Priest to mediate in burial plot dispute

A priest has been called in to broker a truce between two families feuding over a burial plot, it emerged today.

At one stage up to 500 people gathered outside a house in north Belfast where windows were smashed and a door forced in.

The row is centred of demands for a young suicide victim’s body to be moved from a city cemetery where his wife’s relatives are buried and re-interred next to his mother.

Mark Catney’s family want his remains handed over by the McMahons so he can be laid to rest beside his mother, Mary Cassidy, who also took her own life earlier this month.

Tensions flared between the two families following the first death, according to neighbours.

“Mary’s death then provoked an outrage and that’s when the protests started,” one said.

Fr Aidan Troy, the priest caught up in the loyalist blockade outside Holy Cross Primary School, was brought in to mediate between the two sides.

A delicate truce was negotiated that involved the McMahons agreeing to Mr Catney’s body being relocated.

An application to have the remains exhumed was lodged with Belfast City Council on Tuesday.

But an angry crowd from the Ardoyne district, where there has been a rash of suicides in recent months, still descended on the McMahon family’s home in neighbouring New Lodge later that night.

Relatives of Mr Catney, who was in his early 20s, and his mother insisted they had no involvement in the protests and expressed hope that they would stop.

But a sister-in-law of the dead man claimed the deal to move his body had not been enough for a community who wanted to force them out.

She told BBC Radio Ulster: “We thought the understanding was…hand the body over and it would stop. But it’s got worse.”

In an attempt to end hostilities, the McMahons were tonight rumoured to be preparing leaflets calling for people to attend a special rosary outside their house.

Fr Troy pleaded for anyone planning more action to stop because their objective has been achieved.

“If possible people must examine the danger everyone is placed in by further protests,” he said.

“Mark and his mother being buried together has been approved. It would be good now if we could leave things as they are.”