After the attack an IRA member telephoned the Newry RUC station to taunt them. He said one of the police officers had been ‘squealing like a pig’ before they shot him. This was entered into the station log book and, according to a police officer, had an understandably damaging effect on morale. Although it is well known for police in certain rural areas sometimes to refuse to enter a particular area until the Army have swept it, what followed was highly unusual. The town’s constables and sergeants gathered and held an angry meeting. According to an RUC man who was party to the discussions which followed, they refused to go out on the streets unless the Army was brought back into the town. They said they would limit themselves to guarding the police station and courthouse.
Chief Constable Hermon agreed to seek the Army’s help once more and the situation calmed. The incident is cited by some police to show how out of touch their Chief Constable had become by not anticipating the near mutiny.
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Mortars were among a variety of weapons which the IRA manufactured itself. There were practical and financial reasons for doing so. Although properly manufactured mortars could be bought on the arms market, the Provisionals appeared to prefer the home-grown alternative. The anti-armour grenades carried by the men at Strabane were also a product of the IRA’s workshops.
During the 1970s the organization had acquired some RPG-7 anti-tank rocket launchers but had found them difficult to use. One projectile had missed a security forces vehicle and ended up landing in a school. The IRA designed its own anti-armour weapons. Grenades were designed on the shaped charge principle – a technique which involves packing explosive around a cone-shaped cavity to enhance its penetrative effect. The anti-armour weapons were designed either to fly a short distance to their target or as ‘drogue bombs’. The latter were grenades thrown underarm which deployed a small parachute so that the shaped charge would detonate at the right angle relative to the armour.
These improvized weapons sometimes proved dangerous to the firer. Charles English, a Derry Brigade volunteer, was killéd in August 1985 while attempting to use one of the anti-armour weapons. English had been one of the masked men who had fired shots over the coffins at the funeral of the men killed at the Gransha hospital. Though unreliable like the mortars, an anti-armour bomb was used to lethal effect during a later attack in Belfast’s Divis flats.
During the mid 1980s the Provisionals succeeded in obtaining virtually any modern firearm they wanted. Terrorists carried Belgian FNC 5.56 mm assault rifles and the more modern, compact, version of the Armalite. They even obtained the FNC rifles before many of the countries whose regular armies had ordered them. The Provisionals also obtained G3 rifles made by the German firm Heckler and Koch. From 1986 these firearms were supplemented by a large number of Kalashnikov firearms provided by the Libyan government. The Libyan shipments also included SA-7 shoulder-launched missiles and heavy machine-guns, both of which could be used against helicopters.
During the summer of 1985 negotiations were carried on in the United States between Noel Murphy, a resident of Boston, and Provisional sympathizer, and an arms dealer. They discussed a purchase of 500 Armalite rifles, Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine-guns like those favoured by the SAS and belt-fed M-60 machine-guns. After consulting with senior IRA figures in Ireland in January 1986, Murphy returned and told the arms dealer that he was also interested in buying Redeye portable anti-aircraft missiles. Murphy was joined by Kieran Hughes, reportedly representing the Provisional leadership. In May, with the weapons about to be shipped, the dealer was revealed as an FBI agent and Murphy, Hughes and several accomplices were arrested.
As with mortars and drogue bombs, the preoccupation with shooting down helicopters eventually paid off. In May 1985 south Armagh Provisionals staged a complicated ambush near Crossmaglen. They had fitted a heavy machine-gun to a vehicle and covered it with a tarpaulin. They opened fire on an RAF Wessex helicopter which was using the Crossmaglen helipad. They hit the aircraft, but it did not crash.
In June 1988 they ambushed another helicopter with a heavy machine-gun near Crossmaglen. The Army Lynx was hit several times. While Lisburn determinedly used the phrase ‘forced to land’, anxious to deny the Provisionals the propaganda coup of admitting it had been ‘shot down’ it is clear that, in lay language, that is what happened. The aircraft landed heavily, injuring a crewman. IRA members were said to be closing in to finish off the crew with small arms when Army patrols arrived and saved them. Many Army pilots took to flying with an MP5 machine-gun for self-defence strapped to their seat after this. The damaged Lynx had to be carried off under a Chinook helicopter. Republican mural painters portrayed the aircraft as having had its tail shot off.
With its home-made mortars and anti-armour grenades and with its attempts to shoot down helicopters, the IRA demonstrated both its patience in waiting years, if necessary, to achieve its aim and its ability to improvise new weapons. The use of these mortars and anti-armour bombs had as much to do with the propaganda effects of using them and with letting the movement’s better technical intellects have their experiments, as it did with the weapons’ real effectiveness.
22Acceptable Levels
The period from December 1983 to February 1985 had seen aggressive use of Army special forces. From then on, however, the pace of operations seemed to slow slightly, although there was another spate of special forces operations in 1990 and 1991. The reasons for
