The creation of Northern Ireland was accompanied by violence both in defence of and against partition. During the conflict of 1920–22, the capital Belfast saw major communal violence, mainly between Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist civilians. More than 500 were killed and more than 10,000 became refugees, mostly Catholics. For the next fifty years, Northern Ireland had an unbroken series of Unionist Party governments. There was informal mutual segregation by both communities, and the Unionist governments were accused of discrimination against the Irish nationalist and Catholic minority. In the late 1960s, a campaign to end discrimination against Catholics and nationalists was opposed by loyalists, who saw it as a republican front. This unrest sparked the Troubles, a thirty-year conflict involving republican and loyalist paramilitaries and state forces, which claimed over 3,500 lives and injured 50,000 others. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was a major step in the peace process, including paramilitary disarmament and security normalisation, although sectarianism and segregation remain major social problems, and sporadic violence has continued. (Full article...)
In 1993, Yorkshire Television broadcast a programme The Hidden Hand: the Forgotten Massacre, and the narrator named McConnell as a member of one of the two UVF bomb teams that perpetrated three car bomb attacks in Dublin on 17 May 1974, which killed 26 people. The programme also linked him to British military intelligence and Captain Robert Nairac, stating that McConnell and key figures from the bombing unit were controlled before and after the bombings by Nairac. RUC Special Patrol Group (SPG) officer John Weir alleged that McConnell had been part of the UVF unit that shot leading Provisional IRA man John Francis Green to death in January 1975. Weir also alleged that McConnell had been one of the gunmen in the Reavey family shootings, as well as having had a key role in the bomb and gun attack against Donnelly's Bar the previous month. These were part of a series of sectarian attacks and killings that were carried out by the group of loyalist extremists known as the Glenanne gang, of which McConnell was a member. This gang comprised rogue elements of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the SPG, Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), and the UVF's Mid-Ulster Brigade, which from 1975 to the early 1990s was commanded by Robin "the Jackal" Jackson. Jackson was also implicated by the Hidden Hand in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and he was reportedly involved in the Green assassination. (Full article...)
... that despite being the first women's football team in Northern Ireland to sign players on professional contracts, Cliftonville Ladies F.C. were not the first club to register them?
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