During a patrol of the south Fermanagh countryside in April 1986, a young soldier noticed something unusual – a wire which he felt might be a command wire for a bomb. It was near a road which runs along a field outside Rosslea, only about one mile from the border with the Republic. When the soldiers returned to their base, he kept his discovery to himself during the routine de-briefing which follows all such patrols. Afterwards he told his commander about what he had seen and the SB was notified. What followed was, an Army intelligence officer says, ‘about the only recent example I can think of of an SAS operation which did not result from informer intelligence’.
Int and Sy Group carried out a covert investigation of the area and discovered that it was indeed a command wire: there was an 800lb bomb on the end of it. The explosive had been placed, in classic IRA fashion, under the road in the hope of blowing up a security forces vehicle. The SAS and SB detectives discussed what to do next. They agreed that the soldier’s discretion had been exemplary. Had he spoken up at the de-brief, everybody in the battalion would have known about the discovery within hours – with the danger that the news might leak out via a civilian employee or UDR member.
On 25 April, SAS men took up positions around the firing point end of the command wire. In the early hours of 26 April two men appeared in the field, one armed with a Ruger rifle, the other an FNC assault rifle. As they went to the firing point the SAS opened fire. One man, Sean Lynch from Lisnaskea a few miles away, was injured; the other was dead. Seamus McElwaine, Maze escaper and scourge of the security forces in Fermanagh for years, had been killed.
Lynch staggered into the darkness, hit several times. The SAS soldiers fired illuminating flares into the sky and Lynch rolled into a hedgerow for cover. He lay there first as a special forces QRF helped to search the area and then as other police and soldiers came to cordon and search the area. In evidence at Lynch’s trial, the Army said there had been four soldiers in two OPs overlooking the firing point when the shooting happened.
Police from the DMSU, who had been waiting in a nearby RUC station, continued their search into the following morning. Lynch said later he was found by a soldier who said, ‘Have you been shot, mate?’ Lynch replied, ‘I’m riddled.’ The IRA man said that DMSU officers then discussed killing him, but were stopped from mistreating him by an Army doctor.
Lynch attained the distinction, exceedingly rare among IRA members in the 1980s, of surviving SAS gunfire. He was later to claim that McElwaine had been injured in the first burst of shots and that the soldiers had questioned him for half an hour before finishing him off. Such allegations cannot be corroborated independently and, as of mid 1991, no inquest had taken place at which pathological evidence on the nature of McElwaine’s gunshot wounds could be presented.
The loss of McElwaine, only twenty-six but active in terrorism for ten years of his life, was a grave blow to the Provisionals in Fermanagh. There is little doubt that he had planned many killings and been personally responsible for several. His funeral across the border in Monaghan was attended by an estimated 3000 people, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
Some years later, when I visited an Army unit in the area, an officer expressed the opinion that the IRA in south Fermanagh had become largely inactive since McElwaine’s death. In his funeral oration, McGuinness said McElwaine ‘was a brave intelligent soldier, a young man who gave up his youth to fight for the freedom of his country’. The epitaph given him by an Army intelligence officer reveals both respect and loathing for the man: ‘He was an extraordinary bloke who would have been in the SAS if he was in the Army. It is just as well he is dead.’
23Tyrone Brigade
During the mid 1980s Tyrone was one of the key arenas in the battle between the Provisionals and undercover forces. The IRA cells in the area did not match south Armagh in terms of the number of security forces members killed, but they were able to carry out more operations than those in Londonderry or Belfast. IRA enforcers, however, appeared unable to stop widespread informing among the Tyrone republican community – something which allowed the security forces to stage many more covert operations in this area than in south Armagh.
Tyrone, the largest of the six counties, is a heterogeneous area. It stretches from Strabane, on the Republic’s border in the west, across desolate moors to undulating farmland where the county touches the Republic again at Monaghan. Some villages are exclusively Protestant, others Catholic, and towns such as Cookstown and Dungannon contain roughly equal numbers.
The IRA infrastructure has clusters of ASUs grouped in particular parts of the county. Around Dungannon, in villages like Cappagh, Pomeroy and Coalisland there are several ASUs, with close connections with groups across the border in Monaghan and in north Armagh. There is also a cluster of them in the central part of the county in moorland villages such as Carrickmore, Gortin, Greencastle and Eakra. Around Strabane there are groups with close connections with the IRA in Londonderry and Donegal in the Republic. These groups of ASUs sometimes referred to themselves, respectively, as ‘East Tyrone’, ‘Mid Tyrone’ or ‘West Tyrone Brigade’. In reality there were individuals who held sway over groups of ASUs, each sometimes only three or four members strong. The total number of active Provisionals across the county was perhaps fifty or sixty, with another
