Torn Apart
Page 42
A former female UDR soldier told me:
If it is peace now, why do I have to be careful in front of who I speak about my military career? Why do I still check under my car; why would I not feel safe walking through most of the Catholic estates? If this is peace, why do I feel like a stranger in my own country?
The worst single loss of life during the Troubles took place in Omagh, Co. Tyrone, on 15 August 1998, ironically at a time when it was felt that a form of ‘peace’ had come to Northern Ireland. The attack is dealt with in more detail in Chapter 12 of this book. What worried the authorities more than anything was the potential for another bomb, and another and another; it was also the potential location, as dissidents had the ability to co-ordinate several attacks simultaneously. As the bomb had shown in Omagh, it didn’t need to be entirely composed of Czech-supplied Semtex; after all home-made fertiliser bombs had killed and destroyed in the past, and there was no shortage of sympathetic farmers in remote areas willing to help. If they weren’t willing to help, at least they would look the other way during the manufacturing process. Additionally, given that the majority of the DRs had been former PIRA or INLA, they would have their own weapons hidden, and if not, knew where all the arms dumps were located. There were, and still are, tons of weapons that have not been decommissioned: weapons hidden away from the prying eyes of a former Canadian general and his inspection teams – doomsday weapons that many feel will see the light of day again.
Several people have told the author that it was like waking up from a nightmare, others have said that it was as though they had emerged from a long dark tunnel; it was like VE Day in 1945, except there were no street parties with lemonade and cream cakes or war orphans looking simply bewildered. On a sad and final point, more people have taken their own lives in Northern Ireland since the Troubles ‘ended’ than died during the twenty-nine years of the conflict. Fifty years later, more than 4,000 deaths later, billions of pounds worth of property destroyed, countless lives ruined forever, bitterness still unhealed and tribalism still obvious – this is Northern Ireland today: safer but not perfect, not even close. How can division and sectarian mistrust abate when the hatred and suspicion is passed on through mothers’ breast milk?
Albert Einstein is credited with saying, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.’ May one venture to say that a more topical definition of insanity is Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries killing human being after human being and expecting a different outcome to the Troubles?
The words of veteran singer Cher popped into my head as I wrote the final words of this fifty-year overview: ‘I broke some promises, sometimes I lied to you.’ Do these words sum up what is on offer to the people of Northern Ireland today? Were the promises of Tony Blair merely lies, mere words that would enable his name to be written into the pages of history as the man who ended the Troubles? Is the price of his place in history worth the freeing of serial murderers – both Republican and Loyalist – after a mere pittance of time spent behind bars; is it worth the tension and divisions that currently exist in a still-divided country? Only time and posterity will tell. Of one thing I am more than certain, long after my own personal demise, a future historian will write to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Troubles; will he find in 2069 that Northern Ireland still hasn’t moved on, a century after the death of poor little 9-year-old Patrick Rooney, killed in his bedroom at St Brendan’s Pass in the Divis Street area of Belfast?
I have trodden a well-worn path through cemeteries up and down Northern Ireland – in Belfast and Londonderry, in Fermanagh and Tyrone. On the mainland as well: in Manchester and East Ardsley. I have walked in lonely rural graveyards; some are beautiful and others resonate sadness. The graves of those who lost their lives in the Troubles bear silent testimony to the utter bankruptcy of the paramilitaries’ philosophy of violence.
________________
* Belfast Telegraph, 20 January 2018.
* www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-43942247.
** www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/gang-of-up-to-50-capture-bind-beat-and-cover-in-paint-fugitive-sex-offenders-in-northern-ireland-36857060.html.
*** See Chapter 13.
**** www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/victim-attacks-adams-over-commemoration-dinner-for-provos-killed-by-sas-in-1988-37159352.html.
***** Belfast Telegraph, Suzanne Breen, 11 May 2018.
* Formed in 2016, it is Gaelic for ‘liberation’ and is pronounced: sayer-doo.
* Marjorie ‘Mo’ Mowlam (1949–2005) was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in Tony Blair’s Labour Government from 1997 to 1999. She was responsible for bringing together the leaders of both the Republicans and the Loyalists; though much-maligned, she did a very good job under exceptionally difficult circumstances. She was rather unceremoniously dumped in favour of a Blairite Peter Mandelson, the consensus being that her advancing cancer would inhibit her performance in her peace-making role.
** www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2018/04/25/news/murder-clearancerate-less-than-two-per-cent-claims-researcher-1313273/.
EPILOGUE
On myriad war memorials dotted up and down the UK, the words ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ are etched above the names of local men who fell in two world wars. On gravestones scattered about England, Wales, Scotland and, of course, Northern Ireland are the names of around 1,300 military personnel and a little more than 300 RUC officers. There are occasional memorials to some of the British military dead from the Troubles in places such as Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Deal, on the M62 westbound services and across Northern Ireland. There is the Ulster Ash Grove in National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire, where single trees honour those killed by terrorist action, but not those who died because of other causes in the Troubles. There is no memorial to the 1,369; Dulce et decorum est is not for them.
Thomas Albert Stoker was a soldier in the Light Infantry; he also attended the same school in East Ardsley at which this author toiled to understand the complexities of logarithms. He was fatally wounded by a negligent discharge at Berwick Road in the Ardoyne in July 1972, dying from his wounds some seven weeks later. There is a faded inscription on the war memorial at St Michael’s Parish Church; it reads simply: ‘T.A. Stoker killed in Ireland’. It fails to even record the correct land in which he died, but the very fact that it exists at all is tribute to his family, who fought the intransigence of the local parish council to have his name etched alongside the Binks and Broadheads who fell in two wars, representing not only their country, but the tiny village of East Ardsley also. Tommy Stoker, the name by which I remember him, is one of a tiny number of military victims of the Troubles whose memories are etched for eternity.
An arrogance and insensitivity exist among those of our ‘guardians’ to whom we entrust decisions such as the inclusion of Op Banner dead on their memorials. Arrogance because they fail to recognise that what took place in Northern Ireland was a war in every sense of the word; insensitive because they act without a single second’s thought about the impact of their decisions on the lives of the grieving families. This attitude is manifest in the very refusal of our politicians, newspaper editors and teachers to accept the true losses of Op Banner and blithely refer to the war in Britain’s back yard as a ‘police action; an aid to the civil power’.
God bless the memory of Tommy Stoker, David Card, John Haughey, Ernie Johnston, Heinz Pisarek and all their fallen comrades lost in Britain’s longest ever operational deployment.
LEST WE FORGET
APPENDIX 1
FATALITIES BY YEAR, 1969–98
________________
* RUC and An Gardaí Siochana.
** Prison officers.
*** From 14 August.
APPENDIX 2
MILITARY FATALITIES BY REGIMENT
Ulster Defence Regiment (to 1992)
368
Roya
l Horse Artillery
73
Ex Ulster Defence Regiment Soldiers
58
Parachute Regiment
56
Royal Green Jackets
50
Royal Engineers
36
Royal Irish Regiment (from 1992)
35
Light Infantry
35
Royal Army Ordnance Corps
31
Royal Corps Signals
31
Royal Corps Transport
28
Royal Regiment Fusiliers
27
Royal Anglian Regiment
26
Royal Marines
26
Scots Guards
23
Royal Electrical & Mechanical Engineers
22
Kings Regiment
18
5 Regiment Army Air Corps
15
Royal Military Police
15
Duke of Wellington’s Regiment
14
Royal Air Force
14
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
13
Royal Irish Rangers
12
Queen’s Regiment
12
Coldstream Guards
11
Grenadier Guards
11
King’s Own Royal Border Regiment
10
Royal Regiment of Wales
10
Army Catering Corps
9
Cheshire Regiment
9
Green Howards
9
King’s Own Scottish Borderers
9
Queens Lancashire Regiment
9
Royal Pioneer Corps
9
Royal Navy
9
Blues & Royals
8
Gordon Highlanders
8
Women’s Royal Army Corps
8
Devon & Dorset Regiment
7
Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment
7
Gloucestershire Regiment
7
Queen’s Own Highlanders
7
Royal Scots
7
Royal Welsh Fusiliers
7
Staffordshire Regiment
7
Worcester & Sherwood Foresters
7
14/20 Kings Hussars 15/19 Kings Royal Hussars
7
5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards
1
RAF Regiment
6
Royal Army Medical Corps
6
Royal Hampshire Regiment
6
Royal Logistic Corps
6
Royal Tank Regiment
6
Army Intelligence Corps
5
Royal Army Pay Corps
5
Royal Highland Fusiliers
5
17/ 21st Lancers
5
Black Watch
4
Prince of Wales Own Regiment of Yorkshire
4
Royal Horse Artillery
4
Welsh Guards
4
9/12 Lancers
4
13/18 Hussars
3
Air Cadet Force
3
Royal Irish Regiment (V)
3
15/19 Hussars
3
Adjutant General’s Corps
2
Princess of Wales Royal Regiment
2
Royal Army Veterinary Corps
2
Royal Hussars
2
Royal Scots Dragoon Guards
2
16/5th Lancers
2
Scots Dragoon Guards
2
Army Cadet Force
1
Army Physical Training Corps
1
Army Staff
1
General Staff
1
Intelligence Corps
1
Irish Guards
1
Life Guards
1
North Irish Militia
1
Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps
1
Queen’s Dragoon Guards
1
Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars
1
Royal Army Dental Corps
1
Royal Army Education Corps
1
Royal Dragoon Guards
1
Royal Horse Guards
1
The Highlanders
1
Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire
1
APPENDIX 3
PRIME MINISTERS WHO DEPLOYED TROOPS TO NORTHERN IRELAND
Name
Party
Years of Office
Harold Wilson
Labour
1969–70*
Edward Heath
Conservative
1970–74
Harold Wilson
Labour
1974–76
James Callaghan
Labour
1976–79
Margaret Thatcher
Conservative
1979–90
John Major
Conservative
1990–97
Anthony Blair
Labour
1997–2007
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* His first term was 1966–70, but this table includes only the period 1969 onwards.
APPENDIX 4
MAINLAND EUROPEAN FATALITIES
MILITARY PERSONNEL
Colonel Mark Coe (Royal Engineers)
Shot by IRA, Dortmund, Germany: 16 February 1980
Airman Ian Shinner (RAF Regiment)
Shot by IRA Roermond, Holland: 1 May 1988
Airman John Baxter (RAF Regiment)
Killed in the same incident
Airman John Miller Reid (RAF Regiment)
Killed in the same incident
Sergeant Major Mike Heakin (Royal Regiment of Wales)
Shot by IRA in Ostende, Belgium: 12 August 1988
Corporal Steven Smith (Royal Tank Regiment)
IRA bomb, Hanover, Germany: 2 July 1989
Corporal Islania Maheshkumar (RAF)
Shot by IRA in Wildenrath, Germany: 26 October 1989
Major Michael Dillon-Lee (Royal Artillery)
Shot by IRA, Dortmund, Germany: 2 June 1990
MILITARY FAMILY
Mrs Heidi Hazell (Army wife)
Shot by IRA, Unna-Messen, Germany: 7 September 1989
Nivruti Islania (aged 6 months)
Shot along with her father at Wildenrath, Germany: 26 October 1989
DIPLOMATIC PERSONNEL
Christopher Thomas Ewart-Briggs (British Ambassador to the Irish Republic)
Killed by IRA car-bomb Sandyford, Dublin 21 July 1976
Sir Richard Adam Sykes (British Ambassador to Holland)
Shot by IRA in The Hague, Holland: 22 March 1979
Karel Straub (chauffeur to the Ambassador)
Killed in the same incident
Additionally, two Australian citizens, Nick Spanos and Stephen Melrose, were shot dead by the IRA in Roermond on 27 May 1990, in the mistaken belief that they were off-duty British soldiers.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, J., Morgan, R. & Bambridge, A., Ambush: The War Between the SAS and the IRA (Pan Books, 1988).
Barzilay, D., The British Army in Ulster Vol. I (Century Books, 1973).
Barzilay, D., The British Army in Ulster Vol. II (Century Books, 1975).
Beresford, D., Ten Men Dead (HarperCollins, 1994).
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Breen, C., A Force Like No Other (Blackstaff Press, 2017).
Brown, J., Into The Dark: 30 Years in the RUC (Gill & MacMillan, 2005).
Burgess, J., The Exodus (Causeway Press, 2011).
Burleigh, M., Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (HarperCollins, 2009).
Campbell, J., The Iron Lady (Vintage, 2012).
Clarke, A.F.N., Contact (Secker & Warburg, 1983).
Clarke, G., Border Crossing (Gill & MacMillan, 2009).
Clarke, L. & Johnston, K., Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government (Mainstream, 2001).