Those officers who question the right of coroners’ courts to pry into the world of covert operations sometimes say it is impossible to answer many questions because ‘there is a war going on’. Enoch Powell regards this as a dangerous argument which implies a moral equivalence between the two sides. In a television interview in 1988, he said: ‘The IRA isn’t a thing upon which war can be declared. If we make it a nation state and say we are going to treat you as a nation state and recognize you as a nation and declare war upon you, then you would in fact have installed the IRA in the very position which it seeks to attain by means of terror.’
21Disaster at Newry
Just a few days after the Strabane incident the IRA succeeded in launching a spectacular attack on the RUC – a blow characterized by some as the RUC’s equivalent to the Army’s loss at Warrenpoint in 1979. The mortar attack on Newry police station demonstrated several things. It showed the IRA’s willingness to develop weapons to suit its own particular needs and its patience in persevering with such technology despite many years of failure.
In November 1983 the IRA had attacked Carrickmore police station with home-made mortars. They killed one police officer and injured several others, but, prior to Newry, this was the only real success which they had had with such weapons. The Provisionals’ willingness to carry on attempting such attacks seems something of a mystery in retrospect. Between 1973 and early 1978 they attempted a total of seventy-one attacks using such weapons without killing a single member of the security forces. The firing tubes and shells, usually made in workshops in the Republic, could not be made to sufficiently high tolerances to produce an accurate weapon. Many shells failed to explode, others scattered wildly off target – raising the prospect that an attack could go disastrously wrong and kill civilians.
Nevertheless, mortars continued to offer an important advantage to other means of attacking security forces bases. They allowed the Provisionals to remain some distance away from their targets, which meant it was a safer means of attack. Their continued use, despite so many failures, was partly a product of an attitude summed up by Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison, when after the Brighton bombing he said, ‘Remember, we have to get lucky once.’
The ASU which attacked Newry police station used a heavy mortar, the design of which had evolved from much trial and error. Army explosives experts dubbed it the ‘Mark 10’ mortar. The mortar tubes were bolted on to the back of a Ford lorry which had been hijacked in Crossmaglen. Each tube was made from an oxy-acetylene cylinder with the top cut off. The tubes, each containing a bomb full of high explosive, were sloped at different angles to provide a scatter of shot around the target, increasing the odds of a hit.
Early in the evening of 28 February 1985 the lorry was driven through Newry. The driver got out, starting a timing device which was connected to a battery which would send the impulse to launch the shells. As it began to fire, some of the rounds overshot the target falling into the street in front of the police station. A group of police officers in the flimsily built canteen did not have time to take cover. The IRA had only to hit with one shell: each of them contained 40 lb of high explosive. When one crashed through the roof of the canteen nine police officers were killed.
The Newry attack was followed, like many other IRA ‘spectaculars’, by calls from politicians, mainly Unionists, for the government to ‘do something’, to ‘increase security’. Officers at Lisburn and Knock are philosophical about such demands. In this case they knew perfectly well that the loss of nine officers had followed years of almost complete failure with mortar attacks. But telling people that the IRA had simply been lucky was hard when questions are being asked about why so many soldiers and police officers were accommodated in temporary wooden buildings which offered no protection against mortar shells.
After Newry a major programme of construction, costing millions of pounds, was started to protect bases from mortar attack. This usually involved building blast-deflecting walls around the base of a building and a reinforced roof over the top.
Another aspect of the post-Newry ‘security review’ was the stepping-up of Army patrols around bases. This operation, code-named COUNTERPOINT, had several functions. There was a chance that the soldiers might encounter people preparing an attack, although all previous experience had shown this to be a remote possibility. Rather, COUNTERPOINT was intended to deter the IRA from planning such attacks. The generals at Lisburn well understood the value of visible Army patrols for frightening off would-be attackers. It was felt that if a side-street near a base was patrolled every few hours or even days the ‘dickers’ sent to scout out targets would report back that it was too dangerous.
RUC morale in Newry remained fragile in the months after the attack. Under directions from Knock, the police assumed responsibility for patrolling one of the most dangerous towns in Ulster. Many officers thought this a highly dangerous assignment which had been ordered without proper consideration by their chief constable, says an RUC man.
Matters came to a
