The deaths at Coshquin in October 1990 caused outrage in Derry, and there is little doubt the attack marked a low point in the fortunes of the IRA’s Derry Brigade. The local nationalist weekly paper, the Derry Journal, devoted three pages to the story. The banner headline on the front page called the attack “Bloody Wednesday,” and an editorial said the anger in the city was at a level not seen since Bloody Sunday 1972, when British troops had killed thirteen local men, gunning them down without warning or mercy.1 While nationalist and unionist politicians vied with each other to condemn the atrocity, and the city’s Catholic bishop, Dr. Edward Daly, called it “a callous, cynical, crude and horrible deed,”2 behind the scenes the deaths animated a mini–peace process that was to see the IRA in the city gradually and secretly de-escalate its violence in tandem with the British security forces. Although limited in scope and cautious in its application, this mutual de-escalation made Derry a laboratory experiment where the viability of a wider peace process was tested and the IRA enabled to signal to the British authorities a willingness to bring its long war to a controlled and phased end. In the process, both sides began to build the trust that would be needed if the IRA was to declare a much wider cease-fire.
The IRA’s campaign in the rest of Northern Ireland would last for another four years, but in Derry the end came much quicker. Nobody could know it at the time, but the five British soldiers who perished in the Coshquin explosion were the last military personnel to die at the hands of the Provisionals’ Derry Brigade. Although seven more people were killed as a result of republican violence in the city before the IRA called its August 1994 cease-fire, only two, both RUC officers, were members of the security forces. Once ranked as the second or third most active brigade in Northern Ireland, the IRA in Derry soon became one of the quietest in the whole organization.