The British Army in Northern Ireland 1975-77

by Ken Wharton

  The Red Hand Commandos, a Loyalist paramilitary gang synonymous with the UVF, chose the day after the Londonderry killings to launch a massacre of Catholics on both sides of the border. Their first point of attack was in the Republic at Kay’s Tavern in Dundalk, Co Louth, a town where OTR (on the run) IRA men would head to escape the Northern authorities or simply to recharge their batteries. The RHC would be fully aware of the significance of the town when they chose their targets and, just as the IRA attacked their targets with the proximity of the border in mind, so too did their Loyalist counterparts. Kay’s in Crowe Street was a known haunt of both PIRA men OTR and supporters of Sinn Fein. On the evening of the 19th, a car stolen in a Loyalist area of Belfast was driven across the border and parked up outside the bar; it contained at least 100lbs of explosives. Crowe Street in the Parnell Park area is in the centre of the town and it would have been busy on that last Friday before Christmas.

  The car bomb exploded without warning and the massive blast wrecked several buildings as well as partially demolishing the bar. It was somewhat of a miracle, that given how busy it was, that only two people were killed although dozens were injured. Jack Rooney (61) and Hugh Waters (51) were both killed in the blast. The RHC were not content with this and within three hours, another unit had blown up Donnelley’s bar in Silverbridge, Co Armagh. The distance between Dundalk and Silverbridge is approximately 10-12 miles and it is entirely possible that the same unit which had attacked the bar in Dundalk also brought misery to Silverbridge; especially given that the R177 in the Republic and the A29 in the North virtually links the two locations.

  Donnelley’s included a shop and petrol filling station as well as the bar. Just three hours after the Dundalk attack, two cars containing RHC terrorists pulled up outside and immediately opened fire, hitting a customer filling his car and then began firing into the bar. Patrick Donnelly (24) had just arrived outside in his car when he was shot dead. His younger brother Michael (14) was serving petrol when he was hit, dying shortly afterwards. An eyewitness told of one gunman who burst into the bar but the heavy door swung back into his face and he fired through the glass instead. A blast bomb was then thrown inside and it exploded within seconds. Survivors spoke of bodies and debris lying everywhere in the chaotic aftermath of the blast. In addition to the Donnelley brothers, sons of the bar’s owner, Trevor Bracknell (32), father of three was also killed. Mr Bracknell was English but had chosen to live with his Irish wife in the Newry, Co Down area and was visiting Silverbridge that evening.

  Lost amidst the slaughter and mayhem, a UDR soldier was killed in an RTA; prosaic by the bloody standards of the Troubles, it nonetheless caused misery and grief in the man’s family. Lance Corporal John Hegan Niblock (25) is buried at Ryan’s Presbyterian Church, Rathfriland, Co Down.

  Two days later, in a rare show of co-operation and vigilance, Customs and FBI officers in the USA foiled a plot by NORAID to smuggle arms to the Provisional IRA. Using informants, and ‘sting’ techniques, the US authorities foiled one shipment but many others sneaked under the net. This, however, was only a minor setback for the Provisionals and the Irish-Americans would have simply shrugged their shoulders and started the process of arms smuggling all over again. INLA also had their sources and allegedly met regularly with Will Stacey, who was head of the American Seamen’s Union, as they hoped that he would help smuggle arms through the Union-controlled docks and to Ireland. A New York City police officer with fanatical sympathies for the Irish Republicans was said to have provided 22 rifles for the use of INLA gunmen.

  As Christmas, 1975 approached, there was anything but the spirit of good cheer in the Province as Loyalists continued killing Catholics for no other reason than their religion. On the 21st, the UFF attacked a house at Mountainview Parade in North-West Belfast. The street itself is composed of small, neat semi-detached houses with a view of the Black Mountain in the back gardens of some of the houses. The Hughes family of 10 lived there; Christina (43), her husband and their eight children. The family was Catholic and there was only a vague and tenuous link with Republicanism. Mr Hughes was the manager of a social club on the Republican Ardoyne and Mrs. Hughes was the founder of Women Together, an organisation which tried to unite the two religions. On that fateful evening and in full view of four of her children, masked Loyalists broke into the house and shot Mrs. Hughes; she died shortly afterwards.

  By the standards of the Troubles, Northern Ireland’s Christmas passed peacefully, but on Boxing Day, the sectarian killings commenced again after that short lull. The UVF bombed the Catholic-owned Vallelly’s Bar at Ardress, Loughgall, injuring half a dozen and fatally injuring Seamus Mallon (31); the civilian died of his wounds on 30 December. The device was left in the Co Armagh bar and exploded without warning.

  The bloody year of 1975 was limping out, torn, wounded and sick of the violence, but it was still New Year’s Eve and Catholics and Protestants alike celebrated the dawn of a New Year, albeit in their own separated communities. One such celebration took place at the Central Bar in Gilford, Co Armagh. The small town is located south of Lough Neagh and roughly halfway between Craigavon and Newry. Central Bar was packed with Protestant drinkers and if they thought that they might be a reprisal target for the Boxing Day attack on a Catholic bar is not known. However, masked gunmen from INLA planted an explosive device in a bag and left it in the semi-darkened outside entrance to the pub. It exploded without any warning, causing utter chaos and partly demolishing the building. Scores of people were injured, some terribly and two people were killed instantly, with one mortally wounded woman dying the following morning. INLA bomber Francis Corry was charged and convicted of the murders.

  Paras stop and search in Donegal Square, Belfast. (Mark ‘C’)

  Lost Lives and newspapers of the time note that the numbers of injured was so great, that a fleet of no less than seven ambulances were required to take them away to hospital. Richard Beattie (44), father of five children was killed instantly and William Scott (28) was badly mutilated, losing both legs; he died in hospital shortly before midnight. At approximately 06:00 the following morning, Sylvia McCullough died of the wounds she received in the blast.

  December had ended and 21 people had been killed during another dreadful month. The Army lost four soldiers, two of whom were killed by PIRA. A total of 12 civilians were killed; eight were Catholics and four were Protestants. Republicans lost five, four of whom were killed in ‘own goal’ explosions. Loyalists were responsible for seven sectarian murders and INLA for four.

  1975 saw the deaths of 276 people; military, civilian and paramilitary. This equates to just over five deaths per week, a little under one death for every day of the year.

  British Army

  43

  RUC and Gardaí

  13

  Civilians

  165 (146 of whom were considered overtly sectarian)

  Republicans

  31

  Loyalists

  24

  Part Two

  1976

  During this year, a total of 62 serving or former serving soldiers were killed, an increase of over one-third compared with 1975. A quite staggering 26 of these were UDR or former UDR soldiers. Only those former soldiers who were killed as a direct consequence of their service are included in the military total. Included in this total, are 17 road traffic deaths (RTA) and nine where the cause of death is either unknown, or death by ‘violent or unnatural causes.’ It was the year of several massacres, including the killings at Kingsmill and the slaughter of the Reavey family; in short, for the paramilitaries, it was ‘business as usual.’ 1976 was the second worst year of the Troubles after the bloodiest year of 1972. In this year, Noel Jenkinson one of the men who planted a stolen Ford Cortina outside the Officers’ Mess at the Parachute regimental HQ in 1972, died of a heart attack at a jail in England. His death will not be noted nor mourned elsewhere in this book.

  13

  January

  The New Year was o
nly six hours old, some drunken revellers were still staggering home, some were sound asleep and others were nursing hangovers. At a hospital in Co Armagh, Sylvia McCullough (31) who had been dreadfully injured the night before at the Central Bar bombing died from her injuries.

  This author has written many times about the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in accounts passim of the Troubles; one eventually exhausts the litany of clichés which pertain to this paramilitary organisation; murderous, violent, obscene, irrational, barbaric, indiscriminate are but a few. The UVF was and still is a Loyalist paramilitary group, formed in 1965/6. It was named after the Ulster Volunteer Force of 1912, and its first leader was Gusty Spence, a former British soldier. The group’s volunteers undertook an armed campaign, based on sectarian murders of almost thirty years during the Troubles. It declared a ceasefire in 1994, although attacks continued until it officially ended its armed campaign in the Spring of May 2007. Its declared goals were to combat Irish Republicanism – particularly PIRA, INLA and the OIRA – and to maintain Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom. The vast majority of its almost 500 victims were innocent Catholic civilians.

  The UVF were a Loyalist militia founded in 1912 to block Home Rule for Ireland. They opposed independence for Ireland which was agitating for a breakaway from the UK but later, with the declaration of World War One, many of its members enlisted with the 36th (Ulster) Division in August 1914. Its members fought bravely in the appalling trench warfare in Northern France. Members of the UVF went over the top with the Ulster Division on 1 July, 1916 at a place, hitherto unknown to all but locals; the Somme. At the end of that appalling day of slaughter British and Commonwealth forces had suffered 19,240 dead and a quite incredible 35,493 wounded, 2,152 missing and 585 prisoners for a total loss of 57,470. UVF men fell in their scores on that day.

  On 4 January 1976, almost 60 years after the slaughter on the Somme, the UVF launched two raids on Catholic families in Co Armagh. The Reavey family lived at Greyhillan, Whitecross in South Armagh, a tiny hamlet in rural country, close to Bessbrook. It was a Sunday evening, when at least six gunmen from the UVF attacked the Reavey home, the first of two sectarian murders in quick succession. It was a cold winter’s evening and the family was at home, watching television when the Loyalist murder gang let themselves into the house; they opened fire without any discrimination, firing upwards of three-dozen rounds in the first onslaught. John Reavey (24) and his brother Brian (22) were hit and both died instantly; their younger brother tried to hide but gunmen chased and shot him, mortally wounding the teenager, who died on 30 January.

  Just 10 minutes later, and some 15 miles away, a second UVF murder gang attacked the O’Dowd family home in Ballyduggan near Gilford. Gilford was the scene of the late December attack on the Central Bar and the Bingo bus murders in August. (See chapters 8 and 12, respectively.) The O’Dowd family consisted of five brothers, of whom three were not in the house at the time of the attack. The family was gathered around the piano and were having a family sing-song when masked gunmen burst in and opened fire with automatic weapons. In the room at the time were several young children, none of whom were hit but were left, nonetheless, severely traumatised at the shocking and bloody attack. Joe O’Dowd (61) and two of his nephews Declan (19) and Barry (24) were killed and the brothers’ father Brendan was badly injured.

  Loyalist Sandy Row, Belfast. (Author’s photo)

  THE REAVEY BROTHERS

  Haydn Davies, UDR

  Halfway through the evening we started to pick up radio traffic of a shooting incident close to Glennane at Whitecross just outside the base and on our route. Three dead was mentioned and the RUC were at the scene. We drove into Whitecross over the crossroads and down into a lane and down into the muddy yard of the house where we had been directed on the radio. Two police Land Rovers were parked in the dark yard, all the lights were on in the house. The police moved about in a respectful silence. ’No need to go in’ whispered a policeman ‘Just look through the window; it’s a bloody awful sight’ I looked and saw the shot up bodies of two dark haired young men, teenagers. Blood spattered the wall above one of them. A wounded third man was being attended to upstairs. He sounded to be in the most terrible agony.

  An older woman arrived back at the cottage and was spoken to by a policeman. She tried to rush to the house, but was stopped from entering. She then let out an immediate howling sound of the most dreadful grief, it continued on for some minutes and then she collapsed, she came to, and the grief started again. She was forcibly but kindly escorted away to a neighbour’s place some distance away.

  I stood by a police Land Rover and spoke with an attractive blonde Greenfinch driver. My words to her were. ‘Jesus Christ! Just imagine rearing those boys to see them come to this.’ She made no immediate reply and then said quietly ‘Good enough for the likes of those.’ Before I could reply to her, my driver, himself a Catholic, squeezed my arm to keep quiet. My chemical attraction for her died on the spot.

  On arrival back at Gough barracks I made a written report of her words. I felt she should be sacked. The next morning I gave the report to the Adjutant and explained to him what she had said. He took the letter. He didn’t read it but merely placed it into his in-tray without comment. I heard no more of it for a while then about a week later the Training Major (Light Infantry) came into my office and sat down. He started to speak to me in sort of parables without hitting any subject. It became obvious that he had been told to speak to me, but he was making a hash of it. After a silence he said. ‘RSM, don’t become involved in Irish politics, leave it alone or you will be the loser’ He left my office, and as I sat there, I just thought: ‘What a hopeless situation!’

  The following day, with the grieving in the Reavey and O’Dowd households still raw, would end as one of the worst days in the entire Troubles; it would be surpassed by Warrenpoint (1979), by Omagh (1988) and by ‘Bloody Sunday’ (1972). No less than 12 people died on that terrible Monday. The first death occurred early on and it was a case of the Angel of Death biding his time. Back in 1973, RUC Reservist Clifford Evans had been attacked at his home by a PIRA gunman who shot at him several times but missed. On the day that fate finally caught up with him, RUCR Constable Evans (30) was on a routine police patrol in the Toomebridge area of Co Antrim when the car in which he was travelling was ambushed by PIRA gunmen. Constable Evans was dreadfully wounded and died en-route for hospital; his colleague survived.

  In July 1975, the UVF set up a bogus checkpoint just outside Newry and posing as British soldiers forced a minibus containing the Miami Showband to stop, eventually killing three of the band members. On 5 January, PIRA carried out the same deception and stopped a works bus just outside of the village of Whitecross, Co Armagh, scene of the Reavey murders just two days earlier; the next village was Kingsmill. The bus was en-route for Glenanne and was stopped by uniformed men at around 17:30 hours. Because of the increased military presence in the area after the five sectarian murders, the driver of the bus thought that it was a British Army VCP and stopped without hesitation. The men were ordered off the bus and forced to line up outside. One of the men – a Protestant – thought that it was the UVF when a bogus soldier asked which of the Textile workers was Catholic and which was Protestant and tried to advise the lone Catholic – Richard Hughes – not to identify himself, or alternatively make a run for it.

  Hughes, however, stepped forward and was ordered by the bogus soldiers to; ‘Get down the road and don’t look back!’ A single word of ‘Right!’ was shouted out and the gunmen began firing with both semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons. The eleven men were shot at very close range, with a total of 136 rounds being fired in less than 60 seconds. As the bodies tumbled all over the place and in several cases on top of one another, the gunmen walked up and down the ragged rank of dead and dying and fired shots into the prostrate men’s heads at close range. Despite being shot an incredible 18 times, Alan Black survived. The lone Catholic, Richard Hughes
was able to flag a car down and he begged the driver to take him to the RUC station at Bessbrook. In the meantime, a local family had heard the crescendo of shooting and ventured from their nearby house and the first RUC officers on the scene found them amongst the 10 dead Protestant workers, praying for their souls. One can only imagine the carnage, the blood and the pathetic sight of the bullet-riddled bodies and amidst this scene from what can only be described as an abattoir, was a couple on their knees praying to God.

  One of the two people who were praying for the dead heard an agonised moan and found the terribly wounded Alan Black who was lying in a ditch. After a long wait for an ambulance, he was rushed to Newry hospital where he underwent an emergency operation and somehow survived being shot 18 times. One policeman described what he saw as: ‘… indescribable scene of carnage.’ Johnston Chapman, the uncle of two of the victims said that the dead were: ‘…. just lying there like dogs; blood everywhere.’ Two of the victims were so badly mutilated by gunfire that immediate relatives were prevented from identifying them. One relative stated that the hospital mortuary: ‘… was like a butcher’s shop with bodies lying on the floor like slabs of meat!’

  Nine of the dead, the textile workers, were from the village of Bessbrook, whilst the bus driver was from nearby Mountnorris. The murders were claimed by the ‘South Armagh Republican Action Force,’ which claimed that the attack was in revenge for the killing of five Catholics the night before. The Historical Enquiries Team (HET) investigation into the incident found that members of the Provisional IRA had carried out the attack and the weapons used that night could be traced to another 110 murders or attempted murders over the next several years.