Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  It is impossible to measure in real terms our success or the difference that we made, but I am in no doubt that, although the IRA remained strong and active in Riverdale, at the time of our departure most of the residents were happier with the control that we exercised rather than the way that the IRA did things. Perhaps we were just the more acceptable of two evils. The IRA were unscrupulous vindictive bullies, capable of acting brutally towards their own people should they protest. We were resented because we were an imposed force and I would concede that our methods may often have been indiscriminate and heavy-handed, but, unlike the IRA, we were trying to restore the established law and order and peace. Our treatment was robust, but as George Orwell said, ‘We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would do us harm.’

  Our practice was to stop and check indiscriminately almost every person and every stationary car and driver that we met on the street, whether or not they were suspicious. This was done by radio and telephone very quickly and efficiently through the central records offices, but despite this, today the practice would never be tolerated. Those who didn’t check out were hauled back to MPH for further questioning, but quite when or if they were ever properly cautioned, I don’t know. Fred Basset patrols led us to a huge number of suspects and by picking them up regularly we were able to neutralise their effectiveness because they were ‘quarantined’ by the IRA command after being taken into custody.

  Undoubtedly the turning point of our tour of duty was the bomb that killed David Storrey and Bob Hope because it appalled so many of the locals and led not only to expressions of sympathy, which were encouraging for us, but also to a large number of useful tip-offs. Tommy Gorman’s arrest also had a noticeable effect on morale in the estate as the bullying and oppression was at least temporarily removed. Finding E Company’s weapons, complete, in Riverdale North was another major success and stopped the IRA in their tracks just as they were about to become active again. Despite this they were still able to bring in replacement weapons, but the scale of their operations was seriously reduced. We were less successful at controlling the manufacture and use of explosives. The huge find of explosives behind Riverdale South was very important, but we had no inkling of the bomb that killed David Storrey and Bob Hope and although we discovered many bombs and caches of explosives, it is probable that Riverdale, in particular MacAlpine’s Yard, was used for the manufacture of several other explosive devices.

  The end of the Troubles in Ireland came with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, twenty-six years after our time there. Of necessity a large number of concessions had to be made to achieve it. Many of the people who were at the top of our wanted list have obtained legitimacy through the membership of Sinn Fein, and whilst I accept that Sinn Fein ostensibly promotes a peaceful political solution, I find it hard to separate its leaders from their past. Their actions were aimed at making Ulster ungovernable and to achieve them they were prepared to be totally indiscriminate, killing innocent bystanders as well as the old and the young members of their own Catholic communities.

  We never crossed the path of Gerry Adams, but during our time in Ireland we believed he was prominent in planning and executing terrorist activities in Belfast, in particular the horrors of the Bloody Friday bombings on 21st July 1972, at which time he was said to have commanded the Belfast Battalion. He still denies being a member of the IRA and his defenders would say that he never actually pulled a trigger, if that is a defence.

  Martin McGuinness has admitted to being a member of the IRA, and the Saville Report into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Londonderry on 30th January 1972 said that on that day McGuinness ‘was probably armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun’. The events of Bloody Sunday followed the sequence I have described in our experience, namely: demonstration, stone throwing, riot then gunmen. The actions of the Parachute Regiment cannot possibly be excused, but I hold a belief which is something conveniently overlooked, that McGuinness had a weapon which was used or, more likely, would have been used to provoke fire from the Paras, yet he has avoided even the mildest censure.

  It is highly ironic that Gerard Kelly, who was given two life sentences plus twenty years for bombings and who shot a prison warden in the head in an escape bid, was at one time a Sinn Fein Spokesperson for Policing and Justice. Facts like these surrounding key figures make the conditions of the Good Friday Agreement very hard to accept.

  Andersonstown has undergone much redevelopment and improvement since 1972. For many years Andersonstown Police Station dominated the area and overlooked Milltown Cemetery. To the Catholic community it stood as a symbol of British oppression so its removal was one of the first demands and the site now (2014) stands empty. In an ambitious plan to develop the whole area as the ‘Andersonstown Gateway’ with new shops and industry, the site of the old police station is earmarked as an Expo Centre. Andersonstown bus depot went out of use some years ago when Belfast public transport was reorganised.

  The British Army occupation of Casement Park did not last long after our departure, because of its sensitivity. Like the police station, the return of Casement Park was a useful bargaining chip. Casement Park has always remained a focus for Republican activities, mainly because of the historical link between the GAA and Republicanism.

  The most notorious event associated with the stadium occurred on 19th of March 1988 when two corporals wearing civilian clothes and driving a civilian car attempted to drive down Andersonstown Road. There is doubt and confusion over what unit they were from or if they were a part of a plain-clothes intelligence-gathering organisation, but by an unfortunate coincidence a Republican funeral procession was heading towards Milltown Cemetery. They attempted to get past the procession but the crowd realised they were soldiers and dragged them from the car. They were thrown into Casement Park and brutally beaten before being taken to the Slemish Way area and shot dead.

  The celebration in Casement Park on 13th August 2006 of the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike by Republican prisoners at the Maze Prison was also very controversial. In December 2004, after the Northern Bank was robbed of £26 million, Casement Park was raided partly because the prime suspect in the case, Chris Ward, was employed in the social club.

  An earlier plan to provide a new multi-sport stadium elsewhere in the province would have replaced Winsor Park soccer stadium and Ravenhill rugby stadium as well as Casement Park. The three sports cross the sectarian divide and the new stadium would undoubtedly have promoted unity. Unfortunately it could not be achieved so there are now ambitious plans to modernise Casement Park as a 40,000 all-seater stadium for the GAA on its original site. It is a proposed to develop the nearby area as a business park and shopping centre so that ‘roof terraces provide restaurant space with views to the mountains and city centre.’ I have visions of the harridans of Riverdale sipping a latte as they gaze at the Black Mountain, reminiscing sentimentally about the good old days when the ‘boys’ used to drive informers up the mountain and kneecap them.

  During our time in Casement Park the Sappers began clearing MacAlpine’s Yard and removing the rubble. In part, it was a hearts-and-minds project tidying up a local area of wasteland so that children could play safely on it. In part, it removed places to hide weapons and ammunition and eliminated an area that snipers could use for cover when firing at security forces on the M1 and Finaghy Road. The project is completed and is now the Appleton Park housing estate.

  The two most frequent speakers at the rallies outside Casement Park were Máire Drumm and Michael Farrell. Máire Drumm became the vice president of Sinn Féin and was assassinated by loyalists while recovering in Belfast’s Mater Hospital in 1976. Michael Farrell continued to campaign through the eighties before studying law and moving to Dublin where he became a solicitor. He has been working for Free Legal Advice Centres, Dublin, in particular in cases involving human rights, racism and intolerance.

  No one was ever charged for the murders of David Stor
rey and Bob Hope, though at the time we believed that Tommy Gorman, Desi Graham and Geraldine Hughes were involved. Desi Graham was eventually arrested in Ballymurphy in September 1972 with the notorious Jim Bryson, but I do not know what happened to Geraldine Hughes.

  In 1973 I was called to Belfast along with Sgt Moore and several others from 19 Regiment for the trial of Tommy Gorman. We were accommodated overnight on HMS Maidstone, which by then was used for temporary accommodation for service people. At court we waited and eventually were told that the prosecution case had been withdrawn. I believe the evidence against Gorman was largely circumstantial, but he remained interned. I have since been told that the two responsible for the murders were killed in an ambush elsewhere in Ireland, so perhaps Gorman was not directly involved after all. We will probably never know.

  On his release in 1975 he continued as an active member of the IRA throughout the Seventies and the Eighties, but he was one of a number of members of the IRA who were seriously damaged by Ryder and Eddy’s Sunday Times article about IRA embezzlement (see Chapter 19). Even if the story was false, many had suspected or wanted to believe it and much of the mud stuck.

  With the peace, Gorman was at one time described as a Sinn Fein Community Worker in West Belfast and has worked with the Irish Republican Writers Group. He is a person who has never accepted the Good Friday Agreement which he sees as selling out the cause for which he and others fought so hard. He is strongly opposed to Sinn Fein and is quoted as saying.

  If twenty years ago in the republican movement someone had said, ‘Let’s recognise the unionist veto; join a power-sharing government in Stormont; give up all or most of our guns and wait for Ian Paisley to agree when Sinn Fein can enter a coalition with the DUP,’ that person would have gone down a hole in a remote bog or have been sent in a straitjacket to a lunatic asylum.

  He has also said:

  I am questioning the direction in which we are being led because I and others believed we were fighting for a secular, socialist republic and not an extension of the free state, which we are now seen to be aiming for.

  I believe he has now renounced violence and has said that he regrets the carnage of the car bombs of Bloody Friday with which he is suspected of being involved. He does not condone the actions of the ‘Real IRA’, but remains committed to the establishment of a united socialist Ireland freed from rule by London or the current Dublin government. He gives talks and offers comments on Republican affairs.

  In many ways I understand his attitude to the peace and, paradoxically, hold similar opinions on the British position. I cannot begin to understand the methods of IRA members who were prepared to bomb indiscriminately in Ulster or on the mainland and believe that these crimes were too serious for the perpetrators to be released early as part of some bargaining process. I understand that concessions must be made in order to achieve peace, but in his poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ John McCrae includes the lines:

  … If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep…

  In an effort to appease the IRA and cosy up to the USA, where the Irish immigrant community gave active support to the terrorists, the Government was prepared to give too much away, which makes a mockery of the sacrifices made and the risks taken by David Storrey, Bob Hope and men like those of 28 Battery. It ‘breaks faith’ with them and does not honour their memory.

  A major reason for the American withdrawal from Vietnam was the loss of support for the war from the people back home in the States. Returning servicemen were told that the war was wrong, yet they had served their country, risked their lives and experienced traumatic events. The feeling that their actions were scorned or undervalued contributed to psychiatric problems in many.

  The Good Friday Agreement gave immunity to terrorists from prosecution, but did not give similar protection to the servicemen. Today the attitude of much of the media to service activity in Northern Ireland undermines the morale of those who served there and I believe many will share similar feelings to the Vietnam veterans. People that we helped to put behind bars for horrific crimes are now ‘forgiven’ and are members of the Northern Ireland government or part of ‘respectable’ society. There is little acknowledgement of the courage that servicemen showed and the valuable service that they provided when Britain was close to civil war. Instead the media seems full of enquiries, investigations and criticism of the conduct of the peacekeepers, usually to appease Sinn Fein/IRA.

  These enquiries frequently fail to recognise the intense pressures that servicemen were under at the time. Such criticism corrodes and undermines the value of what they achieved and the irony of accusing British Servicemen of human rights violations against the violent thugs of the IRA who did not recognise the Geneva Convention (often referred to as ‘asymmetric warfare’) should not be ignored! Too high a price was paid for the peace and the efforts of the military are subsequently being undervalued in a similar but, perhaps, less serious way than Vietnam veterans.

  The elusive Peter ‘the Para’ McMullen probably returned to the USA during the time that we were in Belfast. We believed then that the IRA Command suspected that he had been misappropriating some of the funds he had raised in America. In 1974 he was arrested in the Irish Republic and served three years’ imprisonment for firearms offences. He then moved to the USA and surrendered in San Francisco in 1978, requesting political asylum, claiming that he would be targeted by the IRA after informing on some of its members.

  The British Government applied for his extradition to face charges of terrorism, but for many years he successfully fought them through the courts on the grounds that his crimes were political. He lived an open life and in March 1982 featured, along with several other IRA fugitives in the States, in a Panorama programme which described how they were using political immunity to escape justice. At the time he was working as a chef in Hawaii – not a bad place to be exiled!

  He described many acts of terrorism in which he had been involved and named those who were with him. Of particular significance, in a BBC Panorama programme broadcast on 19th December 1983 he directly implicated Gerry Adams. McMullen had been directly involved in the bombings of Bloody Friday and he described discussions on the subject at a Belfast Brigade planning meeting in which Adams played a full and active part, though many believe this to be untrue.

  In 1996 he waived his immunity and was brought back to Britain to stand trial for the bombing of Claro Barracks in Ripon in 1974. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fourteen years in jail, but he was released almost immediately. Time served in custody in the USA was taken into account as was his convincing renouncement of the IRA and his poor state of health.

  Terry Herdman came from a family with a strong Republican background. His mother, in particular, was an active supporter of the IRA and a perpetual thorn in our side. Terry grew up as a member of the Fianna and as an adult became an active Volunteer – we suspected, at a low level. We got to know him early on in our tour, as he had distinctive shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, and we regularly lifted him. At one stage the Regimental Intelligence Officer told me to ‘lay off Herdman for a while’ as he had previously given us good information but, because we lifted him so regularly, was now almost permanently quarantined so was not picking up any worthwhile intelligence.

  Shortly after this, we noticed his absence and were told by his mother that Terry and his brother had ‘gone south’ to their grandparents because life in Andersonstown was unsafe. Some weeks later his brother was seen back on the streets of Riverdale. This could have meant two things: either Terry was in the north, keeping his head down, probably involved in nefarious IRA activities; or, more likely, he was in the south, on the run from the IRA.

  We saw or heard no more of him, but in June 1973 Terry’s body was found with two gunshot wounds to the head in County Tyrone with a note pinned to his body reading ‘tout’. The IRA had killed him because they believed he was an informer and since then his girlfriend has fought strenuously to clear his
name. The IRA subsequently made a statement that, although Herdman had not been an informer he had been ‘a liability’ and stood by their order to execute him. An informer is normally coerced into working for the Crown, which in Terry’s case I believe was unlikely; he seems to have just passed on information whenever he was arrested without the need for too much encouragement.

  The members of 28 Battery returned to Germany and, with few exceptions, resumed their normal military careers. I have mentioned previously that a number of senior NCOs returned to Northern Ireland on short tours of duty working with undercover organisations. Some time later I was asked if I would consider volunteering for ‘plain clothes duty’ in Northern Ireland, but at the time I was hoping to serve with the SAS so my name never went forward. I never regretted this as the MRF (though by then disbanded) had been a shadowy organisation. Tales I heard from those involved suggested that they often operated too close to the law for my liking and I wondered if successive units were any different. The Northern Ireland tour of duty finished for 28 Battery on 16th November 1972, but they were to return just twelve months later for another four months, though thankfully in a much less hazardous area.

  The epilogue should be the final chapter of a story that reveals the fates of all the characters and draws the tale to a close. In the above narrative I have done this for the duration of 28 Battery’s tour in Northern Ireland, but one part is still missing – what happened to me.

  My personal Northern Ireland epilogue will not be complete for many more chapters.

  Chapter 21

  Back in Germany

  Today there is a far greater awareness of the effects of stress in battle and soldiers rarely return straight home from an operational tour. Instead they usually stop over on the return journey for a period of thirty-six hours or so to undergo a period of ‘decompression’ which gives them the chance to unwind and think and talk about their experiences, if they want to.