Monuments
Colm was just eighteen years old when he was killed in the William Street area of his native Derry by undercover agents of the British state. As a politically aware youth growing up in Derry he witnessed at first hand the brutality of the British Imperialist stranglehold on his country and it was as a result of the occupation that Colm took up arms, not only to defend his city from the British but to fight for a workers' republic that would indeed cherish all the children of the nation equally. Colm paid the ultimate price for the love of his country and his people.
The other names dedicated to in this monument is Patrick "Hessy" Phelean and Dermot "Tonto" McShane. "Hessy" was a former member of the IRSP and the INLA, Hessy had moved to New York to get away from the troubles in the North.
On 21 January 1996, a friend of Hessy's, a bartender at a New York pub, asked her boyfriend, a New York cop with a record of excessive force complaints, to take Hessy to his apartment.
Once there, according to witnesses and trial testimony, the boyfriend shot Hessy in the head, and was convicted of manslaughter in 1999.
"Tonto" was a former member of the IRSP and the INLA, Dermot was crushed by a British military vehicle during a night of heavy rioting in support of Catholic residents of Garvaghy Road who had been beaten off their street to force an Orange Order parade through during Drumcree I.