An Chloch Liath · Co. Derry
A village on the A2 the world learned the name of on Halloween night, 1993.
Greysteel is a small village on the A2 between Eglinton and Limavady - about 1,400 people in the 2021 census, a parade of houses, a couple of shops, a community hall, a GAA pitch, the Rising Sun Bar at the eastern end. The name comes from the Irish An Chloch Liath, the grey stone. On any ordinary day it is the kind of village you would drive through without noticing, glancing left at the Foyle and right at the Sperrin foothills.
What is not ordinary is the night of 30 October 1993. Just before ten that Saturday evening, three members of the Ulster Defence Association's North Antrim and Londonderry Brigade walked into the Rising Sun Bar, where about seventy people were at a Halloween party. Stephen Irwin shouted 'trick or treat' and opened fire with a Czech vz. 58 rifle. Geoffrey Deeney's handgun jammed. Torrens Knight stood at the door with a shotgun. Eight people died - six Catholics, two Protestants - and nineteen were wounded. The attack was loyalist retaliation for the Provisional IRA's Shankill Road bombing eight days earlier, which had killed nine civilians and one of the bombers. Greysteel was chosen, the trial heard, because it was a long way from the security activity around Belfast.
Karen Thompson was 19. James Moore was 81. Steven Mullan, Moira Duddy, Joseph McDermott, John Moyne, John Burns and Victor Montgomery were everything in between. The Rising Sun reopened. It is still a working pub. A memorial garden sits on the road outside with the names on it and the line 'May their sacrifice be our path to peace.' Annual services bring both communities together. None of this is closure. It is the village going on.
There is more to Greysteel than the worst night it ever had - Faughanvale parish back to the Plantation, the Grocers' Company manor that drew the early lines, a 1933 GAA club, the lough below and the forests above. But you cannot honestly write about this place without writing about 1993 first. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
