Serious Demonstrations In Belfast

Northern Advocate, 13 February 1940, Page 3

Serious Demonstrations In Belfast

LONDON, February 11. Armoured cars patrolled Belfast all night after street fighting in which thousands of demonstrators clashed with over 100 police. Other police and soldiers are scouring the country and combing out hideouts in County Down in an effort to discover arms stolen from Ballykinlar, which is just north of Dundrum Bay. A party of members of the Irish Republican Army with a motor car raided the Ballykinlar Camp. Sentry Gagged They sent in a scouting party of four men, who overpowered and gagged the sentry. The car then drove up, while the raiders broke into the armoury and stole Bren guns and 100 rifles. A rifleman named O’Neill, 19, surprised the intruders. They gagged him and bundled him into the car and took him to their secret headquarters in Belfast, but released him nine hours later. Fight Against Britain At Tipperary a speaker declared: “It is the British Government against whom we fight, for they partitioned our country.” At a meeting in Northern Ireland, those present heard read the last letter from Richards, one of the I.R.A. terrorists who was executed at Birmingham, to his sister. The doomed man wrote: “I have just been told I am to die in the morning. “I shall walk out smiling, thinking of God and of the good cause and the good men who have gone before fighting for the same cause.”