April 1967: Shooting on Dunville Street

Who's pulling the strings?

On the 24th of April 1967, Sandie Shaw was number one in the UK charts with Puppet on a string. A line from that song has the lyrics “Just who's pulling the strings”, and coincidently, that was the question the police in Belfast were trying to answer...

That evening, a Catholic man was shot and seriously wounded on Dunville Street, on the Falls Road. The Belfast Telegraph interviewed residents at the time, with many giving accounts of what happened.

Miss Betty Keenan, whose shop was at the junction of three streets (including Dunville Street) said “I heard a very, very loud bang and saw people running. The bang sounded like a firework, but I didn’t go out to see as I didn’t think it was worthwhile”.

Another resident who was washing his car a short distance from the shop said that he had seen several men “hanging about”, and thought they were up to something.

A woman also stated that a little girl had come running up to her and said that she had seen a man running away and that he had a gun.

What made this incident intriguing is that the police had claimed that the shooting was the work of the IRA. However, a man who claimed to be a representative of the UVF contacted the Belfast Telegraph and refuted the notion that the IRA had been responsible for the shooting, but rather it was the work of four members of the Shankill Road division of the UVF.

In the infancy of the troubles, it wasn’t uncommon for there to be questions about who was responsible for particular incidents, which led to a more structured approach from the paramilitary groups where they laid claim to their attacks thereafter.