by Ken Wharton
With a cynicism worthy of a Provisional IRA spokesman, the UVF claimed that their ‘intel’ had learned that a Sinn Féin meeting was being held in the bar. They also claimed that they were avenging the deaths of Trevor King, Colin Craig and David Hamilton, who had been shot dead as mentioned earlier.
The following month, the Provisionals shot and killed leading UFF men Joe ‘Chinky’ Bratty, Raymond Elder and Ray Smallwoods, in separate incidents, supposedly in retaliation for the deaths in the Heights. It is, however, more likely that their deaths came as payback for the massacre in Sean Graham bookies on the Ormeau Road in February 1992. Sadly, there were many complaints afterwards, claiming that the RUC had bodged the investigation, leading to the destruction or ‘loss’ of evidence. A Police Ombudsman Report in 2011 concluded that the original 1994 investigation lacked ‘... diligence, focus and leadership; that there were failings in record management; that significant lines of enquiry were not identified; and that police failed to communicate effectively with the victims’ families’.
THE OMAGH BOMB
The final atrocity of the Troubles produced the biggest loss of life from a single bomb; Dublin/Monaghan, it is true, saw more fatalities, but that was from four separate bombs in different spots inside the capital city and in the rural border area. On 15 August 1998, a bombing team from a dissident Republicans (DRs) group, the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), left a stolen Vauxhall Cavalier outside Kell’s shop in Lower Market Street, Omagh, in Co. Tyrone. Inside the boot was a bomb containing both Semtex and home-made explosives; it weighed 510lb (232kg). It is thought that their intended target was the town’s courthouse, but as parking had not been available, they left the car outside Kell’s as it was the only free spot.
Hugh O’Toole, owner of O’Tooles Bar (The Heights), Loughinisland, in which six men were shot dead watching the 1994 World Cup on television.
O’Tooles Bar (The Heights) in the Co. Down village of Loughinisland. Six men were shot dead by two UVF gunmen.
Some two weeks earlier, the RIRA had detonated a bomb in Banbridge, Co. Down, so they were recognised as a very real threat to the fledgling peace process. At 14.32, some thirteen minutes after the car was left, a call was made to a television studio warning of a bomb at the courthouse that would explode in thirty minutes. Another caller was on the line within a minute, stating that the bomb would explode in fifteen minutes, in ‘Omagh Town’. Finally, to confuse matters further, a third call was made – to the Samaritans office in Coleraine – stating that the bomb was on ‘Main Street’. It was against this background of utter confusion brought about by deliberately misleading warnings that RUC officers began evacuating shoppers, directing them away from the courthouse, inadvertently towards the actual bomb.
At 15.10 hours, a massive explosion tore Lower Market Street apart, obliterating people, vehicles and buildings. Twenty-one people were killed instantly, with a further eight being fatally wounded; 200–300 other people were injured. Seven of the wounded died shortly afterwards, with the twenty-ninth victim dying three weeks later; one of the dead women was Avril Monaghan (30), who was pregnant with twins. One survivor spoke of hearing ‘... an unearthly bang followed by an eeriness, a darkness that had just come over the place’. After this silence, other eyewitnesses spoke of hearing screams and seeing body parts everywhere among the rubble and wrecked vehicles. Marion Radford searched desperately for her son, Alan (16), with whom she had been shopping in the seconds before the blast; he was killed.
Those killed either in the blast or subsequently were: Samantha McFarland (17), Alan Radford (16), Veda Short (56), Fred White (60), Bryan White (26), Avril Monaghan (30), Philomena Skelton (39), Deborah-Anne Cartwright (20), Esther Gibson (36), Mary Grimes (65), Brenda Logue (17), Brian McCrory (54), Seán McGrath (61), Jolene Marlow (17), Seán McLaughlin (12), Oran Doherty (8), James Barker (12), Fernando Blasco Baselga (12), Rocío Abad Ramos (23), Geraldine Breslin (43), Gareth Conway (18), Breda Devine (1), Aidan Gallagher (21), Maura Monaghan (1), Elizabeth Rush (57), Olive Hawkes (60), Julia Hughes (21), Lorraine Wilson (15), Ann McCombe (48) and Seán McGrath (61).
INLA motif on the Creggan estate, Londonderry.
The dead included both Protestants and Catholics; two of the dead were Spanish tourists. Six children aged 12 and under were killed, as well as the unborn Monaghan twins. The then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the act as ‘... an appalling act of savagery and evil ...’, while the normally tight-lipped Sinn Féin pair of Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams both condemned the attack without reservation.
The RIRA did not admit to the blame – several of their members have been charged, but of those convicted all have had their sentences quashed on appeal – but in 2007 they finally made a public statement. Their spokesman said, ‘The IRA had minimal involvement in Omagh. Our code word was used; nothing more. To have stated this at the time would have been lost in an understandable wave of emotion; Omagh was an absolute tragedy. Any loss of civilian life is regrettable.’ This author believes that both the RUC and the An Gardaí Siochana have the names of the bombing team; the BBC’s Panorama team named the suspected killers, and families of the dead have several times tried to bring about the prosecution of those named. It would seem that the killers of twenty-nine civilians as well as two unborn children will never be brought to justice.
‘They haven’t gone away, you know?’ Creggan Estate.
The Falls Road, a fiercely Republican stronghold in Belfast.
There are four main existing dissident groups on the island of Ireland: Real IRA (RIRA), Continuity IRA (CIRA), 32 County Sovereignty Movement and Óglaigh na hÉireann. There are perhaps a dozen more minor groups, dangerous but small, who also see the Troubles as part of their legacy and part of their sacred role to reunite Ireland. All of these organisations refuse to recognise the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), seeing themselves as the rightful heirs to the original IRA, and view their former heroes in PIRA as traitors and turncoats. They do not want accord with the British or the Protestants but simply wish to bring about the reunification of Ireland by whatever means necessary. While they are very much a minority, they have the power to embarrass those Sinn Féin leaders who are desperately trying to show the world that they are now respectable. The party leadership are constantly trying to distance themselves from these ‘hotheads’ who formed themselves into cohesive groups from the more militant members of PIRA who resented the volte-face of many Republicans, whom they feel ‘sold out’ the movement to secure the GFA.
The perpetrators of the Omagh bomb – the RIRA – were sending a message to the Provisionals when they attacked the town in August 1998. The message was ‘the struggle goes on, with or without the help of traitors’. Their warnings were vague and misleading at best; at worst it was a deliberate attack with the intention of causing maximum loss of life. It caused a wave of revulsion around the world; it showed that the question of reunification was by no means over and it showed that the dissident Republicans still had the explosive wherewithal to extend their ‘struggle’ for many decades more.
In the case of the Omagh bomb, the ASU were only a select number of men, all experts in their own fields, but they had no need for a big organisation or different departments. Had the desire taken them, they could have just as easily chosen Enniskillen as the Provisionals had largely left it alone since 1987, or Belfast, or even Newtownards; the CIRA exploded a car bomb in Enniskillen on 13 July 1996, nine years after the Poppy Day massacre. It is the very potential threat of several major explosions that could lead to a reignition of the Troubles. The British Government’s eyes are firmly fixed on the old Provisionals and indeed also the Loyalists, because they see organisation and they see threat. However, if they keep throwing money into ‘community projects’ then the bear will remain slumbering. They cannot, however, throw money at the dissident Republicans; the hatred and loathing that they harbour cannot be bought.
However unintentionally, it put the words of Gerry Adams into stark p
erspective when he said on 13 August 1995: ‘They haven’t gone away you know!’
________________
* The accepted figure is nineteen, but Martin Dillon, recognised by many as the most authoritative chronicler of the Troubles, believes that the real figure was thirty.
* Guns to Government, Liam Clarke & Kathryn Johnston (Mainstream, 2001).
** Ibid.
*** He was named in the House of Commons by Roy Beggs, MP, as the ‘mastermind’ of the attack.
**** Enniskillen: The Remembrance Sunday Bombing, Denzel McDaniel (Wolfhound Press, 1997)
* Another Bloody Chapter in an Endless Civil War: Vol. I, Ken Wharton (Helion and Company, 2016).
** Denzel McDaniel, op. cit.
* UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror, McDonald & Cusack (Penguin, Ireland, 2004) p.223.
CHAPTER 13
BITING BACK: UNDERCOVER AMBUSHES
Glen Espie was a UDR soldier who twice cheated death when gunmen from the Provisional IRA set up deadly ambushes for him. I interviewed him to ask his thoughts in relation to Republican criticisms about ‘shoot-to-kill’:
The PIRA operated a shoot to kill policy in their area of operations in East Tyrone. Therefore, would it not be necessary for the security services to be in a position to meet force with force? To arrest these people before any planned operation was not an option as there would not be enough evidence to convict them in a court of law. Therefore, the only way was to apprehend them in the execution of a terrorist act. After calling on them to surrender, the terrorist response was to open fire on the security services; in meeting force with force their lives were taken. I met these same people on what you could call a role-reversal, a few weeks before Loughgall; there were no words of ‘Do you want to surrender,’ etc, just their G3s* on ‘rock and roll’ with the intention of killing me.
The term ‘big boys’ rules’ is the title of a superb book by author Mark Urban** and is thought to originate from an unnamed SAS source who said something along the lines of, ‘If the IRA wish to play a big boys’ game, then they will have to abide by big boys’ rules.’ Put simply, if the Republican paramilitaries wanted to take on the British Army, then the rules of the ‘game’ would be applied without mercy or remorse. In this chapter, we will look at the undercover ambushes carried out against the Provisional IRA in the border area in the late 1970s, at Ballysillian in Belfast in 1978, at Coalisland in 1981, at Gransha Hospital in 1984, at Loughgall in 1987, at Lone Bog Road in 1988, at Clonnoe in 1992 and also at the ‘incidental’ ambush on the Ballymurphy estate in 1973. The SAS attack in Gibraltar is covered in a separate chapter in this book (see Chapter 11).
By the early 1980s, while neither the Republican terror groups nor the British Army could be said to have been ‘winning’ the conflict, the former still had somewhat of an upper hand, with deaths of off-duty SF personnel continuing to rise. The Provisionals were at that time heavily engaged in their ‘border genocide’ campaign, striking mainly against part-time soldiers and police officers; they were also killing military personnel in other parts of Northern Ireland at their homes and places of work. Something needed to be done, and it needed to be done quickly; this was when Prime Minister Thatcher turned to that most elite of British Army units: the Special Air Service (SAS).
Although it has always been denied, it is reported that there had been a presence of these elite troops in small numbers since 1973, working with undercover units such as Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF), also known as 14th Int, or simply the ‘Det’. In 1976, following the Kingsmills massacre, the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, announced that in view of the deepening terrorist crisis in Northern Ireland, he was formally deploying the SAS to Ulster.*** There are also suggestions that an SAS presence was in the Province as early as 1969, but almost certainly since 1972. What follows is somewhat apocryphal and the reader can judge for themselves as to the veracity of the story. In March, some three months after they were ‘officially’ deployed, a small unit of the SAS crossed the border into the Irish Republic to abduct a wanted PIRA member, Sean McKenna. McKenna was living in Edentober, Co. Louth, 6–7 miles from the nearest border with the North. In the dark of night, he was snatched from his warm bed, bundled into a vehicle and driven over the border into Northern Ireland, where a regular Army patrol was able to ‘legally arrest’ him.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the following month, on 15 April 1976, another leading Provisional was shot dead by a group of undercover soldiers who had kept his house in Co. Armagh under surveillance. Peter Joseph Cleary (25) was alleged to have been one of the PIRA gunmen who took part in the Kingsmills massacre. Cleary is said to have been a staff officer in the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade.
WASHING BAY SHOOTING
In February 1978, supplied with high-grade intelligence, the Army were informed that there was a weapons cache at a remote farm in Washing Bay, Co. Tyrone. East Tyrone Brigade member Paul Duffy (23) was either ordered to retrieve one or more of the weapons or made the decision on the spur of the moment. However, as he didn’t drive, he persuaded a friend to give him a lift, without explaining the reasons behind his mission. As Duffy picked up a rifle, he was challenged by a soldier; he failed to respond and was consequently shot dead. His innocent companion naturally panicked and attempted to drive away. He too was hit but survived a very bad gunshot wound; he was released without charge following treatment in hospital.
We now turn to very public ambushes by the SAS in their fight against the Provisional IRA between 1978 and 1992.
BALLYSILLAN ATTACK
On 21 June 1978, acting upon intelligence supplied by an informer within the IRA’s New Lodge unit, the Army were made aware of a planned attack on the postal depot at Ballysillan in North Belfast. The agent had informed his handlers that an ASU planned to detonate an incendiary bomb at the depot, thus badly compromising and curtailing Royal Mail business as part of their ‘economic war’. The unit drove from the Oldpark area in a stolen Mazda car, parking up several hundred yards away from their target. The car was left at Wheatfield Road as the three-man bombing team set off on foot for what they thought would be a soft target; it was later discovered that they were unarmed, other than the incendiary devices that they carried. However, lying in wait was a small but heavily armed SAS unit.
The soldiers waited until the men were in firing range before issuing a warning; several of the terrorists made threatening gestures, or appeared to be reaching for weapons, which in turn gave the undercover soldiers a reason to open fire. All three of the bombers were shot and killed: Denis ‘Dinny’ Brown (28), William ‘Jackie’ Mailey (31) and James Mulvenna (28); all three men were Oglaigh (Volunteers) from the Ardoyne unit. Tragically, an innocent bystander – William Hanna (27) – was caught in the crossfire and killed. The driver of the stolen Mazda escaped back into the New Lodge area once he heard the shooting. Sinn Féin were quick to claim that the men were ‘murdered’ and that the action demonstrated further evidence of ‘shoot-to-kill’. Mulvenna had a colourful career within the Provisionals: a rent collector from the Nationalist Bone District of Belfast, he was wounded nine times in 1972 following a shoot-out with the Army. He served four years in Long Kesh and was only released a few months before his death.
By this stage, the IRA knew that they were in a real war with the overt ‘introduction’ of the SAS and that it was a war that they were unlikely to win. What terrified them was that they were now in direct conflict with an organisation that allegedly only paid lip service to rules of engagement (ROE) and used the same ruthlessness as they did. The Provisionals were more than happy with the ‘easy’ way of killing British soldiers, but now, as our American cousins might say, it was a ‘different ball game’. I should explain my use of ‘easy’ to the reader lest they feel that I am being disrespectful to my fellow soldiers who walked the streets of Northern Ireland. The IRA used a method of attack referred to as a ‘shoot and scoot’. In this scenario, a stolen car with one or more
Armalites hidden in the boot would drive to a vantage point overlooking the route in which soldiers were patrolling. Dickers on the streets would have already relayed this information to area commanders, who would dispatch a driver and gunman – occasionally gunwoman – to the area.
Generally, one shot fired into the body of the leading soldier would incapacitate the patrol, at least for long enough to allow the gunman to throw the weapon into the boot before racing off in the car. They knew that the soldiers would take time to react and pull their wounded comrade into cover before deciding on the feasibility of returning fire. Suddenly, in the SAS they had an enemy that wouldn’t allow themselves to be shot like fish in a barrel and would, indeed, take the war to them. In the Ballysillan incident, the Hereford Hooligans ‘announced’ themselves and made clear their intentions, which were bound to strike fear into the hearts of the IRA; more importantly, three bombers had been taken off the streets: permanently. A hard message was being sent to the paramilitaries and they would have to reconsider their own tactics if they were to counter the threat of the undercover soldiers. The British Prime Minister who had first deployed the SAS – Harold Wilson – had gone and had been replaced by James Callaghan. As he had shown in his support of the West German Government’s stand against Middle Eastern terrorist groups, he wasn’t going to turn the other cheek. After Callaghan’s election defeat, another even stronger Prime Minister – Margaret Thatcher – was to confront the Provisional IRA. In her support of British soldiers in Northern Ireland she was to live up to the epithet with which she had been tarred by Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev: ‘Iron Lady’.