An Army surveillance operation had been mounted to keep the cache under observation. While rural operations allowed the soldiers to take cover in a nearby hedgerow or ditch, the built-up nature of the area had posed particular problems for the SAS men, who had gone into position in the house nearly two days before Duffy appeared. Two soldiers were in another bedroom on the first floor of the same house, another was hiding in the attic. The soldiers entered the house in civilian clothes. Once inside they opened holdalls containing camouflage uniforms and a variety of weapons. One had an Armalite, another a 9mm Sterling sub-machine-gun and the third an American-made Ingram 9mm machine-pistol. All three had attached torches to their weapons, a technique used to assist aiming in darkness or low light. A back-up team waited in a nearby street in a red van.
At about 9.20 p.m. on 24 November Patrick Duffy pulled up outside the house. His daughter and her baby waited in the car as Duffy climbed the stairs. He approached the wardrobe. Soldier B says he shouted a warning and began to move forward from the room at the rear of the house to the front room where Duffy was standing. Soldier B said that Duffy ‘spun round to face me bringing his right hand up’. The two SAS men opened fire with their machine-guns. Duffy was hit by at least a dozen bullets and fell mortally wounded. Duffy’s daughter heard the shots, moments later the red van raced up to the house and she watched as the back-up team, dressed in a mixture of civilian and military clothing, rushed into the house. She only found out later that her father had been shot.
Although the building contained an impressive horde of weapons, Duffy himself had not been armed as he climbed the stairs. Edward Daly, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry, commented: ‘The shooting dead of a person merely because that person enters a house or place where illegally held arms or explosives are stored is quite unjustifiable.’
As more facts emerged about the incident, it became apparent that, as in many other cases involving special forces, the SAS men had intelligence which they did not share with the later inquest court. Their commander stated that he had ordered his men to enter the premises, search it and keep any arms found under observation. But statements by the soldiers indicated that the weapons had been placed in the wardrobe nearly twenty-four hours after they had taken up position in the house. No explanation was given as to why they had not attempted to apprehend the men who placed the guns there, nor why they had not left after finding no weapons there in the first place. Clearly the men were sufficiently confident of their intelligence to know that it was worth staying in the house.
Forensic evidence cast doubt on the soldiers’ claim to have shot Duffy because he spun round. Duffy’s autopsy report indicated that he had been shot from a few feet away and that the bullets had entered his body ‘from his left and or behind and to his left’. This was consistent with him having been shot as he stood facing the wardrobe, with his left side and back towards the soldiers, rather than having turned towards them.
This incident did nothing to dispel the impression that the SAS were not subject to the normal legal restraint of using minimum force, and tended instead to shoot first and ask questions later. SAS soldiers had killed three uninvolved bystanders in six months. As 1978 drew to a close the practice of using intelligence to set up lethal confrontations between special forces units and suspected republican terrorists came under increasingly critical scrutiny, particularly at RUC headquarters, Knock. Some of the personalities in the security forces hierarchy who had encouraged the use of the SAS in such operations had little time left to serve in Ulster. Given both the public relations penalties and the legal repercussions of an incident like the Dunloy shooting of John Boyle, it was time for a rethink.
7Undercover Soldiers and the Law
The conflict in Northern Ireland was complicated by the uneasy accommodation between two cultures, that of the soldiers on the ground, and that of the senior officers and politicians, concerned to maintain the appearance of a rule of law. A soldier is trained to think in terms of doing battle with an enemy and attempting to gain victory by eliminating as many of his foes as possible. During the conflicts that preceded independence in some of Britain’s colonies, soldiers had often been able to dispatch ‘restless natives’ with few questions asked. However, on the streets of Northern Ireland they found themselves constrained by the principle of the minimum use of force which had evolved during centuries of mediation between the police and courts.
The belief that the problem could be solved by shooting IRA ringleaders is a common one in the Army. ‘We’ve all basically got the same idea of how we could end this, but world opinion wouldn’t stand for it’, as a sergeant serving in Ulster puts it.
For all the bar-room bravado it is apparent that in recent years the average soldier has had little opportunity to do battle with the Provisionals. The information most likely to lead to a confrontation is jealously guarded by the secret élites of the RUC and Army. For the ordinary member of the ‘Green Army’, rushing across the streets of Northern Ireland, the everyday threat is from bricks, spit and abuse. Training emphasizes the need on the part of troops on patrol for tolerance, because over-reaction to taunts can produce incidents which play into the hands of the IRA, feeding the nationalists’ stereotype of the British
