by Ken Wharton
Paul Maxwell’s father had dropped his young son at the boat and had just driven off. He heard the explosion and immediately drove back towards the harbour. His poignant words about the loss of a young Irishman, killed by fellow Irish, speak volumes: ‘I knew that my son was dead. I couldn’t believe that anybody survived such an explosion. There was little left of the boat apart from debris floating on the surface. I knew he was gone. He was a better Irishman than those who did that foul deed.’
A spokesman for the Provisionals admitted responsibility for the deaths; there was a distinct element of gloating about their statement in which they referred to Mountbatten’s ‘execution’ and again drew attention to the ‘occupation of our country’. Gerry Adams showed his usual tact and diplomacy several weeks later when he stated:
The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed, but the furore created by Mountbatten’s death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment. As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don’t think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA has achieved its objective: people have started paying attention to what is happening in Ireland.
McMahon was convicted of his part in the murders; he was sentenced to life imprisonment but released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. In May 2015, Adams met with Mountbatten’s nephew, Prince Charles; one can only imagine the thoughts that went through the heir to the throne’s head as he shook the hands of the alleged former Provisional commander. Adams has always refused to apologise, stating later that he stood by the words he had uttered almost thirty-six years earlier.*
In The Informer, ex-PIRA killer turned informer the late Sean O’Callaghan stated that the PIRA were paid £2 million by the Syrian government for Lord Mountbatten’s murder. The idea to kill Mountbatten had been conceived by senior IRA leader Brian Keenan – son of a former RAF officer – who together with Ivor Bell was seeking to push the organisation in a Marxist direction. According to O’Callaghan, Keenan had close contacts with GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel Upravleniye, the Soviet Military Intelligence), East Germany and Libya. During his discussions with GRU and the East Germans he was asked to prove PIRA’s sincerity in its move towards Marxism by ‘striking at the heart of imperialism’. He and Bell received GRU’s approval in their choice of Mountbatten; the IRA subsequently received their money from Syria, via the GRU. O’Callaghan suggested that the IRA’s links were mainly with GRU and the East Germans.
Throughout the Troubles, the Provisionals’ tactics were designed to shock and revolt the British public; no atrocity was too much if it resulted in the UK electorate demanding of their government that there was a ‘withdrawal’ from the North. Killing the Queen’s uncle was their means of demonstrating that their reach had no limits, either geographical or political; further, it showed that no one was safe from their bombs and their bullets. This was a calamitous breakdown of security, making both the Irish and British security services look foolish at worst, unprofessional at best. Although a feeling persisted amongst some observers that either Mountbatten himself had refused their help and advice – through a combination of stubbornness and arrogance – or that he was somehow sacrificed. It is very true that PIRA’s military reputation received a considerable boost in the eyes of their international support, but it also shocked the British that day, as they enjoyed their lunches or returned to their places of work after midday.
That fateful day of 27 August wasn’t yet over, with worse news to come from Northern Ireland, as the death toll at the hands of Provisional IRA reached twenty-one, with the deaths of eighteen soldiers. To put this into some kind of perspective, during the Aden crisis, 1965–68, British military losses reached 227 killed, with 510 wounded; the worst of these losses came on 20 June 1967, when twenty-two British soldiers were massacred at Khormaksar and Crater in the Red Sea outpost. On the day of Mountbatten’s murder, the Provisionals almost matched that loss of British military deaths with a double bomb blast at Warrenpoint, on the border with the Irish Republic.
At 16.40 hours, a scant five hours after the Mullaghmore blast, a convoy of 2 Para (Second Battalion, Parachute Regiment) was driving northwards along the A2 Warrenpoint Road, in Co. Down; they had almost reached Narrow Water Keep; the border with the Irish Republic was just across Carlingford Lough to their left. It was a small admin convoy, consisting of a Land Rover and two lorries, moving personnel, kit and ammunition to Newry from Abercorn Barracks at Ballykinler. Watching from across the lough was a team of bombers from the Provisional IRA; as the middle vehicle – a lorry – drew level with a trailer packed with stacks of hay, parked in a layby, the bombers triggered a device. Hidden behind the hay was a 500lb (227kg) landmine. The resulting blast tore the convoy apart, killing or wounding the entire crew of two of the vehicles; six were killed instantly, with the other two being badly wounded. One of the drivers was so seriously eviscerated that all that remained of his shattered body was his pelvic bone, which had fused to the driver’s seat.
Reinforcements from the third vehicle were quickly on the scene; despite their shock, they very quickly tended to the two badly wounded men. One soldier wrote: ‘As the [middle] vehicle came level with the trailer, there was a huge fireball and explosion. The sides of the truck had gone.’ The Paras deployed into fire positions, unable to escape the stench of the black, acrid smoke coming from the shattered vehicles. Seconds later, ammunition in the burning vehicles began to ‘cook off’** causing the tense soldiers to think that they were being fired on from across the lough. Tragically, two young British ornithologists – William Hudson (29) and his cousin, Barry – approached the far shoreline of the lough to investigate the explosions. As they emerged from cover, the paratroopers opened fire, hitting both men. William was killed instantly, and his cousin was very badly wounded.
At that stage, reinforcements arrived, as an Army Gazelle helicopter landed, containing the CO of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, and his radioman, Lance Corporal Victor MacLeod. As senior officer, Lt Col Blair took immediate command, setting up an incident command post (ICP) a few hundred yards further up the road opposite the castle, at an angle of approximately 45 degrees from the initial blast; precisely what the PIRA bombing team had expected. This was the moment in which their army of dickers achieved their greatest success, for they had correctly identified the most likely choice of ICP: the gatehouse to the castle.
Warrenpoint (Narrow Water Castle), where eighteen soldiers were killed in August 1979.
At approximately 17.12 hours, just over half an hour after the first blast, a second device weighing 800lb (364kg), hidden in milk churns at the gatehouse exploded; twelve soldiers, including the two Queen’s Own Highlanders, were killed instantly. The other soldiers, including two who were in fire positions outside the gatehouse, were very badly injured. The blast bowled over men outside the ICP; indeed, it was so severe that it overturned one of their Land Rovers. One of the dead men – Lt Col Blair – could only be identified by his bloodstained epaulettes; another soldier’s face was found floating in the nearby lough. One of the dreadfully injured soldiers suffered a double traumatic amputation as virtually every soldier from the Paras’ QRF (Quick Reaction Force) was injured.
Those killed were: Lance Corporal Donald Blair (23); Corporal Nicholas Andrews (24); Private Gary Barnes (18); Private Raymond Dunne (20); Private Anthony Wood (19); Private Michael Woods (18); Private John Giles (22); Private Ian Rogers (31); Sergeant Walter Beard (33); Private Thomas Vance (23); Private Robert England (23); Private Jeffrey Jones (18); Corporal Leonard Jones (26); Private Robert Jones (18); Lance Corporal Chris Ireland (25); and Major Peter Fursman (35) – all were members of the Parachute Regi
ment. The two Queen’s Own Highlanders killed alongside their Para comrades were: Lieutenant Colonel David Blair (40) and Lance Corporal Victor McLeod (24).
It was a military coup for the PIRA bombers, but it was also a day of disaster and tragedy for the Parachute Regiment and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. It was the perfect justification for the IRA’s tactic of using dickers to observe and report on the movements of soldiers and police; it also clearly demonstrated the need for a Plan ‘B’ when it came to the location of incident command posts. The terrorists had used 1,300lb (591kg) of explosives; they wiped out almost a platoon of some of the finest soldiers in the British Army – a disaster of Aden-like proportions. The author has twice visited the scene of the atrocity to pay homage to the eighteen lost soldiers; on both occasions, makeshift tributes with bunches of flowers and poppies affixed to a wooden panel had been desecrated by Republican supporters – kicked to pieces with little or no thought for the grieving loved ones who had erected this shrine to their dead.
The bomb makers are alleged to have been Brendan Burns and Joe Brennan from PIRA’s South Armagh Brigade. Burns met his death in a spectacular ‘own goal’ explosion, when a device on which he was working exploded prematurely. Brennan was arrested in the Irish Republic while in the process of robbing a bank. In 1995, he was convicted in Belfast on bomb-making charges. Both men were arrested on suspicion of taking part in the Warrenpoint attack but released without charge.
There was a further, unpalatable postscript when the Smithwick Tribunal concluded there was firm evidence that certain individuals inside An Gardaí Siochana had helped destroy evidence – or at the very least neglect it so that it was eradicated by the weather – which could have convicted both Burns and Brennan. There are few recorded comments from the Irish Republican camp in relation to the tribunal’s findings. This would appear to have been a very overt act of collusion by the Gardaí.
The decade ended as it had started: with an atrocity at the hands of the Provisional IRA.
________________
* Lost Lives, David McKittrick, p.367. (Mainstream Publishing, 2004)
** Ibid., p.146.
*** www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/feb/24/ira-admits-killing-gordon-gallagher.
* www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/25/northernireland.northernireland.
* See Chapter 3.
* With the Greatest Respect, John Barratt (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991) p.23.
* Certainly no apologies had been made at the time of writing in July 2018.
** When live ammunition is subjected to intense heat, the flames ignite the gun cotton inside the rounds, causing expanding gas, which fires off the projectile.
CHAPTER 5
INTERNMENT
Internment – the detention of suspected terrorists without the formalities of trial – in Northern Ireland in 1971 was a military operation that gained very little and as a public relations exercise was an unmitigated disaster. True, it did manage to reel in some known players, but it also captured some people who had been involved in the IRA of the 1920s and ’30s, using hopelessly outdated intelligence reports. Moreover, it gave an immediate impression of being overtly sectarian as there was only a handful of Protestants on the list. It was, in this author’s opinion, a debacle that produced an upsurge in violence that saw 150 related deaths in the final five months of the year, compared with around 100 in the previous two years since the start of the Troubles.
Internment was nothing new: following partition, the anticipated explosion of violence in the fledgling country of Northern Ireland prompted the new Ulster Government to introduce the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922, more commonly known as the ‘Special Powers Act’. It had sweeping, draconian powers and was viewed with suspicion by the minority Catholic population, whereas the siege mentality of the Protestants found an element of comfort in the legislation. The partition of the island of Ireland in 1920/21 was followed by high levels of inter-communal violence, especially in Belfast and Londonderry. The IRA was involved in a war on two fronts as it engaged the new government of the Irish Republic in a bloody civil war while simultaneously using violence in the north to compel the British governments of David Lloyd George (Liberal) and later Bonar Law (Conservative) to withdraw completely.
The Act specified measures that the government in Stormont could take to preserve peace, allowing them to take literally any actions they thought necessary. It included the closing of licensed premises; the banning in any area of meetings and parades in public places; the closing of roads; the seizing of land or property, and the destruction of any building. The essence of the legislation was that Sir James Craig, the new country’s first Prime Minister, could take any action he deemed fit. While there are many Catholics who might consider the draconian measures employed to be particularly anti-Catholic and, ipso facto, anti-democratic, one must view the context in which the rulers of the new country took these decisions. The Protestants, elated at remaining in the United Kingdom, realised that the anti-partitionists would not accept the decision without a fight. They prepared for a siege and it is this mindset that it carried through to the late 1960s and beyond; it has shaped relations between the two religious communities ever since.
Between May 1922 and December 1924, 700 Republicans were interned at various RUC and Army barracks under the Act; fairly or not, political violence had decreased quite dramatically by the middle part of the decade, resulting in the ending of internment without trial and a grudging acceptance and informal truce between the two factions. Naturally some Catholic agitation persisted as there was a de facto ‘armed neutrality’ as each side viewed the other with a sulking suspicion. Just as there were bigoted elements among the Protestant community, the same attitudes prevailed among the Catholics, with many priests openly preaching sedition from the church pulpits and in the Roman Catholic schools.
Matters again came to a head, some thirty years later, when the IRA engaged in its infamous border campaign, which the diehard optimists in its ranks thought would finally drive the British into the sea. The militant Army Council led by men such as Seán Cronin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh deployed around 200 volunteers in the various operations. Their actions included blowing up a BBC Radio transmitter in Londonderry and the burning of Magherafelt Courthouse, the symbol of their hatred for approaching a century. The campaign also saw the emergence of a new militant – Seamus Costello – as well as scores of other younger men who less than a decade later would abandon the ‘old’ IRA and enlist in the Provisionals. Costello* would lead the OIRA after the split with the Provisionals, and finally go on to lead the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) following yet another fall-out among the ranks of the Republicans. Other raids included full-frontal attacks on RUC barracks at Enniskillen and Armagh; consequently, internment was reintroduced, with around 400 Republicans being arrested. In February 1962, the IRA declared its campaign over, but, it was merely licking its wounds and taking a ‘breather’ for the real campaign that would start just over seven years later. Losses on both sides were relatively light, with six policemen killed and thirty-two wounded; the IRA lost eight dead, plus four of their supporters also lost their lives.
In what both the British and Northern Ireland governments considered the only answer to the growing violence, a decision was taken to commence internment in the summer of 1971. Operation Demetrius began in the early hours of Monday, 9 August and ended the following day. It was a major military operation, demanded by Ulster Prime Minister Brian Faulkner using the Special Powers Act, albeit reluctantly sanctioned by Prime Minister Edward Heath. ‘Ted’ Heath had only been in power for some fourteen months, and was deeply unpopular following the briefest of ‘honeymoon’ periods. Faulkner flew to London on 5 August to meet with Heath and members of the inner Cabinet. Amidst a great deal of brow-beating and threats from the Ulster PM, Heath caved in and agreed to order the Army in, armed with the best intelligence available at that stage. Dissenters in the Cabinet urged ‘balanci
ng action’ that would involve major raids on Loyalist areas, the cancelling of gun licences and the curtailing of parades that the Protestants have always seen as their right and the upholding of their faith, tradition and culture. The Catholics saw them as offensive and provocative, however, and demanded retrospectively that the majority position of ‘balancing’ should be applied.
Somewhat incredulously, Faulkner claimed that the Loyalists – in particular the UVF – posed no threat, especially in view of the commonly held opinion that the Protestant backlash had not yet materialised. He used the threat of such a backlash as his whip hand, explaining that banning the parades was unworkable and would accelerate a violent reaction from the Loyalist communities. The Troubles had now raged for five days short of two years with deaths having already reached 100, and damage to property and businesses running into the hundreds of millions of pounds. Something needed to be done, as the Provisional IRA were bombing and killing almost, it seemed to contemporary observers, at will. Faulkner won the day with his arguments, and Heath demonstrated the same vacillation as his predecessor Harold Wilson had shown as he did when he procrastinated over his decision to send in British troops almost twenty-four months earlier.
