13 February 1922: Four children and two women were killed by a bomb thrown into Weaver St Belfast by persons unknown but undoubtedly linked to to a Loyalist Terror Gang. 

 Ellen Johnstone (11) and Catherine Kennedy (15) died almost immediately; Elizabeth O’Hanlon (12) died the next day, and Rose-Anne McNeill (13) died on February 22nd. Many more suffered catastrophic injuries. Boys were injured too, as were adults. Two women subsequently died from their wounds, Maggie Smith (53) and Mary Owen (40). 

The city was in the grip of fear as hundreds of people on both sides were killed in sectarian attacks but an attack like this was unprecedented in its savagery as the perpetrators could have been in no doubt that the device they threw would land amongst innocent children.

‘On the evening of February 13th, 1922, just after 8.30pm, two suspicious looking men were spotted by residents of Weaver Street in north Belfast, a small Catholic enclave surrounded by Protestant districts. Despite it being mid-February, it was a crisp dry evening and children were playing on the street, boys with marbles, girls with a skipping rope tied to a lamp-post. Their parents watched them from their doorways.’

The following day, the Freeman’s Journal described the scenes at the Mater hospital: “When the wounded reached the hospital the entire staff was ready to receive them…Most of them had lost consciousness, but many were groaning and writhing in agony…Each child was carried into the hospital by the ambulance men, some of whom, hardened by contact with suffering, had been so moved by the scenes they had witnessed in Weaver Street, that they could ill repress the tears that welled into their eyes as they tenderly bore the groaning little ones into the building.”

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/why-don-t-we-remember-the-weaver-street-massacre-in-belfast-1.4797959

It was an atrocity that shocked the City and indeed the whole of Ireland. The inquest, before a jury and the City Coroner, James Graham, was heard on the 3rd March. The jury brought in a verdict that the deaths had been caused by a bomb ‘…wilfully thrown by some person unknown.’ The City Coroner then adjourned the inquest for two weeks and requested that the Minister for Home Affairs in the northern government, Dawson Bates hold an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Catherine Kennedy, Ellen Johnston, Eliza O’Hanlon and Rose Ann McNeill.

The northern government didn’t even discuss it at its next cabinet meeting (although it did discuss the site for a Stormont egg-laying competition). In a telegram to Michael Collins, Churchill (then Colonial Secretary) called it “…the worst thing to have happened in Ireland in the last three years“. Edward Carson wrote in his diary that there was no evidence the bomb was purposely thrown at the children. But his attitude was clear, as he wrote that even if it was it was only “…one among how many on the other side?“.

https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/awful-bomb-outrage-on-belfast-children/

In the aftermath of all this the lase Catholic residents of  Weaver St were forced to flee and the whole street no longer exists. Nothing remains to remind people today what happened there 101 years ago this night.