Outrage Over Monument to Killer

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Outrage Over Monument to Killer

October 4, 2007

By Barry McCaffrey

NATIONALISTS have lashed out after Unionist politicians voted to allow the erection of a memorial to a notorious Loyalist killer.

Unionist politicians on Craigavon Council in Armagh were criticized by Nationalists after they voted to allow a memorial bench to be placed in front of the grave of infamous Loyalist killer Mark “Swinger” Fulton.

Fulton, a former leader of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), committed suicide while being held at Maghaberry Prison in 2002 and is buried in a cemetery close to Craigavon.

Earlier this week Unionist politicians voted to allow the 47-year-old’s family to erect a memorial bench at his grave. Sinn Fein and SDLP councilors were overruled in their attempts to have the decision reversed.

SDLP councilor Dolores Kelly described the decision as an “obscenity.”

“They have now lost all moral authority in relation to memorials in general and indeed the needs of victims,” she said.

However, it was Fulton’s involvement in more than a dozen sectarian murders that has caused the most controversy.

He took over as leader of the LVF in December 1997 after its founder Billy “King Rat” Wright was murdered by the INLA, a Republican splinter group, inside the Maze prison.

Wright and Fulton had formed the LVF in 1996 after they had both been expelled from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) over the unsanctioned murder of a Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick. McGold-rick’s murder had been a “birthday present” for Wright.

Fulton was also said to have been involved in the murders of Catholic brothers Gerard and Rory Cairns, 22 and 18 respectively, at their home outside Porta-down in 1993.

Fulton and another gunman had sneaked in through the kitchen door of the family home during a birthday party for the brothers’ 11-year-old sister Roisin. Roisin Cairns mistakenly believed that the appearance of masked gunmen was part of a Halloween prank.

The gunmen went through to the living room and shot the brothers dead as they watched television.

Fulton was also quizzed about the murder of South Derry GAA club chairman Sean Brown, who was abducted and murdered while locking up clubrooms at his local Wolfe Tone GAA club in Bellaghy in Derry in 1997.

The notorious Loyalist had also been questioned about the murder of Terence McConville, 43, who was gunned down by loyalists at his Portadown home in March 1992. He had previously been implicated in the murders of workmen Dessie Rogers, Fergus Magee and John Lavery in Portadown in 1991.

Fulton had also been suspected of the murder of Catholic teenager Denis Carville, who was shot dead as he sat in a car with his girlfriend at a nature reserve near Portadown.

He was also blamed for the murder of Catholic father-of-five Patrick Boyle in June 1990.

He is also suspected of coordinating the murder of human rights solicitor Rosemary Nelson, who was killed in a car bombing outside her Lurgan home in March 1999.

Although Fulton had been in prison on the day of Nelson’s murder, it is known that he had been granted parole days before her death and had been in telephone contact with the actual killers from prison.

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