by Peter Taylor
Rita Restorick filled the emptiness left in her life with an endless quest for peace, lobbying everyone from the Prime Minister to the President of Sinn Fein. ‘I was driven to do what I could to move the peace process forward,’ she wrote. ‘I wanted to be a symbol of the hopes of all mothers who wanted an end to the violence. I also wanted English people to take an interest in the suffering that had been allowed to happen in Northern Ireland, instead of only taking notice when the violence crossed over to England … I felt that Stephen was with me every step of the way, pushing me on when the situation seemed so bleak, telling me to speak out to stop other young lives like his being thrown away.’14 Stephen Restorick was the last soldier to die in Northern Ireland before the IRA declared its second cease-fire on 20 July 1997, five months after his death and almost three months after the election of Tony Blair.
Stephen was the ninth victim of an IRA sniper team that had become a republican legend in South Armagh. There were signs by roadsides and country lanes depicting a silhouetted IRA man waving a rifle with the warning, ‘Danger! Sniper at Work!’ The lethal ‘work’ was invariably carried out by an American-made Barrett Light 50 sniper rifle, which is five feet long and fires a .5-inch calibre bullet capable of penetrating body armour with ease. One of the trigger-pullers’ favourite shooting-positions was from the back of a Mazda hatch-back car behind a hinged armoured plate which was dropped the moment the shot had been fired. The team had killed seven soldiers and two police officers. The first victim was Private Paul Turner (18) who was hit in the chest by a single shot on 28 August 1992 as he stood in Crossmaglen’s main square. The death of Stephen Restorick made the army and police even more determined to track down the team and put an end to their killing. Jamie, who was now a senior officer in the army’s 3 Brigade area that covers South Armagh and the border, was candid about the threat the sniper posed.
You never knew where the bullet was coming from. You got virtually no warning. The fact that the sniper was very successful and that when he fired, in the majority of cases you were killed, clearly had a mental and not just a physical impact. Tactically, he was quite difficult to counter. He only had to fire once or twice a year to maintain his reputation as a one-shot killer.
The operation to catch the team was complex and dangerous and embraced all the agencies of British intelligence operating out of TCG South. It lasted for months. ‘Ken’ was one of the many involved. ‘It wasn’t just a single operation to catch the sniper, it was a great concerted effort across South Armagh,’ he told me. One of ‘Ken’s’ tasks was to monitor what was thought to be the cottage of one of the suspects. It took weeks of planning and reconnaissance to get the tiny camera installed in a location close enough to it. The camera was capable of transmitting live black-and-white pictures of the premises and all those who entered and left. ‘Ken’s’ most alarming moment came when he was doing a ‘recce’. He was lying in a ditch, camouflaged from head to foot, when a car with a number of men inside pulled up only feet away from him.
They parked right in front of the cottage and you have to lie there still for hours and hours, waiting for them to go, just wishing that they would bugger off so you could get your work done. You can’t move, you can’t look, you can’t shift around, you’re getting cramps, you’re lying in a damp, cold, wet ditch for hours on end waiting for people to go. Then suddenly one of the blokes got out of the car and came towards the ditch. The old heart races then because you think, Oh, no, have they seen us? Have we been clocked? He walked over to the ditch and literally had a pee on me. You lie in there and you just want to jump up and bop him one on the nose, tell him to bugger off because by that time you’ve just had too much. You just think, Oh, come on, I’ve got work to do. I’ve been here hours. I’m cold, wet and I’ve got absolutely nothing achieved for that particular night – a whole night wasted. And the more times you go back, the more it increases the chances of compromise.
Gradually the net closed around the sniper team. The ‘Det’ and others had identified a farm complex at Cregganduff Road, two and a half miles outside Crossmaglen, from where they were planning to mount their next ‘kill’. It is thought to have been bugged by MI5 assisted by the ‘Det’.15 On Thursday 10 April 1997, a sixteen-man SAS team swooped and arrested the IRA unit after violent scuffles. No shots were fired. The IRA were not carrying weapons at the moment of arrest. The Mazda hatch back, with the firing platform and metal plate ready assembled in the back, was in the barn with them. The Barrett Light 50, with telescopic sight and three rounds in the magazine, was subsequently found concealed in a hidden compartment of a cattle trailer. One of the sniper team’s key members, Michael Caraher, tried to run away across the fields but was overtaken and detained. There is little doubt that a decade earlier, he would have been killed along with his colleagues. When I asked one SAS soldier involved in the operation why the members of the ASU had not been shot dead as they were at Loughgall and Gibraltar, he said the arrest of the sniper team was a ‘professional’ operation in the way that some of the SAS killings in the 1980s were not. With intelligence indicating that another IRA cease-fire was in the offing, the last thing the ‘Brits’ wanted was a bloodbath that would only make it more difficult for Adams to persuade the IRA to put its guns away again. Jamie was jubilant at the success of the operation.
We’d suffered so much from the South Armagh sniper team. We’d caught them red-handed. We’d struck the first proper blow, probably for twenty years, against South Armagh PIRA, who’d almost thought they had become invincible. We’d struck right at the heart of their morale and their feeling of invincibility. It was a great feeling for all the members of the army and for the police because we’d worked a long time to achieve this. We’d lost Bombardier Restorick a couple of months before and we really felt that this was one back for him. I think the fact that we had arrested them and not killed them was very important as well because it sent a message that there weren’t going to be any martyrs. It must have been a major blow to their confidence. We proved that actually we could take the initiative, that we could pre-empt what they were doing and that we could successfully disrupt their operations.
The significance of the arrests was not lost on the RUC Chief Constable, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, who as Director of Operations in the province was ultimately responsible for the planning and implementation of the bloodless ambush.
I think it was an outstanding and stunningly successful operation. I think for the IRA to be arrested and their weapons seized right in their own back yard where they felt a certain degree of relaxation, brought about a sense of shock on their part. It’s an example of the acquisition of high-grade intelligence, proper assessment of that intelligence, and the ultimate exploitation of it.
The arrest of the sniper team was the culmination of intelligence techniques perfected and honed over twenty-five years after disasters like the Four Square laundry.
Shortly after the arrest of the sniper team, Commander John Grieve was at a Bryan Adams rock concert in London when his pager went off. ‘It was a message to call my contacts in the RUC urgently, and it was clear even from the pager message that they were very excited about something,’ he said. ‘They are incredibly elliptical in the way that they talk, even when you’re sitting opposite them, let alone when you’re talking at the end of a phone. But they left me in no doubt at all that they had had a very considerable success.’ One of the sniper team now in RUC custody turned out to be ‘The Triple Thumb-print Man’ that Grieve and his colleagues had spent the past fourteen months looking for. His name was James McArdle. ‘The RUC had just delivered probably one of the greatest operational coups and finest bits of detective work and co-operation that I think I’ve ever seen,’ Grieve said. ‘It’s a brilliant case.’
In June 1998, McArdle was found guilty at the Old Bailey of delivering the Docklands bomb-truck to England and was sentenced to twenty-five years. He also stood trial in Belfast with the other members of the sniper team, Michael Caraher, Martin
Mines and Bernard McGinn. On 19 March 1999, the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Sir Robert Carswell, sentenced McArdle, Mines and McGinn to twenty years for possession of rifles and ammunition with intent to endanger life. Caraher was sentenced to twenty-five years for the attempted murder of a policeman. During his interviews with the police, McGinn verbally admitted ‘riding shotgun’ with an AK 47 when Stephen Restorick was shot. According to the police, he made this admission and others on condition that no official notes of the interview should be taken. On the same understanding, he also verbally admitted mixing the explosives for the Docklands bomb in a shed 200 yards inside the Republic. He said he had done up to twenty ‘mixes’ over the years, ranging from 200 lbs to ten tons, including two tons for the massive Baltic Exchange bomb of 1992. McGinn received three life sentences for three murders, including that of Stephen Restorick.16 At the trial, McGinn’s counsel argued that his client’s alleged admissions should not be accepted as evidence because they had been made in breach of the Codes of Practice governing interviews. The Lord Chief Justice rejected the argument and accepted what the police said were McGinn’s admissions. ‘McGinn made comprehensive admissions of a string of terrorist offences in his interviews,’ he said. ‘… In my opinion the admissions were a reliable account of McGinn’s activities with the IRA, revealed to the police because he hoped for gain from making the revelations.’ McGinn was heard to laugh as sentence was passed. Rita Restorick was in court to hear the judgment in the knowledge that, under the Good Friday Agreement, those responsible for the killing of her son would be free in a matter of months.
It’s very hard, like it is for all the other victims’ families who are having to see this happen. But if we could be sure that this route we’re taking works, and there’d be no more killing, then it’s something we have to accept. It is very difficult for us, but if it did lead to peace and no other people having to face what we faced, then it would be worth it.
The IRA’s South Armagh sniper team were released under the Good Friday Agreement on 28 July 2000, having served sixteen months of their sentences. They were among the last batch of prisoners to exit the Maze. Three months later, Rita Restorick received a profound shock. On 6 October 2000, she learned that the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal had cleared Bernard McGinn of the murder of her son as well as the two other murders of which he had been found guilty. The Appeal Court also cleared him of the explosives offences, including those in connection with the Baltic Exchange and Docklands bombs. The Court ruled that the convictions must be quashed because McGinn had not been properly cautioned by the police before volunteering the information and the interviews had involved substantial breaches of the Code of Practice relating to cautions and the conduct of interviews. Nevertheless, the Court ruled that his convictions stood on the charges of possessing guns and conspiracy to murder for which he had been sentenced to twenty years.17 To those not involved this might seem academic since McGinn was already a free man, but Rita Restorick was amazed by the ruling and felt totally let down. ‘Perhaps when members of the nationalist community say that they have never received justice from the British legal system, I shall now be able to say, “You are not the only ones.”’
Chapter Thirty-Two
Out of the Mire
1997–1998
Almost three weeks after the Docklands bomb, John Major and John Bruton announced a date for the commencement of the long-awaited all-party talks. They were to begin on 12 June 1996 and would be preceded by elections to an Assembly from which delegates for the negotiations would be drawn. Coming so soon after the devastation at Docklands, the setting of a date for talks, which was what the IRA had been looking for during its seventeen-month cease-fire, seemed to prove that violence worked. John Major vehemently denied it, as he also denied that his narrow majority at Westminster and the need to keep the support of the Ulster Unionist MPs dictated his Irish policy. Major’s aim was to pull off the seemingly impossible and get the Unionists into talks and keep them there with Sinn Fein also at the table. That is why he made decommissioning such an issue: he knew that without it, or at least some assurance that it would happen, the Unionists would never play ball. Major played the long game and the Docklands bomb was the result. He made no apology for his strategy.
There were two ways of getting the unionists into talks. One was a gesture, however slight, from the republican side towards decommissioning or commitments for parallel decommissioning. The other was to have the Assembly, which had previously been discussed with the Irish Government. We needed to get people into talks. That is the point that you must never take out of your mind. Whatever happens, unless all the people are in talks, you cannot reach a deal. You cannot reach a deal without the republicans and you cannot reach a deal without the unionists, we’ve seen that in the history of Northern Ireland time and time again. What I had to do was to facilitate the fact that everybody was prepared to sit down together. Without the actions we took, they would not have done so. They would not have done so.
The elections to the Assembly, which was Major’s way of locking the unionists into the process, were held on 30 May 1996. A week before, the Ulster Unionists’ leader, David Trimble, had insisted that his party wanted to see the IRA produce ‘equipment of some sorts’ during the weeks in which the opening session of the talks would be held. For his part, Gerry Adams, who said that Sinn Fein supported the ‘Mitchell Principles’ of nonviolence, insisted that decommissioning was not a prerequisite or concomitant of negotiations.1 In the elections, Sinn Fein, having prevaricated over a boycott, exceeded all expectations, except perhaps its own, by achieving its best result ever. The party won seventeen seats with 15.5 per cent of the vote. Its rival, the SDLP, won twenty-one seats with 21.4 per cent.2 The minority loyalist parties representing the UVF and the UDA/UFF also won seats, as did the Women’s Coalition, ensuring that the negotiations would be truly inclusive. All the pieces were now in place, except for the vital one of Sinn Fein, whose ticket of admission was IRA decommissioning in some form or other. It was a ticket the Republican Movement refused to buy, arguing that Sinn Fein’s acceptance of the ‘Mitchell Principles’ was enough. Major and the unionists would not accept this.
The all-party talks opened on schedule on 10 June 1996 under the chairmanship of Senator George Mitchell, whom the Government had persuaded to try to see the enterprise through, but there was no Sinn Fein at the table. Five days later, the IRA gave its reply by bombing Manchester. Despite the IRA’s continuing campaign, with its mainland ASUs getting ready to wreak havoc in London and the south-east, Major believed that at some stage the IRA would re-instate its cease-fire and Sinn Fein would enter all-party talks. As 1996 drew to a close and a British General Election approached, there was little sign of this happening. Major admitted ‘the logs were pretty well jammed’.3 Although he made it clear that Ministers would not meet with Sinn Fein again until the IRA declared a ‘genuine end to this renewed violence’,4 British officials were authorized to keep in touch with leading members of its party in the hope of releasing the critical log in the jam. It seems there was only one actual face to face meeting in 1996 and that was barely a few weeks after the Docklands bomb. One of the officials present described the attack as ‘cathartic’ for the IRA. ‘They’d re-established their self-respect and sent a message that they couldn’t be messed around,’ he told me. Both sides recognized that, since the secret contacts in 1993, they had travelled too far down the road not to go on trying to find a way forward. The ‘Brits’ knew from all their intelligence reports that the IRA was serious in wanting to end its campaign but was prepared to carry on turning the screw with a strategy it called the Tactical Use of Armed Struggle (TUAS). By this time, Sinn Fein was also using tactics on another front, radicalizing nationalist communities that saw themselves under loyalist siege, most notably at Drumcree, which had now become an annual flashpoint.
It took the British General Election of 1 May 1997 and Tony Blair’s landslide victory to make t
he breakthrough. The Labour leader entered Downing Street with a staggering majority of 179 seats. Major’s tiny majority had severely restricted his room for manoeuvre; Blair’s gave him virtually carte blanche to do what he wanted. Some time before the election, Blair had met some of the British officials involved in the peace process at the Travellers’ Club in London, anticipating that he would soon be working with them. They were impressed by the Prime Minister-in-waiting. Blair said that his hands were not tied by any internal party political differences, unlike John Major, who was trapped by an alliance between the Ulster Unionists and the Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party. From the outset, Blair made Northern Ireland a priority, just as Major had done when he entered Number Ten. But Blair could make a fresh start, unencumbered by the baggage collected over years of negotiation.
The General Election had seen Sinn Fein win a record 16.1 per cent of the poll in Northern Ireland and the twin figureheads of the Republican Movement elected to Westminster. Gerry Adams won back the seat in West Belfast and Martin McGuinness won in Mid-Ulster. In accordance with republican principle, neither took his seat in the House of Commons. The new Prime Minister could now negotiate with Sinn Fein’s two new MPs, but only after the IRA had re-instated its cease-fire. The new Northern Ireland Secretary was Dr Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam. To say Mo was unconventional was an understatement. At meetings she would kick off her shoes, put her stockinged feet on the table and apply moisturizer to her face whilst listening and talking. Unionists were taken aback. Nationalists loved her. Mo had no pretensions, airs or graces and was most frequently described, either in admiration or horror, as being ‘touchy-feely’. Her predecessor, the patrician Sir Patrick Mayhew, had been neither ‘touchy’ nor ‘feely’. With the need to coax Sinn Fein in from the cold and establish the relationship and trust necessary to encourage the IRA to declare a new cease-fire and proceed down the path of peace, Mo was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Within days of taking up her post, the new Secretary of State visited Derry and said that decommissioning would not be a block to Sinn Fein’s participation in the all-party talks. ‘What we want to see first is a cease-fire which is definite in words and deeds so that people know it is serious,’ she said. ‘When we get that, we will be very keen to see Sinn Fein in the talks process.’5