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Nicole's
Travelogues and Budget Travel Tips..
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BELFAST (CONT.), IRELAND
We then headed to the Milltown Cemetery but we didn't have time to drive in and hear about the history. We really wanted to visit the cemetary, so we arranged a visit while it was open on our second visit to Falls Road area during the week.
However, it was soon discovered that Ulster Defense Association member, Michael Stone, had infiltrated the crowd in an attempt to eliminate the republican leadership with several hand grenades and two pistols. Stone killed three people, including IRA member Kevin Brady, who had attempted to disarm him. Stone made his escape towards the motorway continuing to fire his pistols and throw hand grenades at his pursuers. Stone made it as far as the M1 motorway, but was caught by the crowd, who began beating him and shouting that they would kill him. He was eventually put in the back of a car and was being driven away to be shot by the IRA, when the car was intercepted by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who arrested him. The final toll was three dead and upwards of sixty injured.
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Michael Stone is most famous for the Milltown Massacre in 1988 where he attended the funeral of three Irish Republican Army members, who were killed, while on active service, by the British Army in Gibraltar and attacked the crowd with grenades and a pistol. He killed three people - one of them an IRA volunteer - and injured sixty others before he was arrested. The attack was caught on television cameras and provided some of the most savage images of the conflict. Stone, who apparently objected to the newspaper's portrayal of him as a mad Rambo-style gunman, also confessed to shooting dead three other Catholics between 1984 and 1987. He claimed the victims were linked to the IRA, but none of them were. Convicted of six murders, he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation he serve at least thirty years. On July 24, 2000, Stone was released from prison under the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998 that ruled that those convicted of terrorist crimes were to be set free. He now lives in East Belfast has adopted a lower profile in recent years, although in 2004 he published his autobiography 'None Shall Divide Us.'
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The other shop, Sinn Fein Poblachtach, was closed (poblachtach meaning republican), so we continued on the tour. Pat took us to Gerry Adams' house (current President of Sinn Fein) towards the end of a dead-end street. We thought to ourselves that Pat could just take us to any house and say it was Gerry Adams'. Though the house was the only one in the area that had a security camera mounted pointing to the door. 
We visited the Milltown Cemetery with Patrick. He drove us down through the cemetary to the area where Bobby Sands was burried. Milltown Cemetery is a Roman Catholic cemetery at 546 Falls Road across the street from a large RUC station. The Republic Plot has several high-profile IRA graves, including Bobby Sands, and Mairéad Farrell (killed by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988). A large green space marks the site of an unmarked grave for over 80,000 victims of the 1918 pandemic flu.
We walked down to the memorial for IRA volunteers and talked about the Milltown Massacre (
