North Belfast priest Father Aidan Troy has appealed for an end to public protests following a family dispute over where a mother and her son, who both committed suicide within 15 months of each other, should be buried. Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, reports.
Over several nights during the past eight days between 400-600 people, the majority of them women, have been staging protests and holding prayer vigils at Portland Place in the New Lodge area of north Belfast, demanding that the son's body be exhumed so he can be reburied with his mother. A smaller group of around 200 protesters gathered last night at Portland Place.
On Monday night a section of the crowd broke away from the demonstration and attacked and caused damage to a flat in nearby Lancaster Street where the former wife of the man who committed suicide lives. She said that if she had been at home, the crowd would have killed her.
The entangled dispute came to a head in recent weeks after Mrs Mary Geraldine Cassidy (46), from Ardoyne Court in north Belfast, took her own life. In April 2003 her son Mark Catney also committed suicide. Family members said Mrs Cassidy was "devastated" by her son's death and that it was her dying wish to be buried with Mark.
Mr Catney had been briefly married to Ms Catherine McMahon from the New Lodge but, as Ms McMahon's sister Emily said yesterday, the couple encountered marital difficulties.
Ms Emily McMahon said that Mr Catney last year took his own life, having on at least one other occasion attempted to commit suicide.
Mr Catney was then buried in a plot belonging to his wife's family, which both families agree was the basis of this dispute.
The Cassidy family requested that Mr Catney be exhumed and buried with Mrs Cassidy.
The McMahons, according to Ms Emily McMahon, instead offered to have Mrs Cassidy buried with her son in the McMahon plot, but this was unacceptable to the Cassidys.
Word of this issue percolated through the community in Ardoyne, where the Cassidys are popular and held in high regard, local sources explained to The Irish Times. This in turn resulted in hundreds of people protesting outside the home of the McMahons in Portland Place. Father Troy was prevailed upon to try to resolve the dispute.
Earlier this week after a number of mediation meetings the McMahons agreed that Mr Catney's body could be exhumed and buried with his mother.
This satisfied the Cassidys, but it did not stop the protests. "The fact is that feelings were running so high that the feud took on a momentum of its own. It got to a stage where it was difficult to see how anybody could settle it," one well-placed local source said.
Ms Emily McMahon said she now believed that the protesters would only be satisfied if they forced her, her parents, her sister and the wider McMahon family out of north Belfast.
"We thought the understanding was - hand the body over and it would stop. But no, it has got worse," she told BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme yesterday.
Ms McMahon said she believed the family was being targeted because Mr Catney's former wife was "getting on with her life" and was in a new relationship with a man whom she had known before she met Mr Catney, and with whom she had a child seven years ago.
Ms Pat Mulvenna, sister of Mrs Cassidy and aunt of Mr Catney, told the BBC that it was clear that, in the nature of the failed relationship between Mark and Catherine McMahon, that Mark and his mother should be buried together.
She said that the Cassidys were in no way behind the protests and just wanted the issue of the burial resolved.
She was happy that the body was to be exhumed and hoped the protests would now end.
"I hope there will now be closure, and we will be able to grieve as a family," she said.
Father Troy also appealed to local people to end the protests. "I would hope that calm will be restored now that the issue of where Mark is to be buried is resolved, and if there are any other issues at the heart of this dispute, then the people should say what they are," he added.