| East Tyrone Brigade | |
|---|---|
| Active | December 1969–July 1997 |
| Allegiance | Provisional Irish Republican Army |
| Area of operations | east County Tyrone |
| Engagements | Attack on Ballygawley barracks Loughgall Ambush Ballygawley bus bombing Attack on Derryard checkpoint 1990 Gazelle shootdown Coagh ambush Clonoe ambush Coalisland riots 1997 Coalisland attack July 1997 riots |
| Disbanded | July 2005 |
| Commanders | |
| Notable commanders |
Patrick Joseph Kelly Kevin McKenna |
The East Tyrone Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), also known as the Tyrone/Monaghan Brigade[1] was one of the most active republican paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland during "the Troubles". It is believed to have drawn its membership from across the eastern side of County Tyrone as well as north County Monaghan and south County Londonderry.[2]
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In the 1980s, the IRA in East Tyrone and other areas close to the border, such as South Armagh, were following a Maoist military theory[3] devised for Ireland by Jim Lynagh, a high-profile member of the IRA in east Tyrone (but a native of County Monaghan).[4] The theory involved creating "no-go zones" that the security forces of Northern Ireland did not control and gradually expanding them to make the country ungovernable. Lynagh's strategy was to start off with one area which the British military did not control, preferably a republican stronghold such as east Tyrone. The South Armagh area was considered to be a liberated zone already, since British troops and the RUC could not use the roads there for fear of roadside bombs and long-range harassing fire. Thus it was from there that the IRA East Tyrone Brigade attacks were launched, with most of them occurring in east Tyrone in areas close to south Armagh, which offered good escape routes. The first phase of Lynagh's plan to drive out the British security forces from east Tyrone involved destroying isolated rural police stations and then intimidating or killing any building contractors who were employed to rebuild them.[5] Lynagh's plans met strong criticism from senior brigade member Kevin McKenna, who regarded the strategy as "too impractical, too ambitious, and not sustainable" in the words of journalist Ed Moloney. The IRA Northern Command, however, approved a scaled down version of the strategy, aimed at hampering the repair and refurbishment of British security bases.[6] Journalist Kevin Toolis states that from 1985 onwards, the Brigade led an overall five-year campaign that left 33 security facilities destroyed and nearly a hundred seriously damaged.[7]
Members of the East Tyrone Brigade had previously carried out two attacks on RUC bases in their operational area, described by author Mark Urban as "spectaculars".[5] The first was an assault on Ballygawley barracks. The second attack was on the part-time station at The Birches and it began by driving a JCB digger with a 200 lb (91 kg) bomb in its bucket through the reinforced fences the RUC had in place around their bases, and then exploding the bomb and raking the police station with gunfire. On these two occasions the stations were destroyed, and, in the first case, two of the occupants killed.[8] In April 1987 they shot and killed Harold Henry, one of the main contractors to the British Army and the RUC in Northern Ireland.[9]
On 8 May 1987, at least eight members of the brigade launched an attack on the unmanned Loughgall RUC base. The IRA unit used the same tactics as it had done in the The Birches attack.[10][11] It destroyed a substantial part of the base with a 200lb bomb and raked the building with gunfire. However, as their attack was underway, the IRA unit was ambushed by a Special Air Service (SAS) unit. The SAS shot dead eight IRA members and a civilian who had accidentally driven into the ambush. This was the IRA's greatest loss of life in a single incident during its campaign. Six IRA members from a supporting unit managed to slip away.[12]
The eight volunteers killed in the ambush became known as the "Loughgall Martyrs" among many republicans.[13] They were:
Ed Moloney, Irish journalist and author of the "A Secret History of the IRA", and author Brendan O'Brien state that the brigade lost 53 members killed in the Troubles - the highest of any 'Brigade' area.[15] Of these, 28 were killed between 1987 and 1992.[16]
The SAS ambush had no noticeable long-term effect on the level of IRA activity in East Tyrone. In the two years prior to the Loughgall ambush the IRA killed seven people in East Tyrone and North Armagh, and eleven in the two years following the ambush.[17] Most of the attacks which took place in County Fermanagh during this period of the Troubles were also launched from south Tyrone and Monaghan.[18]
A major IRA attack in County Tyrone took place on 20 August 1988, barely a year after Loughall, which ended in the deaths of eight soldiers when a British Army bus was bombed at Curr Road, near Ballygawley. The soldiers were being transported from RAF Aldergrove to a military base near Omagh after returning from leave in England.[19][20] This attack forced the British military to ferry their troops to and from East Tyrone by helicopter.[21]
On 30 August, an SAS ambush killed IRA members Gerard Harte, Martin Harte and Brian Mullin as they tried to kill an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment member near Carrickmore.[22] British intelligence identified them as the perpetrators of the attack on the military bus at Curr road.[21]
According to journalist Ed Moloney, Michael "Pete" Ryan, an alleged top Brigade's member, was the commander of the IRA flying column that attacked a permanent checkpoint at Derryard, County Fermanagh, on 13 December 1989. Journalist Ian Bruce, instead, claims that an Irishman who served on the Parachute Regiment was the leader of the IRA unit, citing intelligence sources.[23] British military sources also report that other IRA volunteers from East Tyrone were involved in the assault.[18] The checkpoint was stormed and two British soldiers killed in action.[24]
On 11 February 1990 the brigade managed to shoot down a British Army Gazelle helicopter near Clogher by machine gun fire and wounding three soldiers, one of them seriously.[25][26] The helicopter was hit between Clogher and Augher, over the border near Derrygorry, in the Republic. The Gazelle broke up during the subsequent crash-landing.[27][28] On 24 March 1990, there was a gunbattle between an IRA unit and undercover British forces at the village of Cappagh, County Tyrone, when the IRA volunteers fired without warning at a civilian-type car driven by security forces, according to Archie Hamilton, then Secretary of State for Defence.[29] An Phoblacht claims that the IRA men thwarted an ambush and at least two SAS members were killed.[30] Hamilton states that there were no security or civilian casualties. A second shooting took place in the village of Pomeroy on 28 June, this time against British regular troops. A soldier was seriously wounded.[31] In October 1990, two IRA volunteers from the brigade, Dessie Grew and Martin McCaughey, were shot dead near Loughgall by undercover soldiers while allegedly collecting two rifles from an IRA arms dump. On 1 January 1991, a British Army outpost was fire on by an IRA unit at Aughnacloy.[32] On 3 June, three IRA men, Lawrence McNally, Michael Ryan and Tony Doris, died in another SAS ambush at Coagh, where their car was riddled with gunfire. Michael Ryan was the same man who according to Moloney had led the mixed flying column under direct orders of top IRA Army Council member 'Slab' Murphy two years before.[33][34] The RUC stated the men were on their way to mount an ambush on Protestant workmen.[35]
In January 1992, IRA members killed eight building workers and severely injured another six, with a landmine at Teebane near Cookstown, on their way back from a British Army base. One of the workers killed, Robert Dunseath, was also a member of the Royal Irish Rangers.[36] The men were working to re-build RUC/Army barracks damaged by IRA bombs. The men were all Protestants and this was widely perceived as a sectarian attack.[37]
Another four IRA members were killed in an ambush 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. O'Donnell had been released without charges for possession of weapons in two different occasions in the past.[38] Whereas the previous ambushes of IRA men had been well planned by Special Forces, the Clonoe killings owed much to a series of mistakes of the IRA men in question. They had mounted a heavy DShK machine gun on the back of a stolen lorry, driven right to the RUC/British Army station and opened fire with tracer ammunition at the fortified base at point-blank, when the long-range of the weapon would unable them to fire from a safe distance. No efforts were made to conceal the firing position or the machine gun. After the shooting they drove past the house of Tony Doris, the IRA man killed the previous year, where they fired more shots in the air and were heard to shout, "Up the 'RA, that's for Tony Doris". A support vehicle further compromised the getaway by flashing its emergency lights. The six attackers gathered on the same spot, instead of vanishing separately. The IRA men were intercepted by the SAS as they were trying to dump the lorry and escape in cars in the car park of Clonoe Roman Catholic church, whose roof was set on fire by Army flares. Two IRA men got away from the scene, but the four named above were killed. One British soldier was wounded.[39] One witness has said that some of the men were wounded and tried to surrender but were then killed by the British soldiers.[40]
In addition, the IRA in Tyrone was the target of an assassination campaign carried out by the loyalist paramilitaries of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The UVF killed 40 people in east Tyrone between 1988 and 1994. Of these, most were Catholics civilians with no paramilitary connections but six were Provisional Irish Republican Army members. The IRA responded by killing senior UVF man and former UDR member Leslie Dallas on 7 March 1989,[41][42] but the UVF shot dead three IRA members and a Catholic civilian in a pub in Cappagh on 3 March 1991. The intended target, Brian Arthurs, escaped injury.[43] The IRA retaliated on 5 August 1991, when they shot and killed a former UDR soldier along Altmore Road, also in Cappagh.[44] Another former UDR soldier was killed when an IRA bomb exploded underneath his car in Kildress, County Tyrone in April 1993; it was claimed that he had loyalist connections.[45] The later attack led to allegations that the IRA was killing Protestant land-owners in Tyrone and Fermanagh in an orchestrated campaign to drive Protestants out of the region.[46]
In March 1992, members of the brigade destroyed McGowan's service station along the Ballygawley/Monaghan road, on the basis that they were supplying British forces,[47] while a soldier was injured by a bomb near Augher.[48][49]
Another IRA bomb attack against British troops, near Cappagh, during which a paratrooper lost both legs, triggered a series of clashes between soldiers and local residents in the staunchly republican town of Coalisland, on 12 and 17 May 1992. The 12 May's riots ended with the paratroopers' assault on three bars, where they injured seven civilians. Another street fracas on 17 May between a King's Own Scottish Borderers platoon and a group of nationalist youths in Coalisland resulted in the theft of an army machine gun and a new confrontation with the paratroopers.[50][51][52]
Six paratroopers were charged with criminal damage in the aftermath, but they were acquitted in 1993. Five of them were bound over.[53]
Another British soldier was injured in Pomeroy when his patrol was fired on by an IRA unit on 2 August 1992.[54]
The brigade was the first to use the Mark-15 Barrack-Buster mortar in an attack on 5 December 1992 against a police station in Ballygawley.[55]
From mid-1992 up to the 1994 cease fire, IRA units in east and south Tyrone executed a total of eight mortar attacks against police and military facilities and were also responsible for at least 16 bombings and shootings. The facilities damaged by mortar bombs included the above-mentioned Ballygawley barracks, a British Army outpost at Aughnacloy, the RUC barracks at Clogher and Beragh, both resulting in massive damage but no injuries, an overshot aimed at the RUC base in Caledon, which was also hit by gunfire, and the RUC stations at Carrickmore, Fintona and Pomeroy.[56]
At least five members of the security forces were killed by the IRA in around this area during the same period.[56][57] Among the killed were two constables who were shot dead while driving a civilian type vehicle in Fivemiletown's main street on 12 December 1993. A British Army helicopter was fired on in the aftermath of the ambush.[58] Another fatality was a Royal Irish Regiment soldier from Cookstown who was abducted and shot dead while on leave; his body was later found in the outskirts of Armagh town on 21 May 1994. His elder brother, a civilian contractor to the Ministry of Defense, had died in a South Armagh Brigade[59] mortar attack one year before, while working inside an Army base near Keady, County Armagh.[60]
There were a number of actions carried out by the IRA in the eastern part of Tyrone from 1996 up to the latest IRA ceasefire of July 1997:
Róisín McAliskey, daughter of political activist Bernadette McAliskey and suspected IRA member from Coalisland was accused by German authorities of being involved in a mortar attack on British Army facilities in Osnabrück, Germany, on 28 June 1996. Her extradition from Northern Ireland was refused in 2007.[71]
The commander in chief of the brigade,[72] Kevin MacKenna, was also appointed 'chief of staff' of the IRA in 1983. He later became the longest-serving volunteer in this job, right up to the 1997 cease-fire.[73]