According to the brigade report, the van, fitted with a Mark-15 mortar, was left besides a military sangar. 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. [82][86], A brigade statement claims that late on the evening of 26 April 1993, a "variation" of the Mark-15 was fired at a British Army position on an open field near the river Fury, a few miles east of Clogher. It is of his great-grandfather Henry McGeough, a member of the Ribbonmen, the 19th-century society of often violent Catholic rebels. 26 March 1997: A grenade was thrown by IRA volunteers to the Army/RUC base at Coalisland. According to them, a second 264 pounds (120kg) device was defused in the follow-up operation. Their brothers, Pdraig McKearney and Jim Lynagh, were among eight members of the IRA's east Tyrone brigade killed by the SAS during an attack on an RUC station in the Protestant village of. 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. Their brothers, Pdraig McKearney and Jim Lynagh, were among eight members of the IRAs east Tyrone brigade killed by the SAS during an attack on an RUC station in the Protestant village of Loughgall, in Co Tyrone, in May 1987. 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. 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. [87] On 30 April, a heavy horizontal mortar was fired at an RUC patrol vehicle near Ballygawley roundabout; the round missed its target and hit a wall. Along with Lynagh and McKearney, the IRA gang included Gerard O'Callaghan, 29, Tony Gormley, 25, Eugene Kelly, 25, Patrick Kelly, 30, Seamus Donnelly, 19, and Declan Arthurs, 21. The standout example is the SAS shooting of eight East Tyrone IRA members whilst the IRA attacked Loughgall RUC station in 1987. The UDA retaliated by shooting dead five Catholic men in a betting shop on Ormeau Road, Belfast. 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. Orangeism and Britishness in Northern Ireland. Simon Carswell. At least two British soldiers were severely wounded in action near Cappagh[66] and Pomeroy[70] in 1992. In July of 2005, The Sunday Times reported that Adams was replaced by Brian Arthurs, a former commander of the Provisional IRA's East Tyrone Brigade. The East Tyrone Brigade members killed at Loughgall in 1987 consisted of: * Commander Patrick Kelly (aged 30) * Jim Lynagh (aged 31) * Pdraig McKearney (aged 32) * Declan Arthurs (aged 21) * Seamus Donnelly (aged 19) * Eugene Kelly (aged 25) * Gerry O'Callaghan (aged 29) * Tony Gormley (aged 25) Eugene Kelly The RUC officer, William Logan (aged 23), who was driving the police patrol vehicle was mortally wounded and died the following day, he was the first RUC officer killed by the brigade. [26], 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. Tusk has said that the EU will seek "flexible and creative solutions" to avoid a hard Border. Why would article 50 change that? 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. Anybody who has ever fought in the Provisional IRA, as distinct to those who hid in the Provisional IRA, or joined after the ceasefires, will never live to see a united Ireland, Dissidents who backed Brexit with the objective of destabilising the UK are not going to wage an armed campaign, he says. British military sources reported that other IRA volunteers from East Tyrone were involved in the assault. [18] In August 1988, an SAS ambush killed IRA members Gerard Harte, Martin Harte and Brian Mullin. [59], The brigade was the first to use the Mark-15 Barrack-Buster mortar in an attack on 5 December 1992 against an RUC station in Ballygawley. The British are sending a plausibly deniable mixed message, he says. In April 1987 the brigade shot and killed Harold Henry, one of the main building contractors to the security forces in Northern Ireland. [112] On 11 May 1993, British security forces found and defused a horizontal mortar complete with warhead in Dungannon. McKearney and Lynagh are dissenters, not dissidents; although they support the peace process they object to the policies pursued by Sinn Fin and some of their former comrades who moved into politics. Sean O'Farrell was wounded and attempted to escape. Ryan, according to Moloney, had led the mixed flying column under direct orders of top IRA Army Council member Thomas "Slab" Murphy two years before. There is very, very little appetite among republican circles in the North for a resumption of any armed campaign. The IRA responded by killing senior UVF man and former UDR member Leslie Dallas on 7 March 1989,[46][47] but the UVF shot dead three IRA members and a Catholic civilian in a pub in Cappagh on 3 March 1991. Now he has a doctorate in political science and writes a lively blog, the Pensive Quill, firing off opinions on the peace process, among other topics, and offering a platform to others. The area was previously secured by a group of armed volunteers. Interviewees suggest the vast countryside made rural IRA units particularly dangerous. [17] The eight volunteers killed in the ambush became known as the "Loughgall Martyrs" among many republicans. 7 December 1985: during an attack on the RUC barracks in Ballygawley, the IRA killed two RUC officers (Reserve Constable William Clements and Constable George Gilliland) and destroyed the barracks with a large bomb. Meanwhile, in an interview in the Sunday Tribune [added link], Brian Arthurs has revealed that he was one of a number of former senior Provisional IRA members in Tyrone who, along with Sinn Fin party members, left Sinn Fin two years ago. [9] The theory involved creating "no-go zones" that the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not control and gradually expanding them. As well as RAAD, the alliance includes an east Tyrone group thought to be responsible for killing PSNI officer Ronan Kerr in 2011, . McKearney argues that cross-Border economics has operated in a beggar-thy-neighbour way: Newry has over the years benefited at the expense of Dundalk, and vice versa, depending on currency fluctuations. [16] Additionally, most of the attacks which took place in County Fermanagh during this period of the Troubles were also launched from south Tyrone and Monaghan. The genie is out of the bottle, so you are not going to put it back in again, and at this point in time we are in the uneasy calm before the potential storm. [9], Mural commemorating those killed in the Loughgall Ambush, On 8 May 1987, at least eight members of the brigade launched another attack on the unmanned Loughgall RUC base. A second shooting took place in the village of Pomeroy on 28 June, this time against British regular troops. The device exploded while he was driving on Carrydarragh road, near Moneymore, County Londonderry, on 31 May 1993, just a few miles from Cookstown. May has said that the British do not want a return to the Border of old. [11] Scottish-born journalist Kevin Toolis has written that from 1985 onward, the brigade led a five-year campaign that left 33 security facilities destroyed and nearly 100 seriously damaged. He was arrested in 1988 for crossing the Dutch-German border with AK-47 rifles in the boot of his car and charged with attacks on British soldiers based in Germany. Certainly, I think we can rule out the idea of a hard Border with British troops on the Border. A 'senior security source' claimed that the IRA was responsible. [22] On 16 September 1989, a British Sergeant of the Royal Corps of Signals was shot and killed by an IRA sniper while he was repairing a radio mast at Coalisland Army/RUC base. [73], The brigade was the first to use the Mark-15 Barrack-Buster mortar in an attack on 5 December 1992 against the RUC station in Ballygawley. In 1988 he had been caught in possession of a 1,000lb bomb and sentenced to 16 years in prison. [52] 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 range, no efforts were made to conceal the firing position or the machine gun. [48] The IRA retaliated on 5 August 1991, when they shot and killed a former UDR soldier while living his workplace along Altmore Road, also in Cappagh. 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". [56][57][58], A part-time RUC barracks at Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, in the operational area of the brigade, was destroyed by an IRA van-bomb on 7 May 1992, though the attack was claimed by the South Fermanagh Brigade. The ambush that left Tyrone Volunteers Kevin Barry O'Donnell, Patrick Vincent, Sen O'Farrell and Peter . There may be little bits here and there, or attempts here and there, but nothing significant.. ], In 2012 a Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club in Tyrone distanced itself from a republican commemoration of those killed in the ambush. [34] 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. Since June 2016, when the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, there has been much speculation about the risk to the Northern peace process. 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: Risn 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 Osnabrck, Germany, on 28 June 1996. This was the last action by the Brigade before. One British soldier was wounded. Another street fracas five days later, 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. The fourth was imprisoned for offences that included attempted murder. [115][64] Among them there were Constable Andrew Beacom and Reserve Constable Ernest Smith, the two RUC members ambushed and shot dead while driving a civilian type vehicle in Fivemiletown's main street on 12 December 1993. 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. 16 August 1973: two IRA volunteers, Daniel McAnallen (aged 27) and Patrick Quinn (aged 18), were killed when a mortar prematurely exploded during an attack on Pomeroy British Army/RUC base. Its all guff': Colm Lynagh, Anthony McIntyre, Gerry McGeough and Tommy McKearney Colm Lynagh, Anthony McIntyre, Gerry McGeough and Tommy McKearney. The SAS shot dead eight IRA members and a civilian who had accidentally driven into the ambush. Anthony McIntyre, an IRA man turned writer and historian who is another supporter of the peace process but critic of Sinn Fin, fails to see how a hard Brexit would fuel any new armed campaign, given that it was not the Border that brought the Provisional IRA into existence but the response in Belfast and Derry to the British armys behaviour when it came to the North. O'Donnell had been released without charges for possession of weapons on two different occasions in the past. He thinks it would be silly of the British to build a hard Border again and potentially stir up those tensions. Her extradition from Northern Ireland was refused in 2007. This in response to a complaint from DUP AssemblymanWilliam McCreaaccusing the GAA of turning a blind eye to "republican terrorist" events in the last years. Ed Moloney, Irish journalist and author of the Secret History of the IRA, states that the Provisional IRA East Tyrone Brigade lost 53 members killed in the Troubles, the highest of any rural Brigade area. One RUC officer was injured. A member of an IRA unit who survived a deadly SAS ambush at Loughgall which claimed the lives of eight republicans has broken his silence for the first time on the 30th anniversary. After being caught he was put up against a fence and killed. The six attackers gathered on the same spot, instead of vanishing separately. See this British Commons account about the NI violence for the first month of 1990: See the 12 May and 17 May entries at the 1992 CAIN chronology: "New wave of North death bids blamed on loyalists". 2 February 1996: The house of a part-time member of the RUC was riddled with gunfire in Moy. Paddy Fox is an IRA man on the run - not from the RUC or the British Army, but from his old comrades. 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