THE funeral has taken place of Flo O’Riordan who passed away peacefully at home on Saturday, aged 87.
Flo was born in the Markets area in 1934 and met her husband Jack, a butcher, in Clonard Monastery in the 1950s.
She moved to West Belfast and worked with her sisters in the mills before becoming a market trader where she was known as 'Second-hand Rose'.
On 23 March 1972 her 13-year-old son Sean was shot dead by the British Army.
Speaking to the Andersonstown News in 1999, Flo said Sean and three friends were on their way to petrol bomb a nearby derelict house, thus preventing the British Army from using it as an observation post. The soldiers had been tipped off, however, and opened fire on the boys.
“He had only just left the house,” she said. “I knew he was a member of the Fianna and knew what he was going to do, but he never got to do it. When the shooting started I pulled a wee boy from the street into the house and I tried to get out of the house again because I knew Sean was out there. I started shouting, ‘Don’t be shooting, they’re children!’ But the army shot 57 rounds of ammunition up that street at them.
“They were just wee boys. Sean could run like the wind, he was so athletic and loved sports, and played Gaelic football and football, but he tried to get into somebody’s house only the door was closed and that’s when he was shot in the back of the head."
By the time Flo arrived at the scene of the shooting the soldiers had already taken Sean away in a Saracen.
“I ran down to the hospital in my bare feet,” she continued. “When I got there the doctor told me he was going to die. I got down on my knees and prayed to God and told Him to let Sean live and I would nurse him for the rest of his life, even though I knew Sean would hate that because he was so active. Then they turned off the life support machine and I went ballistic because me and his father weren’t there at the time and they had no right to turn it off, but it was too late, we had lost him."
Six months prior to Sean’s murder, Flo had also been shot and wounded when the British Army opened fire on a car she had been travelling in, killing her friends Dorothy Maguire and Maura Meehan in Cape Street on the Falls. The British Army claimed a gun had been pointed from the back of the car – a claim that has been disputed by eyewitnesses and the women’s family.
In 2013, Flo was critical of the National Graves Association for removing the words “killed on active service” from a monument next to Sean's name in Milltown Cemetery.
Recalling her commitment to republicanism, Fr Devlin told those gathered in St Paul’s Church: “She was in and out of that guest house down in Armagh and loved to go there on holidays. She used to go the Dublin and she used to go the America. She was on the run that often and then jumped over that many fences that she could have been in the Olympics this week.
“When she brings her flag with her today, it is not just ‘oh, I’m Irish’. She gave her blood for it, she gave her son for it.”
Flo is survived by her children Marian, Brian, Ursula and Pearse and wider family circle.
Flo’s remains were later laid to rest in Milltown Cemetery.
