Emma Groves - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Emma Groves was a leading campaigner for banning the use of plastic bullet

Plastic bullet

A plastic bullet or plastic baton round is a non-lethal projectile fired from a specialised gun. Although designed as a non-lethal weapon they have still caused several deaths. They are generally used for riot control...

s and a co-founder of the United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets

United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets

United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets is an organization based in Belfast, Northern Ireland that opposes the use of plastic bullets by the British army and police....

. She began her campaign after she was blinded from being struck in the face by a rubber bullet

Rubber bullet

Rubber bullets are rubber or rubber-coated projectiles that can be fired from either standard firearms or dedicated riot guns. They are intended to be a non-lethal alternative to metal projectiles...

in 1971.

Shooting incident

Groves was Belfast

Belfast

Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...

mother of 11 children. At 9 a.m. on 4 November 1971, aged 51, she was standing at her living room window during British Army

Operation Banner

Operation Banner was the operational name for the British Armed Forces' operation in Northern Ireland from August 1969 to July 2007. It was initially deployed at the request of the Unionist government of Northern Ireland to support the Royal Ulster Constabulary . After the 1998 Belfast Agreement,...

searches on her neighbours' houses. As a mark of defiance Emma turned on her record player and placed the ballad Four Green Fields

Four Green Fields

Four Green Fields is a 1967 folk song by Irish musician Tommy Makem, described in the New York Times as a "hallowed Irish leave-us-alone-with-our-beauty ballad." Of Makem's many compositions, it has become the most familiar, and is part of the common repertoire of Irish folk musicians.-Content and...

on her record player and turned up the volume.

As she turned back to the window, a soldier, at a distance of about eight yards, shot a rubber bullet through the window hitting her in the face. As a result, she lost her sight in both eyes. A doctor at the hospital who was removing Emma's eyes approached Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was visiting Belfast at the time, to break the news to Emma that her eyesight was gone. Years later, she was offered £35,000 compensation, which was seen at the time as a de facto admission by the Army, although the soldier involved was never charged.

Campaign to ban plastic bullets

Year	Rubber bullets	Plastic bullets
Numbers of rubber and plastic bullets fired in Northern Ireland 1970-1981
1970	238
1971	16,752
1972	23,363
1973	12,724	42
1974	2,612	216
1975	145	3,556
1976		3,464
1977		1,490
1978		1,734
1979		1,271
1980		1,231
1981		29,665
Total	55,834	42,669
Total rubber and plastic bullets 98,503

Emma Groves campaigned for thirty years for the banning of plastic bullets. Groves and Clara Reilly founded the United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets

United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets

United Campaign Against Plastic Bullets is an organization based in Belfast, Northern Ireland that opposes the use of plastic bullets by the British army and police....

after the killing of John Downes in August 1984. The aim of the organisation was to bring together the families bereaved or injured by rubber and plastic bullets. They also compiled information on the statistics relating to usage of plastic bullets in Northern Ireland.

In 1976, rubber bullets were replaced by plastic bullets. Up until that time they had caused the death of one person and the wounding of a further seventy. The new bullets were solid PVC cylinders, 4 inches long and 1.5 inches in diameter. Their weight was nearly 5 ounces and they were fired at up to 170 miles per hour.

They were presented as a more secure and less dangerous means of crowd control, despite that their use was prohibited in Great Britain as they were deemed ‘a danger to the civilian population’. Despite this, Groves said they were used "unsparingly in Northern Ireland."

In 1981, during the hunger strikes

1981 Irish hunger strike

The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest during The Troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners...

, large numbers of people took to the streets to show their solidarity with the prisoners. The greatest number of plastic bullets fired was between May and August 1981, the same period in which Bobby Sands

Bobby Sands

Robert Gerard "Bobby" Sands was an Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and member of the United Kingdom Parliament who died on hunger strike while imprisoned in HM Prison Maze....

and the other nine prisoners died on hunger strike.

It was during those years, that the vast majority of fatalities of plastic bullets were children between the ages of ten and fifteen. In October 1976 Brian Stewart, 13 years old, was killed in Belfast by a plastic bullet. He was shot in the face by a British soldier. Paul Whitters, aged 15, from Derry

Derry

Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland and the fourth-biggest city on the island of Ireland. The name Derry is an anglicisation of the Irish name Doire or Doire Cholmcille meaning "oak-wood of Colmcille"...

, died in April 1981 as the result of a bullet to the head fired by an RUC policeman. Again in Belfast, 12 year-old Carol Ann Kelly was fatally shot on her way home after buying milk, in May 1981.

It was at this point that Groves decided to do something and to have those "deadly bullets banned". In 1982, she learned that the bullets were manufactured by an American company. So she went to the US along with her daughter and an 18-year-old youth from Derry who had "lost an eye and had his face disfigured". She managed to arrange a meeting in New York with the manager of the company who manufactured them. After their talk she said "the company stopped producing the bullets."

In April 1982, another boy (Stephen McConomy, aged eleven) died as a result of shot to the head fired by a British soldier. Commenting on this, Groves said, "When you start killing the children, you inflict the deepest wound of all on a country." In 1982, at the request of the government in Dublin, the European Parliament

European Parliament

The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...

banned plastic bullets throughout the European Union. However, the British government ignored the ban.

With other members of the United Campaign she spoke of her experience at public meetings throughout Ireland. They then decided to take their campaign abroad. They were invited to Holland, Belgium, Norway, Italy, Sweden and Germany. Groves herself went to the US on two occasions.
The Campaign then discovered that a Scottish factory, the Bronx Fireworks Company, was manufacturing plastic bullets, and for four years a group from the United Campaign went over to Scotland to picket the factory gates. Later the factory stopped making the bullets. There were, according to Groves, at the time still a number of factories producing the bullets but "the British authorities keep their names secret". The Campaign then began focusing its efforts on a London-based company, Astra Holdings, who it hoped would stop manufacturing the bullets.

John Downes was shot dead during a street disturbance. Groves, in an interview with Silvia Calamati recorded in Belfast in August 1990, said,

After John Downes, two more youths were killed by plastic bullets: Keith White, a twenty-two-year-old from Portadown (1986) and Seamus Duffy, aged fifteen, from Belfast (1989). She concluded her interview by saying, "The victims of plastic bullets are always offered large sums of money as compensation. I have always refused this money as have other family members of the victims. We do not want money. What we do want is justice."

Emma Groves died April 2, 2007.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Shooting incident

Campaign to ban plastic bullets

Further reading

External links