Joe McCann

In December 2016, two former British soldiers, known as Soldier A and Soldier C, were arrested and charged with murder. The trial commenced in Belfast April 2021. In May 2021, the trial collapsed and the two soldiers were acquitted. The judge found that the soldiers' statements given in 1972 to the Royal Military Police, on which the prosecution was based, were inadmissible because the statements were provided without the soldiers being under caution. The family are set to apply to the Attorney General to request an inquest.

In 2010, the Historical Enquiries Team investigation into the killing of Joe McCann found it was unjustified.

In 1997, a plaque was unveiled at the spot on Joy Street in the Markets where McCann was killed. Members of the various republican factions, the Workers' Party of Ireland (ex Official IRA), Sinn Féin (political wing of the Provisional IRA) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party (a splinter, along with the Irish National Liberation Army from the Official republican movement in 1974) were all in attendance.

In early February 1972, he was reported to be involved in the attempted assassination of Ulster Unionist politician and Northern Ireland Minister for Home Affairs John Taylor in Armagh City, outside the then Hibernian Bank on Russell Street. McCann and another gunman fired on Taylor's car with Thompson submachine guns, hitting him five times in the neck and head; he survived, though he was badly injured. In another incident McCann and another man were standing outside a Belfast cinema to purchase tickets for the film Soldier Blue when McCann spotted a British Army checkpoint.

McCann was killed on 15 April 1972 in Joy Street in The Markets by soldiers from the Parachute Regiment. He had returned to Belfast shortly before being killed and was at the top of the RUC Special Branch wanted list. He was told by the Official IRA Belfast command to return for his own safety to Dublin. However he ignored their requests and remained in Belfast.

McCann's funeral on 18 April 1972 was attended by thousands of mourners. A guard of honour was provided by 20 OIRA volunteers and a further 200 women followed carrying flowers and wreaths. Four MPs including Bernadette Devlin were also in attendance. Cathal Goulding the Official IRA Chief of Staff, provided the graveside oration in Milltown Cemetery. Goulding said:

Despite this hardline rhetoric, however, Goulding called a ceasefire just six weeks later, on 29 May 1972. One of the more surprising tributes to McCann came from Gusty Spence, leader of the Ulster Volunteer Force loyalist group. Spence wrote a letter of sympathy to McCann's widow, expressing his, "deepest and profoundest sympathy" on the death of her husband. "He was a soldier of the Republic and I a Volunteer of Ulster and we made no apology for being what we were or are...Joe once did me a good turn indirectly and I never forgot him for his humanity". This is thought to refer to an incident in which three UVF men wandered into the Lower Falls, were captured by OIRA men, but were released unharmed on McCann's orders.

On 9 August 1971, his unit took over the Inglis bakery in the Markets area, following the introduction of internment without trial by the Northern Ireland authorities. They defended it throughout the night from 600 British soldiers who were seeking to arrest paramilitary suspects. The action allowed other IRA members to slip out of the area and avoid arrest. He was photographed during the incident, holding an M1 carbine, against the background of a burning building and the Starry Plough flag.

McCann was appointed commander of the Official IRA Third Belfast Battalion. By 1970, violence in Northern Ireland had escalated to the point where British soldiers were deployed there in large numbers. From 3–5 July 1970, McCann was involved in gun battles during the Falls Curfew between the Official IRA and up to 3,000 British soldiers in the Lower Falls area that left four civilians dead from gunshot wounds, another killed after being hit by an armoured car and 60 injured. On 22 May 1971, the first British soldier reported to be killed by the Official IRA, Robert Bankier of the Royal Green Jackets was killed by a unit led by McCann. McCann's unit opened fire on a passing British mobile patrol near Cromac Square, hitting the patrol from both sides. He was the fourth British soldier to die on active service, and the seventh overall since the conflict began.

McCann was active in the IRA's involvement in the civil rights activism, protesting against the development of the Divis Flats. McCann became Officer Commanding of the IRA in the Markets, involved in housing issues and any matters which related to local government. In 1969, after sectarian rioting in Belfast, the IRA split into two factions: the newly created Provisional Irish Republican Army, traditionalist militarists, and the existing organisation, which became known as the Official IRA, Marxist-Leninist-oriented socialists. McCann sided with the Officials. His brothers Dennis, Patrick and Brian, also joined the OIRA.

In 1964 he was involved in a riot on Divis Street in Belfast in opposition to the threat from loyalist leader Ian Paisley to march on the area and remove an Irish tricolour flying over the election office of Billy McMillen. In 1965 he was arrested for the possession of bayonets with five other men. They served nine months in Crumlin Road jail. He had expressed an interest in the priesthood while a teenager. He joined the Third Order of Saint Francis in his later teens.

He was born in the Lower Falls area of Belfast, and spent most of his life there and in the nearby Markets area of the city. His mother died when he was four years old leaving, four children. His father remarried. He was educated at the Christian Brothers school on Barrack Street in Belfast, where he developed an interest in the Irish language. A bricklayer by trade, he joined the Fianna Éireann at age 14 and the IRA in the early 1960s.

McCann married Anne McKnight who hailed from a strong republican family in the Markets area in Belfast. Anne's older brother, Bobby, was part of the 1956–62 border campaign and was arrested and jailed, as well as later being interned. Anne's brother Seán sided with the Provisionals after the 1969 split, and went on to represent South Belfast for Sinn Féin.

Joe McCann (2 November 1947 – 15 April 1972) was an Irish republican paramilitary. A member of the Irish Republican Army and later the Official Irish Republican Army, he was active in politics from the early 1960s and participated in the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was shot dead during a confrontation with RUC Special Branch members and British paratroopers in 1972.