof Hamilton Fairley did chemotherapy trials, but he soon realised the profound limitations of this approach. He became attracted to the idea of using the body's own immune system to try to combat cancer.
This was an early version of "immunotherapy”, a treatment that has evolved and improved over the decades and which has revolutionised modern cancer care. Prof Hamilton Fairley was trying to push the field in this direction at the time of his death.
His loss to oncology is widely recognised as being substantial.
Intended Victim
The intended victim of the IRA bomb that killed him was his neighbour, the Conservative MP Hugh Fraser. The Fraser family had a teenage house guest at the time, one who might well have been killed herself if the bomb had gone off as intended as the Frasers got into their car.
That house guest was Caroline Kennedy, daughter of assassinated US president John F Kennedy, a young woman who went on to serve as US ambassador to Prof Hamilton Fairley's native Australia and who is the mother of a leading political hopeful of the Democratic party in the US.
Prof Hamilton Fairley left a widow (still alive) and four children, who have in turn gone on to make major contributions to healthcare, including cancer research.
Gordon Hamilton Fairley mentored and educated many of the leadership generation of British oncology, and his legacy survives through the people whose careers he inspired. Two of them, Tim Oliver and Ray Powles, who went on to have influential research careers themselves, are interviewed in my podcast, Second Opinions with John Crown.
The memorial plaque to Prof Hamilton Fairley states "what matters is not how a man dies, but how he lives”.
For many years, the major award at the European Society of Medical Oncology, presented annually to a leading European cancer researcher, was called the Gordon Hamilton Fairley Award.
Sadly, that award no longer specifically memorialises him, which I think is a shame. I'm not sure if it had something to do with Brexit.
Another very sad anniversary also occurs around this time of year. Marie Wilson was a young nurse who was killed in the Enniskillen bombing on Remembrance Day in 1987.
The circumstances of her death were particularly poignant.
Her father, Gordon Wilson, was also caught up in the blast, and as they lay in the rubble awaiting rescue, Marie's last words were: "Daddy, I love you very much.”
Gordon Wilson, an "extraordinary religious man” and "a devout Christian” in the words of the great journalist Eamonn Mallie, became a symbol of forgiveness when in an interview soon after his daughter's death he forgave the bombers and then worked for reconciliation.
He met leading members of the IRA in an attempt to persuade them to give up their violent campaign. He felt a great sense of despondency when they refused to do so. He was subsequently appointed to Seanad Éireann.
Other nurses who died
Other health workers died. Two retired nurses were victims of the same bomb that killed Marie Wilson. Georgina Quenton and Jessie Johnston had both worked in Enniskillen hospital.
Nurse Mary Grimes died in the Omagh bombing, along with her pregnant daughter and granddaughter.
Another nurse, Mary Doherty, was shot and killed at a British army checkpoint.
Gerald Tucker was a hospital porter and part-time UDR member. He was shot as he left work. Robin Shields was an ambulance dispatcher and former police reservist who was shot at his desk. Radiographer Janet Bereen was killed in the Abercorn bombing.
Why bring these painful memories up now?
Well, I had intended to do something to mark the anniversary of Prof Hamilton Fairley's death, but there was something else.
The Troubles were obviously hugely complex. People will look at them and come to different conclusions about the rights and wrongs. My own belief is that despite the undeniably repressive and sometimes murderous nature of the Northern Ireland state, the Provisional IRA campaign was completely unjustified.
Even acknowledging these differences of perspective, which we all in truth need to do, often through gritted teeth; and specifically recognising the fact that those who planted bombs on behalf of the IRA are viewed as freedom-fighting heroes by some, I still find it unfair that the man who oversaw the London bombings was feted and is annually commemorated and memorialised in parts of Ireland, while Gordon Hamilton Fairley is forgotten here. Remember him.
Nairac's army intel role casts shroud of silence in search for his body
SUZANNE BREEN, Sunday Life, November 16th, 2025
He remains eternally young. If Robert Nairac was alive today, he would be a white-haired 78-year-old.
Death means that, in our collective memory, he is frozen as a vigorous, striking-looking, twentysomething soldier.
Along with Brigadier Frank Kitson, he is one of two instantly recognisable names to have come from British Army ranks.
Nairac's story was told in a documentary on BBC Northern Ireland this week by journalist Darragh MacIntyre and director Alison Millar. They are a Bafta-winning team, and it's easy to see why.
It was a beautifully shot, haunting and evocative piece of work in which people from south Armagh, along with friends and former colleagues of the soldier, recounted their experiences of him.
Ex-IRA man Martin McAllister explained his quest to find the captain's remains. He is not someone scared of taking a stance, even if it's a solitary one.
He drew the wrath of the leadership due to his protest at the 1976 Kingsmill Massacre, in which 10 Protestant workmen were murdered.
McAllister wrote a letter expressing his disgust from Long Kesh, where he was serving a 10-year sentence. He was suspended from the republican movement and threatened with court martial by the IRA for doing so.
Unlike Kingsmill, Nairac's 1977 murder was unplanned. Abducted and savagely beaten, he was shot dead and secretly buried in Co Louth.
The IRA leadership was later furious at what it saw as a “wasted opportunity” to interrogate someone central to the intelligence world.
Nairac operated out of Bessbrook Mill as the liaison officer between the SAS and Special Branch. That role, combined with the long existing local code of omerta, has made the search for his remains exceedingly difficult.
INFORMER
When the IRA issued a statement in 1999 admitting nine disappearances, the names of Nairac and Crossmaglen men Charlie Armstrong and Gerard Evans were missing from the list.
In 2009, I was contacted, through a third party, by a member of the South Armagh Brigade who was one of a 12-strong unit which had killed Evans, an alleged informer. In a lock-up garage across the border, he recounted the fate of the young Crossmaglen man, last seen trying to hitch a lift home from a dance in Castleblaney in 1979.
“We held him for three days,” the republican said. “He confessed very quickly to being an informer. He wasn't tortured. He pleaded for mercy, he pleaded not to be killed, and then he said his prayers. He was shot once in the back of the head.
“I don't see why the IRA in other areas can admit disappearing people but South Armagh can't. There's an attitude (of) 'We won't admit anything until hell freezes over'.”
The IRA man told me Evans was buried in bogland two miles from Hackballscross, and gave me a map.
Wearing a balaclava, he was ultra-nervous despite the peace process. “If it got out I was speaking to you, I'd be dead,” he said.
I passed the map and the details onto the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains. Evans' body was found in November 2010 based on that information.
Charlie Armstrong's body had been discovered four months earlier.
MORE CHALLENGING
A dig for Nairac last year was unsuccessful. Securing information about where he lies is more challenging than the two other cases.
There have been persistent but unproven claims that he colluded with loyalist agents. His specific Army role has meant less information has been forthcoming.
“Those who hope the bodies of the other Disappeared, like Gerard Evans and Charlie Armstrong, are found don't care about Nairac,” a South Armagh republican told me in 2009.
He said the captain wasn't “an ordinary young soldier deserving compassion who found himself in unfortunate circumstances” but “a member of the British intelligence services suspected of involvement in several murders”.
Such thinking still prevails among many living along the border. Nairac's friends and family live in hope that his remains will be found, but nearly half-a-century after his disappearance, the odds are surely stacked against that outcome.
Willie Frazer tried to dupe UTV with dodgy dossier linking innocent Catholics to republican terrorists
IVAN LITTLE, Sunday Life, November 16th, 2025
HOW LOYALIST TRIED TO SMEAR INNOCENT BROTHER OF UVF VICTIMS
Disgraced victims campaigner Willie Frazer tried to dupe UTV with a fake dossier linking innocent Catholics to republican terrorists.
The loyalist also gave DUP leader Ian Paisley the files that he used to make bogus claims under parliamentary privilege about the involvement in IRA terrorism of Eugene Reavey and 19 other men in south Armagh.
Mr Reavey's three brothers — Anthony, John Martin and Brian — were killed in a loyalist gun attack at their family home in Whitecross in January 1976.
The next day, republicans shot dead 10 Protestant workmen at Kingsmill.
On January 27, 1999, Paisley said under parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons that a police dossier he had obtained linked the Reaveys' brother Eugene to the Kingsmill massacre.
The then RUC Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan quickly dismissed the document as a forgery and said Eugene Reavey was an innocent man.
Forged
In Eugene Reavey's new book, The Killing of the Reavey Brothers, he tells of his anger at the DUP leader's allegations and how he challenged him to repeat them outside the House, where he would take legal action against him.
The North Antrim MP never retracted his allegations or apologised for them.
At the book launch, PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher also dismissed the allegations, saying: “Eugene Reavey is entirely innocent.”
Mr Reavey wrote that he believed Frazer “persuaded” Paisley to make his statement at Westminster and said that then deputy DUP leader Peter Robinson once appeared to agree that the founder of Families Acting for Innocent Relatives was the source of the dossier.
I can now reveal that several days before Paisley's statement in Westminster, Frazer tried to get UTV to broadcast the claims in the document which he presented to me as a security forces' intelligence dossier.
However, as well as the obvious libel considerations, the files appeared to have a number of inconsistencies and UTV didn't report on any of its claims.
I don't know if Frazer had been given the intel by rogue police officers or soldiers, but he was at pains to insist that it was genuine and dismissed suggestions it was a forged paper that he had a hand in producing.
After UTV's refusal to broadcast its contents, Frazer hinted that he would then let Paisley see the files. On January 26, I approached the DUP about whether or not their leader was going, as I suspected, to use parliamentary privilege to reveal names in Westminster.
Boasted
My diary entry for the day said that the party “gave me the runaround”. But the next day Paisley was indeed on his feet in the House of Commons to read chapter and verse from the files, which caused widespread controversy.
In his book, Eugene Reavey refers to reports that Frazer boasted that he had driven the getaway car for the killers after the Reavey slayings.
He wrote that he didn't know whether to believe Frazer “because Willie was a notorious liar and fantasist and was only 15” at the time of the Reavey killings. A Frazer family statement later refuted the claim that he had been involved in the murders.
Eugene Reavey's book also referred to a BBC documentary in which Frazer admitted not long before his death in June 2019 that he had supplied guns to loyalists which had been used in multiple murders across Northern Ireland.
A survivor still suffering 38 years on
IVAN LITTLE, Sunday Life, November 16th, 2025
They say time is a great healer, but I dare say the man I've been hearing about over the last few days wouldn't agree.
The survivor of one of Northern Ireland's most shocking outrages has been living a 38-year nightmare triggered by a split second of terror.
He was in Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday in November 1987, and has told relatives the memories and trauma of that grim morning still haunt him every day — and he's not alone.
Wounds
I know many victims and survivors of the Troubles from both sides of the divide who have found the healing process anything but quick or easy.
Thousands suffered grievously as a result of the conflict, and some still find it impossible to recover from their wounds, be they physical or mental, or from the loss of loved ones.
Many have had to cope completely on their own, and have done so in silence because they had no alternative and wouldn't have known where to turn anyway.
So, I'm grateful that a reader responded to my reflections last week on the legacy of Enniskillen and has eloquently captured the often forgotten, or deliberately ignored, reality of the suffering.
His words will no doubt resonate with others in similar positions.
The reader got in touch to echo much of what I wrote and to share his thoughts and those of his relatives about the Poppy Day massacre, when a no-warning IRA bomb killed 11 people and injured more than 60, claiming the life of another victim 13 years later.
I agreed not to name the reader or give anything away about his or his family, and he gave me permission to pass to write about his feelings.
He said his relatives in Enniskillen that day were “young men who are no longer young men (and) who have mostly been forgotten about”.
Referring to one family member in particular, he said: “What he witnessed that day, no human should have to witness. The memories have never left him.”
No psychological supports
The reader said no member of his family had received psychological support.
He claimed that was also the case for many members of the security forces on duty in Enniskillen that day: “They were just expected to carry on.”
He went on to describe how a photograph of the aftermath of the explosion in which his relative appeared and which was widely published brought the horrors “to the forefront” of his mind.
The man said the survivor tried to avoid the newspaper coverage of Enniskillen and its anniversaries, but social media posts were much harder to ignore and revived memories that, like the trauma, still haunt him.
The reader said he got in touch with this family member before the commemorations in Enniskillen last weekend to say he was thinking of him.
He said seeing the photograph of the devastation, and his relative in the middle of it, reminded him that people “ran into the aftermath of what the IRA did, in order to help anyone they could”.
While he wrote about Enniskillen, I've no doubt the innocent victims of other atrocities feel exactly the same.
Incidentally, another reader contacted me last week to ask if I believed Enniskillen was a turning point in the Troubles.
She said a reference to the town during the play The History of the Troubles (accordin' to my Da) seemed to suggest that was the case.
The indications are that the atrocity sickened many republicans and influenced the IRA to pursue peace.
The pity is that it took so long to turn those thoughts into action.
Audit of Sinn Féin property portfolio is still incomplete
MAEVE SHEEHAN, Irish Independent and Sunday Life, November 16th, 2025
An internal audit of Sinn Féin's property portfolio remains incomplete, amid ongoing confusion over how many buildings the party actually owns.
New transparency rules require political parties to declare all properties they directly or indirectly control to the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo).
However, Sinn Féin, the largest political property owner in Ireland, is unsure of the full extent of its holdings and has launched an internal audit to find out.
Former party financial controller Des Mackin previously claimed that Sinn Féin owned more than "40 and 50” constituency offices across Ireland.
Sinn Féin later said it owned 19 properties, yet the party declared only 12 in its most recent return to Sipo.
The audit comes amid a restructuring of the company that owns the Letterkenny constituency office used by local Sinn Féin TD Pádraig Mac Lochlainn.
The building on Letterkenny's High Street was bought for €180,000 in 2016, with funds raised by Sinn Féin supporters.
It is owned by a company called Donegal Office Services which is in turn owned by a local republican commemoration group, Drumboe/Tír Chonaill Commemoration Committee, according to Sinn Féin.
The party said that while it contributed to the cost of the property, it does not own the building and has not declared it to the ethics watchdog.
Numbers discrepancy
Company records filed in recent weeks show that Donegal Office Services has restructured and shares have been allocated to a number of local Sinn Féin members, including councillor Gerry McMonagle.
A Sinn Féin spokesperson said: "In recent weeks the company structure has been re-registered from a private company limited by shares to a company limited by guarantee. This did not change the ownership of the building,” the spokesperson said.
The restructuring protects members of the company from its liabilities.
Sipo has investigated a complaint that the Donegal constituency office was purchased with the help of foreign donations, against ethics rules. Sinn Féin has denied foreign donations were received.
Under current rules, political parties must declare all properties owned or controlled by the party or its subsidiaries that support or benefit the party.
The only exception applies to properties valued at under €40,000.
Sinn Féin has not explained why the party said it owned 19 properties two years ago, but has declared ownership of only 12 to Sipo — leaving the remaining properties unaccounted for: 77 North Street, Lurgan, Co Armagh; 1 Kilmorey Terrace, Newry, Co Down; 60 Irish Street, Dungannon, Co Tyrone; 64B Racecourse Road, Derry; 16 Upper John Street, Sligo; 21 Dublin Street, Monaghan; 39 College Street, Cavan; and 45A Flower Hill, Navan, Co Meath.
In its most recent financial statements, Sinn Féin acknowledged that the income and assets listed "do not reflect the entirety of the wider party structure”.
The party said it disclosed subsidiaries and properties in its financial statements in accordance with Sipo thresholds and guidelines and is conducting an "internal audit” of all properties and assets "potentially owned by party units”.
A spokesperson has confirmed that the property audit is still "ongoing”.
"Sinn Féin will ensure, in accordance with the legislation, that it continues to comply with those requirements in our externally audited accounts,” the spokesperson said.
