Loughgall, County Armagh, Friday, May 8, 1987. It was just after 7:15 on a bright spring evening when the shooting began. Witnesses later said that the gunfire seemed to go on forever, but in such situations the mind often plays tricks and events can seem to happen in slow motion. Nonetheless the shooting was relentless. When finally it ceased, an eerie silence descended over the shattered remnants of the village’s police station. The scene that greeted the Special Air Services (SAS) soldiers and policemen as they carefully emerged from their hiding places was shocking even by the standards of a Northern Ireland whose seventeen years of bloody conflict had been regularly punctuated by multiple loss of life. Scattered around the bullet-riddled shell of a Toyota Hiace van lay the bodies of the cream of the Provisional IRA in County Tyrone. The eight-man active service unit (ASU), the cutting edge of the East Tyrone Brigade, had been wiped out in the carefully planned ambush, cut to ribbons in a withering fusillade of automatic fire. Estimates of the number of rounds fired by the British that evening reach as high as twelve hundred.
The East Tyrone ASU’s plan had been to destroy Loughgall police station with a huge bomb. The device had been placed in the bucket of a mechanical digger hijacked from a farm near Dungannon and then driven the twenty-five minutes or so to the picturesque village situated deep in Armagh’s rolling apple orchard country. Loughgall police station was a part-time post, manned by just three or four RUC officers, which opened only in the mornings and afternoons. The IRA men expected to find it unoccupied when they arrived, and anticipated no resistance. Three of the ASU traveled with the digger, while the remaining five drove ahead in the Toyota van, scouting for patrols and checkpoints. The digger easily broke through the wire mesh rocket-proof fencing that surrounded the police station, and it was rammed into the building so that when the explosion came it would cause maximum damage. The fuse was lit, but just as the bomb detonated the SAS opened fire.
The East Tyrone IRA had walked into a carefully laid trap. More than three dozen British soldiers drawn from the elite SAS regiment were lying in wait for them. Armed with heavy machine guns and automatic rifles, they poured bullets into the startled IRA men from at least four points. Backing them up were scores of officers from the RUC’s elite paramilitary wing, the Headquarters Mobile Support Unit, while shadowing the IRA operation as it unfolded that day were many more police and military surveillance personnel. The scale of the British operation spoke eloquently to the quality of intelligence that had come their way. The conclusion was difficult to avoid: someone, somewhere in the IRA had betrayed the East Tyrone Brigade.
The Loughgall ambush resulted in the heaviest single death toll suffered by the Provisional IRA in all the years of the Troubles. The only comparable loss in IRA history had happened way back in the middle of the Tan War in February 1921 when, in an operation characterized by the same military ruthlessness, a fifteen-strong IRA company was pinned down in a cottage in Clonmult, County Cork, by a mixed party of British troops and auxiliary police. After a fierce firefight the IRA men surrendered, but when they did they were set upon and twelve were killed. Although the scale of the slaughter at Loughgall was not as great, it probably dealt a more devastating blow. In fact the ambush had two damaging consequences for the Provisionals. Not only was the morale of IRA activists and Provisional supporters throughout Ireland rocked by the killings, but the organization lost a number of irreplaceable members, skilled and determined operators who had been slated by GHQ to play a key role in the planned post Eksund “Tet offensive.”
Even more damaging were the subsequent suspicions that have surrounded the identity and motives of those who apparently betrayed the East Tyrone Brigade. The questions have lurked in the minds of the IRA in the county ever since, hanging over Tyrone republicans like a huge black cloud that threatens to explode into a storm yet never quite does. The years since 1987 may have passed, but the speculation has never ceased about whether the traitor came from Tyrone or from elsewhere in the IRA and, if so, how high up, or, alternatively, whether the British stumbled upon the operation by expert surveillance or whether flaws in the restructured IRA sealed the unit’s fate. Even darker and more sinister are the questions that link the ambush to the then growing peace process and the impact on its development.
Whatever doubt exists about the identity or role of the Loughgall informer, there is no doubt that the ambush robbed the IRA of some of its best fighting men. Perhaps the most feared and certainly most wanted by the British was Jim Lynagh from Tully in County Monaghan. One of fourteen children, thirty-one-year-old Lynagh had joined the IRA as a teenager and was soon making his name as a fearless activist. In 1973 he had a narrow escape when a bomb he was carrying exploded prematurely. He was badly injured but survived and then was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, becoming one of the few Monaghan men ever to serve time in Long Kesh. In 1978 he was released, immediately rejoined the IRA, and a year later was elected a Sinn Fein councillor on Monaghan Urban District Council. Three years later he was caught carrying bullets by the Irish police and was sent to Portlaoise prison. Freed in April 1986, he once again resumed active service with the East Tyrone Brigade.
Lynagh was a ruthless IRA gunman, whose politics were simple and straightforward, his belief in military methods as unshakable as his readiness to conform to the party line was undependable, as a former colleague remembered:
He was outside the charmed circle. He was regarded [by Sinn Fein leaders] as not quite respectable enough, a bit too wild for them. He was no saint. He had been involved in the odd punch up, and his brother had been charged with shooting a bouncer. He was also a hard-line republican. I can remember when the word came [from Sinn Fein headquarters] not to mention the North or the war on the doorsteps while canvassing [for election] and to concentrate instead on social and economic issues, Lynagh objected and then just ignored it.1
Despite the leadership’s doubts about Lynagh, GHQ had chosen him to play a key part in the “Tet offensive”; he was one of a small group of trusted operators taken to Libya in 1986 for training in the weaponry being smuggled from Qaddafi’s arsenals.
Lynagh’s ideological soulmate was thirty-two-year-old Padraig McKearney, a member of a renowned republican family from The Moy, on the border between Tyrone and Armagh, whom Lynagh had met in jail and befriended. McKearney’s maternal grandfather, Tom Murray, had fought with the Roscommon IRA in 1920, and the family tradition lived on with the Provisionals. The oldest McKearney brothers all joined the IRA as teenagers in the early 1970s, and a sister, Margaret, has lived in Dublin, out of the reach of the British authorities, since the mid-1970s, not long after Scotland Yard branded her as “the most dangerous and active woman terrorist” operating in Britain.2 Their youngest brother, Sean, was killed along with a lifelong friend, Eugene Martin, in May 1974 when a bomb intended for a local garage exploded prematurely as they were transporting it. It was probably his first IRA operation, and he was just eighteen at the time. The oldest brother, Tommy McKearney, rose through the ranks to become a member of the IRA’s GHQ until he was arrested in 1976 and processed through the Castlereagh conveyor belt to a cell in the H Blocks of Long Kesh. When the IRA prisoners decided to fast for the return of political status in the autumn of 1980, Tommy McKearney volunteered and was one of the seven inmates chosen to go on hunger strike. When the protest ended in confused circumstances on December 18, he had gone without food for fifty-three days. The Troubles were to touch the McKearney family again more than a decade later when the youngest son, Kevin, was shot dead by Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gunmen in the family butcher’s business in The Moy and an uncle, Jack, fatally wounded. Later that year another uncle, Charlie Fox, and his wife, Tess, were shot dead in their home by the same UVF. Few republican families had been as devastated by the Troubles as the McKearneys.
Padraig McKearney joined the IRA in 1971, when he was seventeen, and served two spells in jail, the first in 1974, when he was convicted of blowing up a factory, and again in 1980, when he was caught with a loaded Sten gun. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment for that offense but never served the full term. In September 1983 he and thirty-seven other IRA prisoners broke out of Long Kesh prison in a spectacular escape. Like his close friend and fellow escaper Seamus McElwaine, another republican nonconformist, Padraig McKearney reported back for duty with the IRA as soon as he was safely across the Border.
Along with twenty-nine-year-old Gerard O’Callaghan, Lynagh and McKearney were the senior members of the East Tyrone ASU that day. Their commander was Patrick Kelly, the thirty-two-year-old OC of Tyrone IRA, who drove the Toyota van into Loughgall. Regarded by some as the architect of the IRA’s strategy in Tyrone, Kelly was seen differently by the activists. “He was there for diplomatic reasons, to represent the interests of Northern Command and McKenna [the chief of staff],” commented one. But two generations of IRA men were shot dead in Loughgall. Declan Arthurs (twenty-one), Seamus Donnelly (nineteen), Tony Gormley (twenty-five), and Eugene Kelly (twenty-five) were all chums who lived in and around the staunch republican village of Galbally, home of the dead IRA hunger striker Martin Hurson, whose death in 1981 persuaded them to join the IRA. According to those who knew them, their role model and the IRA man they most looked up to was Jim Lynagh.
THE LOSS of the East Tyrone Brigade devastated the Provisional IRA. None could have guessed it back in 1987, but the killings at Loughgall marked the start of a concerted undercover British and loyalist offensive against organized republicanism in the county, its supporters, and uninvolved Catholics which would leave over twenty IRA members and twice that number of nationalists dead within five years. As a contribution to the internal and external pressures on the IRA to go down the peace process road, this slaughter in Tyrone should never be understated.
Tyrone had always played a crucial role in the annals of Irish republicanism, and a setback to the IRA in Tyrone would be bound to damage the cause throughout Ireland. It had been that way for over three hundred years. Ever since the great Tudor campaigns against the remnants of Ireland’s Gaelic chieftains, Tyrone had stood out for the strength of its resistance to English rule. The defeat and death in 1648 of Owen Roe O’Neill, great chieftain of the Tyrone clans who had returned from European exile to lead his people into battle, marked the end of opposition throughout Ireland to the English occupation. It was not until a hundred and fifty years later that the flame of Irish rebellion was lit again when a Southern Protestant, Theobald Wolfe Tone, made common cause with the Northern Catholic Defenders to mold the United Irishmen. The defeat of O’Neill also consolidated the plantation of Ulster by lowland Scots and Northern English Protestants whose seizure of Catholic land gave England a buffer against French or Spanish invasion through its Irish back door but left a deep and enduring scar on the Tyrone psyche. “Rural memories are long,” commented one Tyrone republican. “People know which land they lost in the plantation and who took it. They can identify their fields, and in all probability the same Protestant families who took it from their ancestors are still living there.”3
Military defeat and repression created two tendencies in Northern nationalism, based partly on differences in social class, partly on conflicting political interest. One, from which the Provisionals sprang, preached physical resistance to British and unionist rule and the attainment of full independence, while the other, a Hibernian, strongly Catholic tendency, argued for slow constitutional advancement and the placing of sectional before national interest. The Hibernian tendency thrived in most of pre-partition Ulster and was dominant in most counties. Tyrone was the exception. There the two forces were historically more evenly balanced and are even to this day, the advantage tilting in one direction or the other, depending on which is thought better placed to give unionism the hardest time.
Tyrone republicans were to play a significant part in the 1916 Rising and the subsequent Anglo-Irish war, not least because of ties with Irish-American sympathizers on the east coast of the United States. Following the collapse of an alliance between Parnell’s parliamentarians and the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood in the late nineteenth century, Irish republicanism found a new home in New York, where the Fenians regrouped to form the secret, elitist Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), whose Military Council in Ireland and the United States plotted and planned the Easter rebellion.
The IRB set up an American wing called Clann na Gael, and Tyrone men would always figure prominently in its affairs. The best known of these was the “father” of the Easter Rising, Tom Clarke, one of the 1916 Proclamation signatories, whose mother was from Tyrone and who had been reared in Dungannon, where he joined the IRB. Clarke emigrated to New York, but the Clann sent him back to Ireland, where he was arrested and then imprisoned in England for fifteen years. After his release he quietly recruited for the IRB in Dublin in preparation for the Easter Rising. Using a tactic that was to be imitated by future republican groups, the IRB infiltrated and ultimately controlled the much larger and open Irish Volunteers, who provided the manpower for the Rising. Clarke paid for his militancy with his life. Along with Patrick Pearse, who was regarded by the British as the leader of the failed insurrection, Clarke was in one of the first groups of rebel leaders executed by a British firing squad in the days after the Rising.
Clarke’s activities on behalf of the Clann began a long tradition of Tyrone involvement in the group’s clandestine support for militant republicanism in Ireland. In the buildup to the Rising, the Clann was headed by J. J. McGarritty, from Carrickmore in Mid-Tyrone, who sent Roger Casement to Germany in a fruitless search for weapons to arm the 1916 rebels. He later helped raise thousands of dollars for the IRA’s 1919–21 campaign and hosted de Valera during his lengthy stay in America. The Tyrone influence in Clann na Gael lived on, and during the Provisionals’ campaign most of its leading New York members were from the county, many of them prosperous figures in the city’s construction industry. While the media focused on Noraid as the largest U.S. fund-raiser for the Provisionals, the fact was that the secretive and close-knit Clann was a much more significant source of support.
In 1916 Tyrone was chosen by the IRB as the rendezvous point from where the Northern IRA was to mobilize and play its part in the Rising. Fearing that sectarian violence would engulf Belfast and Derry, the IRB had ordered that there be no military action in the North and instead told Northern units to gather in Coalisland, from where they were to link up with Liam Mellowes in Galway. The idea was that they would help hold the west, in a line from Cavan to Limerick. When the orders were countermanded by the Volunteers’ commander in chief, Eoin MacNeill, most of the Tyrone men returned to their homes but some went on to fight.
Tyrone’s tradition of militant republicanism went hand in hand with an often stubborn streak of dissent against distant leaderships, whether in Dublin or in Belfast. Liam Kelly was perhaps the best example of this breed. Born and reared in Pomeroy, Kelly almost single-handedly forced the IRA leadership into launching its 1956 Border Campaign. Interned by the Stormont government in the 1940s, Kelly, who had joined the IRA at sixteen, was OC of the IRA in Tyrone, and he was impatient for battle. When he was expelled from the IRA in 1951 because of unauthorized military action, he took most of the Tyrone membership with him and formed Saor Uladh (Free Ulster), which scandalized unionists when it occupied and sealed Kelly’s home village of Pomeroy. In 1953 he was elected to the Stormont parliament as an abstentionist MP on a platform of utter simplicity: “I do not believe in constitutional methods, I believe in the use of force; the more the better, the sooner the better—that may be treason or sedition, call it whatever the hell you like.”4 Nearly a quarter of a century later his nephew Patrick would lead the Loughgall unit to their deaths.
Curiously, Kelly’s political line mirrored that of the post-1986 Sinn Fein, although his methods were much more violent than those with whom figures like Gerry Adams would ultimately be comfortable. Kelly happily accepted de Valera’s 1937 constitution, linked up with Sean MacBride’s strongly republican Clann na Poblachta, which was a partner in the 1948 coalition government and was happy to take a seat in the Irish Senate, courtesy of MacBride in 1954. Kelly’s quarrel was not with the Irish state but with the Northern state, and his pursuit of that made him an irritating thorn in the flesh of the IRA leadership. In November 1955 Saor Uladh bombed and shot up Roslea RUC station in County Fermanagh. Although Kelly was forced to flee and eventually sought refuge in New York, the unionist government was startled by the attack and the IRA leadership was forced to contemplate advancing its own military plans or risk defections to extremism. A year later Operation Harvest was launched.
The same streak of independence was evident in the years following the 1969 IRA split. Most of Tyrone stayed loyal to the Goulding leadership, if only because the Army Convention of that year had backed it, but the line between the Officials and the Provisionals was always blurred. The ideological differences that had split the movement in the South mattered little in Tyrone. What did count was which IRA was able to hit the British hardest. The killing of the Official IRA OC, John Paddy Mullen, and another member of the Official IRA, Hugh Heron, in October 1972 illustrated the point. British soldiers shot them dead at a roadblock, and there were angry allegations that they had been killed in cold blood. The Officials’ failure to strike back, despite Goulding’s pledge at their funerals that they would, strengthened support for the Provisionals, and Mullen and Heron were quietly transformed into posthumous Provos. Their names now appear among the Tyrone dead in the republican roll of honor published each Easter in An Phoblacht–Republican News. As late as 1977 the local pro-Goulding Republican Club would make no distinction between the Provisional and Official IRA when it contributed to the Prisoners Dependants Fund. Goulding eventually expelled them.
The leading Provisional IRA figure in Tyrone after the split was Kevin Mallon, whose trial during the Border Campaign had been a cause célèbre. Accused of the 1957 murder of an RUC sergeant killed in a booby trap bomb near Coalisland, Mallon was acquitted when evidence was produced showing he had been ill treated by his police interrogators. Mallon had a strong following in Tyrone, but he kept those under his control more or less independent of the Provisional Army Council after the 1969 split until, as a former colleague put it, “he was caught up in the tidal wave”5 and gave allegiance to the Provos.
Lynagh, McKearney, and other members of the East Tyrone ASU showed the same independent and rebellious streaks. They opposed much of the Adams agenda, especially the dropping of abstentionism, fearing that recognizing and accepting the Irish parliament would lead inevitably to endorsing the Stormont and Westminster bodies too. Had they lived, they almost certainly would have also opposed the peace process and perhaps might have brought significant numbers of the IRA in Tyrone and Monaghan with them. What distinguished their opposition to the leadership was that it was expressed in both political and military terms. Lynagh and McKearney had worked together to oppose the dropping of the absten-tionist rule and had used exactly the same arguments as O Bradaigh and O Conaill, principally that it would lead to constitutionalism and inevitably to the dilution of armed struggle. At the Tyrone-Monaghan brigade convention, which chose delegates for the Army Convention, they spoke out against the motion and clashed with the chief of staff, Kevin McKenna, a fellow Tyrone man but at that stage a strong Adams supporter. They were counting on the support of another veteran republican (J.B.) Joe O’Hagan, a former quartermaster general and IRA Executive member from Lurgan, County Armagh, who had found refuge in Monaghan. They believed they had his support, but when the brigade convention voted, O’Hagan, like the majority of delegates, went with Adams. Despite that setback, Lynagh and Paddy Kelly attended the 1986 Army Convention and voted against Adams, although they were in a minority of the brigade delegation.
Their military critique was also calculated to cause friction with the leadership. It opposed two tenets of the Army Council’s strategy as it was developed in the mid-to late 1980s, both closely associated with the Adams concept of republican struggle: namely the notion that the IRA’s war was a piece of armed propaganda and that Britain would be forced to move when enough soldiers were killed. “[Lynagh and McKearney] didn’t believe sending Brits home in boxes would work, because the British army wasn’t a conscript army like the Americans in Vietnam,” recalled a former associate.
They were working on the basis that a radical departure had to be made. The idea was either total war or no war at all, to force the British out of their bases and to make the place ungovernable. They said that either the IRA should take it to that level or finish with the war; killing the odd UDR man did nothing. They believed the “Green Book” [the IRA manual of tactics and regulations] was shit, that it was based upon the false idea that the IRA would be able to operate from its home base and at the same time be able to resist interrogation at Castlereagh. Their response was that the enemy will not allow you to survive in his bosom. Would Castro have survived if he had been in Havana rather than in the mountains? That was the question they asked.6
The pair had gone to Chief of Staff Kevin McKenna with a radical proposal to build a flying column, consisting of perhaps twenty or thirty trusted activists, which would be based deep in the South, with its own dedicated training facilities. The column would never break camp, in a conscious imitation of the flying columns that had run the British ragged in Cork during the 1919–21 conflict. This was meant to ensure that it would be more secure; an informer in the midst of the column would reveal himself if he separated from the group, as an informer would have to do in order to communicate with his or her handlers. The column would strike three to five times a year, aiming to cause maximum damage and disruption to the British administration. Satellite groups of two or three men would all the while attack on a harassment basis and collect intelligence for the bigger strikes.
McKenna turned down the idea, condemning it as too impractical, too ambitious, and not sustainable, and rejected their request for a separate training camp on security grounds. Friction between McKenna and the Lynagh-McKearney team intensified. There were attempts to separate the pair, apparently aimed at weakening their influence. “McKenna tried to put Lynagh in one zone and McKearney in the other,” recalled an associate. “It was possibly also an attempt to divide and conquer, to cause rivalry over assets and the like.”7 Another IRA source suggested that McKearney may have been seen as the greater irritant: “Padraig and McKenna had never really got on. After the escape in ’83 the men were offered the choice of going to America or back to active service. Padraig got the feeling McKenna would have liked to see him take the boat. For his part Padraig was very strongly opposed to the 1986 decision [to drop abstentionism]. He felt afterward that people who were in favor of running down the war were being pushed forward.”8
McKenna and the Army Council did not like these militant views, but they could not afford to ignore them. Lynagh and McKearney had powerful friends and allies. Among those who backed their agenda or at least were sympathetic to it, according to IRA sources in Tyrone, were some of the most active IRA gunmen and bombers of the day. The claim is not, it has to be stressed, supported by any independent evidence, but it has been made by sources who claim a deep and close knowledge of the relationship between Lynagh-McKearney and others of a like mind. The other dissidents and malcontents, according to this version of events, included not only the bulk of the Loughgall unit but also Seamus McElwaine and Kieran Fleming, who had escaped from Long Kesh with McKearney in 1983, Antoin MacGiolla Bhride from South Derry, Dessie Grew from Armagh, and the Ardboe men Michael “Pete” Ryan and Liam Ryan, the former OC of the New York IRA who was brigade intelligence officer when the Loughgall ambush happened. The area covered by the dissenters embraced not just East Tyrone but Armagh, South Derry, and Monaghan, the most important and active operational area outside of South Armagh. Like the Loughgall ASU, McElwaine, Fleming, MacGiolla Bhride, Pete Ryan, and Grew were all to be killed in British undercover ambushes, while Liam Ryan died in an expert UVF gun attack on his bar.
Although McKenna had turned down the East Tyrone flying column proposal, Northern Command did order the unit to bomb and mortar police and UDR bases in 1985, although in this case the strategy was a limited one, aimed at frustrating the repair and renewal of security bases. The East Tyrone ASU spearheaded much of this activity, and a sort of flying column was set up—but it came together only for specific operations, and that made it very different from the full-time and secure column Lynagh and McKearney had in mind.
In December 1985 the East Tyrone ASU blew up Ballygawley RUC station and killed two policemen who were stationed inside. Then it mortared bases in Castlederg and Carrickmore. In the autumn of 1986 the police station in “The Birches” near Portadown, County Armagh, was devastated by a bomb carried to its target in the bucket of a mechanical digger. The Loughgall attack was supposed to be a repeat performance. East Tyrone was also to the fore in the offensive against building contractors. Two weeks before the Loughgall ambush, five ASU members took fifty-two-year-old Harry Henry out of his Magherafelt, County Derry, home in his stocking feet and shot him in the head. Henry’s brother owned a building firm that specialized in doing work for the security forces.
Although the IRA leadership had moved to meet some of the East Tyrone demands, Lynagh and McKearney felt it still fell far short of the sort of tactic they believed could cause a qualitative shift of fortune in the IRA’s direction. Relations between McKenna and McKearney in particular were worsening, and the number of operations carried out by East Tyrone kept to a minimum, as one dissident confidant recalled: “[McKenna] kept on knocking back ideas for operations and separating Padraig from the rest of the [East Tyrone] unit. He was excluded from the attack on The Birches for example, and it was like McKenna was trying to tell the others they didn’t need Padraig.”9
In the months between the 1986 Convention and the Loughgall ambush, McKearney began putting out feelers in Dublin and elsewhere in a bid to acquire weapons that would be used to arm the rebels if they decided to break free of the Provisionals. He was also in touch with the faction that had coalesced around the Provisional IRA renegade turned INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey, whose violent campaign in the South Derry countryside in the late 1970s was matched in its ferocity only by that in East Tyrone. McGlinchey, who had even less regard for the Adams leadership than the East Tyrone men, was in jail at this point, but his formidable wife, Mary, an experienced and ruthless operator in her own right, had assumed leadership of his group. The contacts between McKearney and the INLA were designed to test whether they could find common ground, but when Mary McGlinchey was killed in January 1987, shot dead by unknown gunmen as she was bathing her two infant sons, the liaison ended.
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1987, just weeks before the Loughgall ambush, the dissidents met to discuss their plans. The venue was Seamus McElwaine’s family home on the Monaghan-Fermanagh Border. “They sat down in North Monaghan and asked their colleagues whether it would be feasible to break away and form a separate organization which would put their flying column idea into practice,” recalled a former associate. “It was an informal meeting, seven or eight of them were present.”10 Naturally, the meeting was kept secret from mainstream IRA loyalists. Another source familiar with these events added, “The gist [of the meeting] was that they [decided that they] could get arms from their own sources and move away from the Provos.”11
Jim Lynagh and Padraig McKearney did not live long enough to put whatever plans they had made into action. Since their deaths in the Lough-gall ambush the search for an explanation of what went wrong that day has obsessed many Tyrone republicans. Was there an informer and, if so, who was he? The obsession caused near-paranoia to grip the IRA in the brigade area. Patrick Kelly’s successor as OC, Brian Arthurs, went as far as splitting East Tyrone in two to see if this could isolate the guilty party, and for a long time brigade operations were suspended altogether while internal investigations were carried out.
Certain features of the Loughgall operation suggested the possibility of a more innocent explanation. Glaring mistakes were made in the planning and execution of the bombing which inadvertently could have put the British on the trail, mistakes that spoke of a reckless overconfidence and care lessness. There were, for instance, no probes made around Loughgall before the attack. This was routine practice in South Armagh, where, before am bushes or other IRA operations, sheepdogs were sent into adjoining fields to flush out under cover soldiers. Nor was there any effort to give the attackers the protection of covering fire just in case something went wrong. Such sloppiness at this late stage possibly indicated that other lapses had occurred earlier in the preparatory work and it is conceivable that this is how the British learned of the plan. An internal IRA investigation held afterward concluded that something like this might have happened, and that there had been a leak at the Monaghan end of the operation, although the precise source was never identified.12 The IRA leadership remains as much in the dark about what really happened as anyone else.
The number of theories suggesting that an informer had betrayed the unit have multiplied with the years. An Ardboe woman, Colette O’Neill, came under suspicion in 1989, for instance, and was briefly kidnapped by the IRA but rescued by the RUC, which seemed to have excellent information about her plight. She later made a deal with the IRA in which she agreed not to give evidence against her abductors if the IRA left her alone. In an interview with the author not long afterward, she denied being the Loughgall informer, although she admitted that a phone call had been made from her home to members of the ASU on the day of the operation, clearing the way for the bomb to be picked up. Another theory blames a ninth member of the ASU, who was supposed to be on the Loughgall mission but missed it. Although the man protested his innocence, not surprisingly he left for England not long afterward and has not been seen since.
Some British sources have claimed that electronic surveillance of the homes of two other Tyrone IRA members, Gerard and Martin Harte, near Omagh, put the British on the trail of the Loughgall operation.13 The same eavesdropping operation directed against their home led a year later to the death of the Hartes, lured into an ambush near their home by the SAS. The Harte brothers’ role in the Loughgall operation was to hijack the mechanical digger, and the sources say that electronic bugs picked up details of this part of the plan. Against this, local sources claim that while this may have happened, it did not necessarily mean the British would have known the target.
“Liam Ryan did the intelligence work for Loughgall, and he insisted that he had compartmentalized everything, that no single participant would have known all the details,” recalled a confidant of the Tyrone Brigade intelligence officer. “He felt [the leak] had to be at a centralized level; he would have concluded that it had to be higher up than Tyrone.”14 Other Tyrone IRA sources corroborate this and say that some of the minor members of the Loughgall team were not told about the operation until fourteen or fifteen hours beforehand, not enough time for the British to mount an SAS ambush on the scale of that which destroyed the ASU.15
Another factor may have led to the Loughgall ambush. Since the mid-1980s the IRA leadership had exercised tighter and tighter control over the IRA’s day-to-day activity as it became clearer that bad IRA operations, those in which civilians were put at risk or killed, could seriously erode electoral support for Sinn Fein. During the 1983 general election a huge bomb aimed at Andersonstown RUC station had wrecked homes in the streets where Gerry Adams had been canvassing for votes not long before. The Ivor Bell–Belfast Brigade revolt against Adams during 1983 and 1984 had led to the deaths of Edgar Graham, Jimmy Campbell, and Mary Travers, daughter of the Catholic magistrate Tom Travers. Adams had warned of the need for “controlled and disciplined” IRA actions at the 1983 Ard Fheis.16 After Sinn Fein’s poor performance in the June 1984 Euro election, he returned to the theme: “[T]here are a number of people who, while they voted for us in June 1983, may not have been able to tolerate some aspects of IRA operations,” he cautioned. “I think it is fair to say there are varying degrees of tolerance within the Nationalist electorate for aspects of the armed struggle.”17 The ballot box was beginning to curb the Armalite.
Just before the death of Seamus McElwaine, killed by the SAS in County Fermanagh in April 1986, Northern Command got permission to vet most IRA operations in Northern Ireland in a bid to forestall further electoral damage. “There had been some bad operations, politically bad operations, and this was done to correct that,” recalled one activist. “McGuinness [the Northern commander] got authority from the Army Council to vet operations. Before that, area commanders would run through their plans in very general terms, for example, ‘I have a policeman or a British patrol,’ with the chief of staff or director of operations. Now people had to go into the detail of the operations.”18
IRA activists had an almost pathological fear of sharing operational intelligence with people they did not know or who did not come from their area. No one ever suggested that Martin McGuinness or any other senior figures at his level were passing on information to the British, but the very fact that the circle of operational knowledge was widened beyond those chosen to go on the mission heightened fears of leaks, surveillance and even treachery.
The vertical IRA structures introduced by Adams after his Cage 11 days combined with the greater political control exercised over operational matters made it easier, not harder, for British intelligence to penetrate the IRA’s nerve centers. The old battalion and company architecture was leaky, for sure, but whatever damage an informer did was usually confined to one small area. Even then it was a relatively easy task to isolate and identify the traitor. A well-placed agent in the remodeled IRA could by contrast cause enormous harm throughout the length and breadth of the organization and be pretty sure of getting away with it. Those on the ground who fought the IRA’s war were acutely aware of these dangers.
Loughgall was a case in point. The bombing was a Northern Command–directed operation, but Lynagh objected strongly to having to share vital details of the mission plan with others. Before the go-ahead was given for the operation he traveled to Monaghan to see Kevin McKenna to complain, and the two had a blazing row. “McKenna and Lynagh never saw eye to eye,” remembered one associate.19
But this alone does not explain the deep gulf of mistrust that separates many Tyrone republicans from their leadership beyond the county. To explain that, it is necessary to go back to the secret meeting of East Tyrone activists who gathered in North Monaghan in the spring of 1987 to discuss splitting from the Provisionals. “They made a big mistake by including someone who really shouldn’t have been there,” concluded an associate.20 This was a reference to a Belfast IRA man whose family had a record of long and loyal service to the leadership. No proof or evidence has ever been produced to show that he or anyone else told the leadership about the dissidents’ plot, but in the hothouse world of the IRA that hardly mattered. “This is the reason for all the suspicion around Loughgall,” said the same source.21
FROM THE TIME of the Loughgall ambush onward, it was more or less open season on the Tyrone IRA as far as the SAS and British intelligence were concerned. In August 1988 the SAS killed the Mid-Tyrone IRA members Gerard Harte, Martin Harte, and Brian Mullin. In October 1990 Dessie Grew and a ferocious young gunman from Galbally, Martin McCaughey, were ambushed and killed by undercover soldiers not far from Loughgall. In June the following year the remnants of the East Tyrone ASU died in an SAS trap in Coagh, between Ardboe and Cookstown. Lawrence McNally and Pete Ryan, both Monaghan-based operators, had been lured to the village by a sighting of a UDR soldier who, because of his alleged connections to loyalists, had long been an IRA target, but their car was destroyed in an SAS gun and rocket attack. Their driver, Tony Doris, was an IRA member from Coalisland. “After McNally and Pete Ryan that was it; we had nobody left,” commented one Tyrone republican.22
The SAS was not finished, however. In February 1992, undercover soldiers cut a swath into the next IRA generation when they killed the twenty-one-year-old student Kevin Barry O’Donnell, twenty-three-year-old Sean O’Farrell, nineteen-year-old Peter Clancy, and twenty-year-old Daniel Vincent in a set-piece ambush in the parking lot of the Catholic church in Clonoe, between Coalisland and Ardboe. The four died after a particularly pointless machine-gun attack on Coalisland police station mounted from atop a truck as it sped through the town. Once again, according to IRA sources in a position to know, Northern Command had approved the operation.23 In all four ambushes the British security forces’ intelligence had been excellent.
The impact of the British offensive is evident from the war statistics, which reveal a picture of a steady decline in IRA activity in Tyrone. In 1986, before the Loughgall ambush, according to the author’s analysis of the weekly IRA “War News” column published in An Phoblacht–Republican News, East Tyrone accounted for 21 percent of all IRA operations in Northern Ireland. But in 1987 that dipped to 9 percent. In 1988 there was some recovery in IRA activity to 16 percent; but thereafter the decline resumed: in 1989 to 13.5 percent, in 1990 to 16.4 percent, in 1991 to 8 percent, in 1992 to 11 percent, and in 1993, the year before the first cease-fire, to 9 percent.24 The IRA death toll tells the same tale. Up to April 2000, the IRA in Tyrone had lost 53 members, the highest death toll for any brigade area. But over half, 28, were killed in the five years between May 1987 and February 1992, compared with 25 in the seventeen years between 1970 and 1987. In other words, IRA deaths in Tyrone increased fivefold after the Loughall ambush.
The SAS was not alone in putting East Tyrone in its deadly sights. The years 1987 and 1988 also saw the beginnings of a concerted UVF assault against republicans and nationalists in the brigade area that in its way was more enervating than the undercover military ambushes. In an important sense the East Tyrone Brigade brought the calamity upon itself. The killings of Harry Henry in April 1987 and then a year later of Ned Gibson, a Protestant sanitation worker who was also a part-time soldier in the UDR, shot dead as he collected garbage in Ardboe, were regarded by Tyrone’s unionists as overtly brutal sectarian assaults, and they responded in kind. It was, however, the nature of the IRA’s response to the loyalist offensive that made the carnage in Tyrone such a significant milestone on the road to the 1994 cease-fire.
In the first twenty years of its existence the Provisional IRA had a simple if brutal attitude toward loyalist killings. This was to retaliate with excessive but deliberately directed violence against the unionist community. Two notorious incidents stand out as examples of what in practice this policy meant. The first occurred in early January 1976 when Provisional IRA gunmen halted a minibus carrying textile workers home from work near Kingsmills in South Armagh. They singled out the lone Catholic on board, told him to get out of the way, and then lined ten Protestants up against the side of the bus and riddled them with automatic fire. The incident was so horrific that the IRA was reluctant to admit responsibility, and instead a cover name, the South Armagh Republican Reaction Force, was used. The Kingsmills slaughter was the IRA’s response to the UVF killing in the days before of five South Armagh Catholics, members of two families.
The second example came in January 1981 when an eleven-man IRA unit, reportedly led by Jim Lynagh, broke into Tynan Abbey, an enormous mansion set in eight hundred acres of lush farmland near the Armagh-Monaghan Border, and killed its two occupants, eighty-six-year-old Sir Norman Stronge and his merchant banker son, forty-eight-year-old James. They then planted incendiary devices that set the abbey alight, destroying it in the fire. The family had been in Tynan for eight generations, and the Stronges were scions of the unionist establishment. Sir Norman had been Speaker of the Stormont parliament for a quarter of a century and his son had been a unionist MP at Stormont; his great-grandfather had been Speaker of the old Irish House of Commons. The reason for the IRA attack was clear. Five days before, UDA gunmen had made an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the Tyrone republican leader Bernadette McAliskey, which had left her and her husband, Michael, barely alive. The UDA attack was the latest in a series of assassinations of prominent nationalist and republican figures. The killing of the Stronges was designed to bring them to a halt.
The point about the Kingsmills and the Stronge killings is that most Provisional supporters believed that they had worked and that a speedy and violent IRA reaction of that caliber was the best, perhaps the only, way to stop such loyalist violence in its tracks. Such retaliations became accepted as part of the Provisionals’ view of the world. “It’s a lesson you learn quickly on the football field,” commented a Tyrone republican and GAA veteran. “If you’re fouled, you have to hit back.”25 The reprisal policy was part of what the Provisional IRA was about; it reached deep down into the group’s Defenderist roots.
But by the time the Mid-Ulster UVF began its killing in the autumn of 1988, IRA policy had begun to change. In November 1988 the UVF targeted the home of the Moortown Sinn Fein councillor Francie McNally, not far from Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh. Shots were fired through the kitchen window, and McNally’s younger brother Phelim was fatally wounded as he played an accordion. Three months later, in February 1989, the UVF struck once more against Sinn Fein. This time the target was fifty-eight-year-old Magherafelt SF councillor John Joe Davey, who was cut down in the driveway of his isolated rural home. Davey had been named under privilege in the House of Commons by the DUP MP for Mid-Ulster, the Reverend William McCrea, as an accomplice in the killing of a local Protestant security contractor in 1986. A veteran of the Border Campaign, Davey had twice been interned by the Northern authorities. The UVF was exacting revenge.
Army Council policy in relation to reprisals had changed significantly by this stage. Retaliations of the Kingsmills and Stronge variety were banned, as one IRA source familiar with the policy change explained: “John Davey was the first Sinn Fein councillor to be shot, but there was to be no retaliation because of [an Army Council directive] against political assassinations. Although there could be exceptions—Ken Maginnis [ex-UDR captain and the former Fermanagh–South Tyrone unionist MP] was one—and there could be special requests, basically that type of reprisal was politically unacceptable to Adams and company.”26
Instead the IRA was allowed to strike back only at named, identified targets, and this meant that only those who could be shown to have been directly involved in the loyalist killings or who were known to be pulling their strings in the background were legitimate targets. Again Northern Command would vet each operation, and local brigades would have to justify the choice of targets. That was necessarily a drawn-out process that delayed the IRA response. “The time frame was crucial, otherwise the message was lost,” recalled a Tyrone republican. “Loyalists retaliated fast, while in the IRA they had to battle for permission to strike back. You virtually needed a jury trial.”27
Retaliation for the McNally and Davey killings came in the first week of March 1989 when East Tyrone IRA members sought out Leslie Dallas, a UVF member and a leading member of one of the four UVF families in the East Tyrone–South Derry area. He was gunned down in a garage in Coagh, not far from Ardboe, but the shooting was a disaster for the IRA. Two elderly Protestant men, Ernest Rankin and Austin Nelson, neither of whom had any association with the UVF, were caught in the gunfire and shot dead.
In Belfast, Gerry Adams distanced Sinn Fein from the killings. Referring to the deaths of Rankin and Nelson, he echoed the Army Council line. “Our position is clear,” he said. “Sinn Fein does not condone the deaths of people who are non-combatants. There can be no legitimate reason for any uncertainty about Sinn Fein’s attitude to such killings.”28 On the ground in East Tyrone, the Provisionals’ grassroots, by contrast, had demanded a much more drastic response. “The cry was a councillor for a councillor, for Willie McCrea or a bomb in the council chamber,” explained a Tyrone republican. “That was the gut feeling of the rank and file.”29 They didn’t get their way.
After the Coagh shootings, the UVF campaign in the East Tyrone, North Armagh, and South Derry areas intensified. Their targets included not just uninvolved Catholics but IRA and Sinn Fein members and their families, and its effect was to deeply undermine republican morale. “In Tyrone the SAS went for IRA members while the UVF went for the families,” was how one republican source described the tactics in these years.30 The UVF killed twice more in 1989, five times in 1990, and fifteen times in 1991, eight of the victims gunned down in the first three months of the year. Again the facts and figures speak for themselves. Between 1988 and August 1994 eighty-six people died violent deaths in the East Tyrone operational zone, and the UVF was responsible for forty of them, nearly half the slaughter. Davey’s death began an open season on Sinn Fein councillors and activists. Fourteen Sinn Fein members were killed in the four years that followed the killing of the Magherafelt councillor, over half of all the Sinn Fein personnel killed since 1970. The IRA was powerless or unwilling to stop it.
Relatives of Republican activists were also picked off, sometimes in exceptionally brutal circumstances, sometimes in circumstances suggesting that the loyalist killers had excellent intelligence. Roseanne Mallon, for instance, shot dead in Lisgallon in May 1994, was related to the most senior IRA figure in the county. In one of the worst examples of this kind of killing, a mother of five, Kathleen O’Hagan, was gunned to death in front of her children at her home near Cookstown in August 1994. Her husband had served eight years for possessing an IRA gun, and that made her a target, as it made by implication the spouses of other IRA personnel. Mrs O’Hagan was seven months pregnant at the time of her brutal death. There were other clues that the killers were well briefed. Patrick Shields, shot dead with his son Diarmuid in January 1993 in his grocer’s shop near Dungannon, had been in the IRA in the 1970s but had quit long before. He was, however, still a contact of Kevin Mallon’s, by this stage no longer a Provisional but a dissident sympathizer. Not many people would have known that. A month later his son’s girlfriend, Julie Statham, overwhelmed by grief, committed suicide.
The IRA’s new, restrained retaliation policy had two effects. The IRA concentrated all its energies in the hunt for the head of the Mid-Ulster UVF, Billy Wright, who was based in Portadown and who was believed to have had a hand in most if not all the killings. The IRA made at least five attempts on Wright’s life, including a booby trap bomb placed underneath his car, but the UVF leader lived a charmed life and survived them all. He was later shot dead by the INLA under extraordinary circumstances, inside the Maze prison, but the IRA’s inability to deal with him or his associates discredited the organization. “They were always talking about a night of the long knives against the UVF, but it never did happen,” remembered one Tyrone IRA man.31 Another recalled approaching a prominent Sinn Fein politician in the county after learning of a UVF threat against his family: “His response was ‘I wonder if we could get in touch with the UVF and sort it out.’”32 A week later the UVF killed his brother.
The IRA’s failure to stem the loyalist killings struck at the core of its raison d’être. If it couldn’t protect its own, especially in Tyrone, wondered many republicans, how could the IRA expect to drive the British out of Ireland? “As the killings grew, the demand to do something grew as well,” recalled one activist. “People were scared because it seemed the loyalists had a free hand. People were afraid to be identified with Sinn Fein, not just the IRA. You could be shot for having the same name as someone in Sinn Fein like poor Tommy Molloy. Meanwhile the IRA was doing nothing to protect people.”33 Molloy was killed apparently because he shared a surname with Francie Molloy, the leading Sinn Fein figure in the area, who later became an Assembly member for Mid-Ulster. By the end of 1990, according to republican sources in the area, Sinn Fein was having great difficulty persuading people to run in council elections.34 The grassroots demoralization that flowed from all this nourished the psychology of ceasefire, making the peace process acceptable and even welcome, as one astute observer of Tyrone republicanism noted. “People are terrified of going back to war because of their memories of that UVF campaign,” he said.35
The IRA leadership’s new attitude toward loyalist killings sometimes meant that lies were told about the true allegiance of some victims. At least three Sinn Fein councillors killed by the UVF in the area were also key IRA activists, but this was never acknowledged even years later. When Liam Ryan was shot dead by the UVF at his Battery Bar near Ardboe along with a civilian, Michael Devlin, his IRA membership, never mind his role as brigade intelligence officer, was denied by Sinn Fein, although three weeks later an IRA firing party did fire a volley of automatic shots over his grave. The IRA’s worst loss at the hands of the Mid-Ulster UVF came in March 1991, when three young IRA members were shot dead as they drove into the car park of Boyle’s Bar in the strongly republican village of Cappagh, County Tyrone. Twenty-three-year-old John Quinn, seventeen-year-old Dwayne O’Donnell, and twenty-year-old Malcolm Nugent were cut down in a hail of bullets, and a Catholic noncombatant, fifty-two-year-old Thomas Armstrong, killed by a stray round as he used the toilets in the bar. The IRA did not acknowledge the three for a year, and they were depicted in Sinn Fein propaganda as innocent Catholic victims, the result of an order relayed to the Tyrone Brigade on behalf of Northern Command by Jim Gibney, a senior Belfast-based adviser of Gerry Adams.36 The deception fooled no republicans in Tyrone and very few in the rest of Northern Ireland, but was aimed at currying sympathy south of the Border, where people were much less likely to be aware of the truth.
“Adams’s attitude was always to encourage the view of nationalists as being the underdog, the ones at the receiving end of this sort of violence,” recalled a senior IRA source. “He would say we want to be seen as the oppressed, and that was why the Cappagh men were disowned.”37 Denying the Cappagh dead enraged many Tyrone republicans, but the IRA on the ground was assured that there were good reasons. “It was to do with making life easier in the South, particularly in relation to the safe houses and the like which we could get, especially from Fianna Fail people,” explained one former senior figure. “After disasters like Enniskillen, houses were shut to the IRA; after Cappagh when what happened [was] seen as security force collusion with loyalists to kill Catholics, the houses open again.”38 There was a political dimension to this as well. If Fianna Fail supporters could open their homes to the IRA, then perhaps the Fianna Fail leadership could do the same at a political level with Sinn Fein. This provided the real reason for the shift in Army Council policy on loyalist killings. The change dovetailed into Gerry Adams’s quest for pan-nationalist unity that in 1988 and 1989 was at the center of his secret diplomatic overtures to the Fianna Fail taoiseach, Charles Haughey.
THE FUNERALS of the Loughgall ASU were some of the biggest seen in Ireland since the hunger strikes. Jim Lynagh’s removal and burial became an occasion for the Provisional grassroots to demonstrate a disdain for the Republic and its institutions that had been sharpened by suspicions that the Irish police, the Gardai, may have played a part in laying the ambush, possibly by passing on intelligence to the British. Lynagh’s body was escorted back across the Border on the Monday after the killings by hundreds of IRA supporters. At Emyvale in County Monaghan the cortege stopped in the main street and was joined by an IRA color party. From a side entry stepped three masked IRA men armed with automatic rifles. They fired three single shots over the coffin and then a wild volley into the air that roused the crowd. As they turned to melt back into the sea of faces, they found their way blocked by a carload of the elite Garda antiterrorist unit, the Task Force armed with Uzi submachine guns. Seeing this, the crowd surged forward and manhandled the police car into an empty drain, upturning it with one of its plainclothes occupants still inside. Other policemen fired wildly in the air, and for a few moments it looked as if a serious confrontation might follow. Later that day a Sinn Fein picket gathered outside Fianna Fail’s headquarters in Lower Mount Street in central Dublin. Angered by Fianna Fail denunciations of the IRA in the wake of the ambush, the picketers strung a banner across the footpath which read, “Fianna Fail, ‘The Republican Party,’ Collaborators with SAS Murderers.”
Lynagh was buried two days later, on May 13, and Gerry Adams gave the oration at his graveside and lashed the Fianna Fail government and its leader, Charles Haughey. “A few short months ago,” he said,
the people of this State elected a Fianna Fail government of sorts. Their leader made many brave noises about a British withdrawal being a prerequisite for peace in this island. He described the Six-County State as a nonviable social and economic unit. He chose Bodenstown to denounce British policy, [Garret] FitzGerald’s collusion in that policy and the actions of the British Crown Forces. That was when he was looking for votes. I have some questions for all Fianna Fail supporters and for all nationalists. Did you elect a government to support Thatcher’s terrorism? The British government understands Charles J. Haughey… as it understood FitzGerald and Spring. It has always understood the shoneen clan—it bought them off with partition. It does not understand the Jim Lynaghs, the Padraig McKearneys or the Seamus McElwaines. It thinks it can defeat them. It never will.39
It would have been later the same day or not long afterward that Tim Pat Coogan was ushered into Charles Haughey’s presence to hand over the lengthy letter from Father Alec Reid that outlined Gerry Adams’s proposals for an alliance between Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein and the extraordinary offer of an IRA cease-fire. The letter, fifteen pages and 7,000 words long, had been written two days before, when the gunfire over the coffin of Jim Lynagh was still echoing around the streets of Emyvale and the angry shouts of Sinn Fein picketers were ringing outside Fianna Fail’s offices.