Irish Family Savaged by Both Sides : Sectarian strife: Nine McCartans have died; two have been seriously hurt.

Sally McCartan handed her visitor a mug of sweet, milky tea, then bolted the inch-thick iron bars that secure the front and back doors of her home on Friendly Street.

“Those were put in to keep out the loyalists, not me own,” she said. “But these days, it could be either side coming to sledgehammer your door.”

“Loyalists” are pro-British gunmen from nearby Protestant areas, who have killed seven members of the McCartan clan. “Me own” are the IRA bombers and shooters among her Roman Catholic neighbors--the ones who killed a cousin and shot her son Damien in the legs.

The clan attributes two other deaths to Northern Ireland’s “troubles.”

McCartan, 55, has four children and has lived all her married life within a mile of her current home in the Markets, a Catholic district bounded by the River Lagan, downtown Belfast and a hostile Protestant area.

“We know we’re vulnerable here,” she said, “but this is our home.”

Her husband, Sean, a quiet man in a mud-streaked sweater with surprisingly happy eyes, added: “Talking about what’s gone on just brings you grief.”

Sean McCartan is one of 14 children. In August, his 42-year-old brother, Richard, was dragged from his home in the Markets by two IRA men who broke his legs and an arm with a hatchet. He survived, with 54 stitches in his head.

By McCartan standards, Richard was lucky.

In 1972, Sean’s brother Jimmy was attending a wedding party for Protestant friends in east Belfast when loyalists abducted him outside the hotel, in front of the bride and groom.

According to police records, several men kicked him, beat him with a pick-handle, smashed him against a concrete floor and cut him open with a knife. He died from three gunshots to the head.

Alice McGuinness, Sean’s sister, was run over and killed in 1973 by loyalists making a getaway. One cousin was killed by an IRA sniper on New Year’s Day, 1974, and another was found dead in a car trunk.

Sean’s mother, Alice, died of a heart attack in 1974--of a “broken heart,” as the family puts it.

A second brother, Gerard, was hospitalized for a respiratory disease in 1980, but fled the hospital after finding a bullet in his bed, a common loyalist threat. His condition, untreated, killed him.

Another brother, Noel, was killed in 1974 in front of his sister Lily.

“The loyalists just walked up to the two of ‘em and blew the brains off him,” Sally McCartan recalled. “All she seen was big red flashes, but they must have thought she recognized them.”

The next week, Lily’s Protestant husband, John Hamilton, was gunned down in their home. She never recovered from a nervous breakdown.

“Lily doesn’t know daylight from dark,” Sally McCartan said, pointing to the ceiling and shaking her head. “She enjoys herself up in her room and never comes down.

“Lily doesn’t even know her wee son was murdered. It was in ’89 that the Prods (Protestants) bludgeoned James to death. We decided not to tell her, for he was her only child.

“So she gets a wee Christmas box and card every year from him. But it’s really from us.”