Enniskillen Massacre

 

Remembrance Day had just begun,
To honour Ulsters fallen,
And ended in the massacre,
of Enniskillen town.

From ‘the poppy day massacre’

 

The Enniskillen Massacre, or Remembrance Day Bombing, as it is also called, took place on November 8, 1987, at the town of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, during a Remembrance Day church service to commemorate the dead of World War I and II. In a vicious and completely unexpected bomb attack by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), 11 people were killed, and 63 injured. Afterwards, the attack was widely condemned by politicians of all persuasions in Northern Ireland and Britain, and it came to be seen as a turning point in the Northern Irish conflict, ushering in a new era of hope for peace.

Today, the Enniskillen massacre is generally held to be a major tactical error on the part of the IRA, because it thoroughly alienated the general public from the Republican cause. Although there may have been a political motivation for the bombing – one of those present was a reserve member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – the fact that the townspeople of Enniskillen were attacked when they were gathered together quietly with their families to commemorate the dead in a religious service pointed to the inhumanity of the IRA’s campaign. Moreover, when the father of one of the victims publicly forgave his daughter’s killers, the senseless brutality of the political conflict in Northern Ireland was brought into sharp focus, and the need for both sides to move towards a peaceful solution was shown to be more pressing than ever.

 

Buried Alive

 

On the morning of Remembrance Sunday, a day dedicated to the memory of all those killed in World War I and II, a small crowd gathered in the centre of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, to lay wreaths of poppies on the local war memorial. The red poppies were a reminder of the fields of northern France, where so much of the bloodshed took place. All over Britain, similar groups were gathering in towns and villages, in an atmosphere of solemn remembrance, to honour their dead.

The calm at Enniskillen was suddenly shattered when, at 10.45 a.m., a bomb suddenly detonated. The blast caused the wall of a nearby building, St Michael’s Reading Rooms, to collapse, showering huge chunks of rubble down onto the small group below. All at once, the atmosphere became one of chaos, panic and sheer horror as the scale of the atrocity became clear. Some of the victims were killed instantly; some staggered about bleeding until they died; and others were buried below the rubble, slowly suffocating as others tried to rescue them.

Unusually, the entire event was captured on video, by an amateur video enthusiast who had brought his equipment along to film the service. The scene of carnage from this video, later shown on television, shocked all who saw it. A more graphic example of the horrific results of sectarian violence could not have been devised, and it brought home just how pointlessly destructive the conflict in Northern Ireland had become.

 

The Survivor

 

All of the victims of the attack were Protestants, many of them elderly people and their families. Three members of the Armstrong family, Bertha, Wesley and Edward, were killed. Edward, aged 52, was a member of the ‘Chosen Few’ Orange Lodge and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Reserve. Jessie and Kitchener Johnson, both aged 70, died; as did William and Angus Mullen, also in their 70s. Among the other victims was Marie Wilson, the 20-year-old daughter of Gordon Wilson, who was also buried under the rubble with her but survived the ordeal.

Later, Gordon Wilson told how the force of the bomb blast had thrown him and his daughter forwards into the air, while stones and rubble rained down on them. A piece of falling masonry struck him on the shoulder, causing intense pain, and he then found himself lying under a pile of rubble 20 m (6 ft) high. He shouted to his daughter, who was still alive, and the pair held hands, although he could not see her. He asked her if she was all right and she replied yes, but then, after telling her father that she loved him, she fell silent. After a few minutes, Wilson and his daughter were pulled out of the wreckage and taken to hospital. Marie later died there.

 

A Human Tragedy

 

After he was released from hospital, Gordon Wilson made a public statement that he did not bear a grudge towards his daughter’s killers. ‘Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life,’ he said. He also mentioned that he would pray every night for the terrorists. His statement so impressed loyalist paramilitaries, who were intent on carrying out some form of retaliation, that they abandoned their plans for revenge. Wilson went on to become a spokesperson for peace, his courageous stance encouraging a general spirit of reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

Where the IRA had seriously miscalculated was to suppose that the Remembrance Day mourners in Enniskillen would be seen as a politically motivated group of Protestants with strong sectarian links, rather than as a group of ordinary citizens coming together to remember the many Irish men and women who had lost their lives in the World War I and II. In the public mind, the connection was made between the victims of the wars and the victims of the continuing troubles in Ireland; between the soldiers of the past who had no control over the political situation yet lost their lives, and modern-day civilians in Ireland who now found themselves in a similar situation, caught up as innocent victims in the horror of war.

 

Sectarian Violence

 

In fact, only one of the crowd who were present at the war memorial in Enniskillen that day was a politically motivated individual. Edward Armstrong, who lost his life, was a 52-year-old reserve member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which had come under heavy criticism from the IRA and others as a biased, anti-Catholic and often brutal state security force. In addition, he was a member of the ‘Chosen Few’ Orange Lodge. The Orange Order, as it sometimes called, is a Protestant organization that has been accused of anti-Catholic sectarianism, particularly with regard to its practise of marching through strongly Catholic areas in parades that celebrate Protestant culture and identity.

Thus, to some degree, there was a political aspect to the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen, but it was hardly strong enough to warrant such a violently destructive act. Apart from Edward Armstrong, most of the victims that day were elderly or middle-aged people who had little or no connection with political activism. For this reason, the attack was seen as an example of the IRA’s increasing tendency towards mindless violence. The fact that the attack took place on a day when the destructiveness of war was being quietly remembered all over the country made the crime seem doubly outrageous.

 

A Bunch of Hoodlums

 

Not surprisingly, the Enniskillen attack was extremely damaging to the IRA’s campaign. It was roundly condemned by all the leading political figures of the day, as well as by the media and members of the general public. This time, the rhetoric of the politicians had some real weight to it, and the public began to believe that, instead of agitating for a cause – the creation of an independent Republic of Ireland – the IRA were simply a bunch of hoodlums mired in violence and bitterness, dedicated to continuing age-old feuds and creating permanent civil war in the country. In response, the IRA claimed that the real target of the bomb had been a group of British soldiers, and that their leadership had not authorized the bombing. However, this was widely disbelieved.

It then emerged that a bomb had also been planted 32 km (20 miles) away, near a village called Pettigo, and that members of the Boys’ Brigade, a religious organization for boys and young men, had gathered there to take part in a service for Remembrance Day. Thankfully, the bomb had failed to detonate, and no one had been injured. However, news of this attempted attack caused more outrage and further damaged the republican cause.

 

Legacy of Peace

 

In 1997, on Remembrance Day, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams publicly apologized for the bombing on behalf of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. Three years later, Ronnie Hill, a victim of the bombing, finally died. He had been in a coma for 13 years as a result of his injuries at Enniskillen.

Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was a victim of the Enniskillen bombing, and who later became a spokesman for peace in Northern Ireland, said after her death: ‘I don’t have an answer, but I know there has to be a plan. If I didn’t think that, I would commit suicide. It’s part of a greater plan.’ His words were prophetic, at least to the degree that the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen finally marked the moment when the general public lost sympathy with the IRA, and the conflict in Northern Ireland reached a turning point, making it possible for a peace process to begin.