Provisional IRA East Tyrone Brigade
The Provisional IRA's East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most famous Republican groups in Northern Ireland over the course of the 'Troubles'. They allegedly drew their membership from right across the eastern side of County Tyrone as well as North Monaghan and South Derry. The east of the county has a very long history of militant Republicanism from Hugh O'Neill, Tom Clarke, J.J. McGarrity, Liam Kelly, Bernadette Devlin and Martin Hurson. One of the most widely publicised failures in the Brigades campaign was at Loughgall where a group of eight men were ambushed and killed by the British special forces, the SAS during an attack on the RUC barracks on May 8 1987.
Membership of the Loughgall Unit
The East Tyrone Brigade members killed at Loughgall consisted of:
- Commander Patrick Kelly (aged 32)
- Declan Arthurs (aged 21)
- Seamus Donnelly (aged 19)
- Michael Gormaley (aged 25)
- Eugene Kelly (aged 25)
- Jim Lynagh (aged 31)
- Pádraig McKearney (aged 31)
- Gerry O'Callaghan (aged 29)
Arthurs, Donnelly, Gormaley and Kelly were all from the village of Cappagh, and had joined the PIRA after the death of Martin Hurson, another Cappagh man, on hunger strike in Long Kesh in 1981.
Strategy
The PIRA in East Tyrone and other areas close to the border such as South Armagh had been following a Maoist military theory devised for Ireland by Jim Lynagh, the leader of the IRA in East Tyrone (but a native of County Monaghan). The theory was that by starting off with one area which the occupying military did not control, and then by expanding gradually until the desired land was acquired, a paramilitary organisation could control any area of land as long as no enemy forces could retake the "zones of liberation" as they were called. The South Armagh area was considered to be one of those zones and thus it was from there that these attacks were launched, with most of them occurring in East Tyrone in areas close to South Armagh which had good escape routes and the opportunity to expand these zones.
Previous attacks
The East Tyrone Brigade had carried out two previous attacks on RUC bases in East Tyrone. Both attacks were begun by driving a JCB digger with a 200 lb (91 kg) bomb in its bucket through the reinforced fences the RUC had around their bases, then exploding the bomb and raking the barracks with gunfire. On these two occasions the barracks had been destroyed, and most or all of the occupants killed. It was therefore with some confidence that the PIRA tried the same tactics on the Loughall RUC barracks.
The ambush
The SAS, however, had set a meticulously planned a trap to kill the unit, having an RUC informant in the group (he was killed by the SAS in the ambush). They had placed an SAS soldier inside the barracks, and deployed a squad of 24 soldiers split into six groups.
Just after 7 o'clock, Declan Arthurs drove the JCB through the perimeter fence of the barracks. The van carrying the rest of the PIRA unit pulled up and they jumped out and opened fire on the station, intending to provide cover for Arthurs until he could get clear.
The SAS riddled the JCB and the van with bullets. Passer-by Anthony Hughes, 36, was killed and his brother badly wounded when they were caught up in the crossfire. All eight PIRA men were killed, all from head wounds. The soldiers fired more than 600 bullets; the PIRA men fired 70 bullets but did not hit any of the soldiers. It was later revealed that one of the dead men was in fact an informant for the RUC, although this was denied by them and by some journalists, who claimed that the information on the unit was gained from electronic surveillance.
The British recovered eight IRA waepons from the scene - three Heckler & Koch rifles, one FN rifle, two FNC rifles, a Luger pistol and a Spaz shotgun. The Royal Ulster Constabulary linked the guns to 7 murders and 12 attempted murders in the mid Ulster area (The Long War, Brendan O'Brien 1995 p141).
Aftermath of the ambush
SAS operations against the PIRA continued well into the 1990s. The PIRA conducted a long investigation in search of the informer in their ranks, not realising he had been killed by the SAS in the attack.
The group became known as the "Loughgall Martyrs" among supporters of the PIRA, who alleged that their deaths were part of a deliberate shoot-to-kill policy by the security forces. In the short term, their deaths may have galvanised militant republican support among the nationalist comunity in Northern Ireland. Thousands of people attended the funerals of the dead IRA men, the biggest republican funerals in Northern Ireland since those of the IRA Hunger Strikers of 1981. Gerry Adams in his graveside oration said the British Government understood that it could buy off the government of the Republic of Ireland, who he described as the "shoneen clan" (pro-British), but "It does not understand the Jim Lynaghs, the Paidraig McKearneys or the Séamus McElwaines. It thinks it can defeat them. It never will" (Quoted in the Secret Histoy of the IRA, Ed Moloney, 2002, page 325).
In 2001 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the eight IRA men (among others) had had their human rights violated by the failure of the British government to conduct a proper investigation into the circumstances of their deaths.
Subsequent Brigade activity
The killing of the veteran IRA men at Loughgall was a heavy blow to the IRA in East Tyrone. Many of their remaining activists were young and in-experienced and fell into further ambushes leading to very high casualties by the standards of the low intensity guerrilla conflict in Northern Ireland. Ed Moloney, Irish journalist and author of the Secret History of the IRA, states that the Provisonal IRA East Tyrone Brigade lost 53 members killed in the Troubles - the highest of any Brigade area. Of these, 28 were killed between 1987 and 1992 (Secret History p319). In August 1988, an SAS ambush killed IRA volunteers Gerard Harte, Martin Harte and Brian Mullin. In October 1990, two more IRA men, Dessie Grew and Michael McGaughey were shot dead near Loughgall by undercover soldiers. In June 1991, three IRA men, Lawrence McNally, Peter Ryan and Tony Dorris were lured into yet another SAS ambush at Coagh, where their car was raked with gunfire and rocket propelled grenades (Secret History of the IRA, p318).
In January 1992, IRA East Tyrone Brigade members killed eight building workers with a landmine at Teebane near Omagh. The men were working to re-build British Army bases damaged by IRA bombs. The men were all Protestants and this was widely percieved as a sectarian attack (O'Brien, Long War p219-220).
Another four young IRA volunteers were killed in February 1992. The four, Peter Clancy, Kevin Barry O'Donnell, Sean O'Farrell and Patrick Vincent, were killed at Clonoe after an attack on the RUC station in Coalisland. Whereas the previous ambushes had been the well planned killings of experienced IRA members, the Clonoe killings owed much to the in-experience of the IRA men in question. They had mounted a heavy DHSK machine gun on the back of a stolen lorry, driven to the RUC/British Army station and opened fire with tracer ammunition at the fortified base. they then drove past the house of Tony Dorris, the IRA man killed the previous year, where they fired more shots in the air and were heard to shout, "Up the RA, thats for Tony Dorris". This gave ample time for the British Army to respond. The IRA men were intercepted by the British Army as they were trying to dump the lorry and escape in cars in the car park of Clonoe Roman Catholic Church. Two IRA men got away drom the scene, but the four named above were killed. One witness has said that some of the men were wounded and tried to surrender but were then killed by British soldiers(O'Brien The Long War p232-233).
In addition the IRA in Tyrone was the victim of an assassination campaign carried out by the loyalist paramilitaries the UVF. The UVF killed 40 people in east Tyrone between 1988 and 1994. Of these, almost all were Catholic civilians with no paramilitary connections, but six of their victims were IRA members. Three of them were killed in a pub in Cappagh in March 1991. The IRA responded by killing senior UVF man Leslie Dallas (Moloney Secret History page 322).
Sources
- Brendan O'Brien, The Long War -the IRA and Sinn fein
- Ed Moloney, Secret History of the IRA