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Showing posts with label Brandon Sullivan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brandon Sullivan. Show all posts
Brandon Sullivan  🎤 Interviews TPQ columnist and published author, Christopher Owens.

Following on from reviewing Christopher’s novella, Dethrone God, I had an opportunity to talk to him further about it. Here is a transcript of our exchange.

BS: Your work looks at contemporary Belfast, but with an eye to the past. Have you considered writing something from conflict era Belfast?

CO: I wouldn't rule it out, but it's not something that I would consider at the moment in time as I feel that the present is always the most interesting period to explore. I think this because you have a bigger sandbox to play in (so to speak) so you are able to connect a view of the past with a vision of the future and see how the two measure up in the present. Quite often, writers do go back in time to tell a story that works as an analogy of whatever is happening at that moment in time, but you have to be a writer of immense skill to ensure that such a work doesn’t fall into cliché ridden viewpoints or perpetuate debunked folklore which, as a student of history, is something that deeply irritates me with historical fiction. That’s not to say that it isn’t possible to create some  astonishing historical fiction. I am on record as saying that Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man not only changed my life but inspired me to become a writer. Skintown by Ciarán McMenamin is another example, dealing with being a teenager in Enniskillen in the early 90’s and Maurice Leitch’s Silver’s City manages to capture the shifting worldviews between the elder gunmen and the Young Turks. These three stand out because the various writers understood that character and location drove their narratives and so it allowed for something a little more introspective and closer to the bone than a million Shadow Dancers.

Review of A Vortex of Securocrats

BS: What inspired you to write a poetry, and then a novella?

CO: Trial and error. I usually start off writing poetry and then decide that the theme might be better served as a piece of prose, a short story or a novella. Dethrone God initially began as a poem about realising that the city I grew up in had substantially changed over the years, as had I. There's a punchiness to poetry that I love, in the sense that it can conjure up an atmosphere within a few lines that leave you musing on what was described for days afterwards, whereas the demands of a novella mean that there are many such moments within the story. This makes the novella harder to write. By contrast A Vortex of Securocrats was easier as I had a general theme and was able to shape the poetry to make it fit.

BS: Any other forms of writing that you’re considering at the moment?

CO: I am currently collaborating with the artist Michael Hing to interpret some of my poetry into a comic format. This probably won't see the light of day for a while but I'm excited by the preliminary drafts. I would love to write a full graphic novel/comic book but that will take a long time. I'm also working on the memoir of a singer whose band I greatly admire. I have about six months of interviews so it's taking a while but it's a brilliant story of a working class lad from the North of England who made something of himself thanks to punk and continues to be his own man. I've learnt a lot from him in our ten years of friendship and this memoir is the least I can do to honour that friendship.

BS: What do you hope to achieve with your written work?

CO: There are a multitude of answers I can give you; all designed to flatter my ego and make me seem more important than I actually am. We all know that culture is deeply fragmented in 2024 and so the chance of a novel sparking various discussions among a wide stratum of society is zero. In such circumstances, all I can realistically hope for is that as many people as possible read my work and enjoy it. If it lingers a little longer in the memory, then I will be over the moon. All too often, people set themselves unrealistic goals. I’ve seen this among bands and writers (some of whom were very good) who entered the arena thinking that they were the ones who would overcome the odds to become the breakout artist of their generation. Naturally this didn’t happen, and they ended up feeling disillusioned and cheated. But the problem is they weren’t cheated, they had inflated expectations and crumbled whenever reality came their way. Whereas I don’t expect my work to sell millions of copies, nor do I wish to become a “professional writer” (with connotations of government grants, constraints and hobnobbing). I am quite happy as an independent writer as I can write what I want whenever I want, I can work with like minded people and I am not dictated to by finances nor commercial pressures.

Review of Dethrone God

BS: "I feel that the present is always the most interesting period to explore" This immediately jumped out at me. What makes the present the most interesting period to explore? And given the sheer historical weight of Belfast/NI, what makes contemporary study more interesting?

CO: In purely literary terms, the past and the future are no longer tangible entities, but have bled into the present to create a kind of inertia where everything seems to be both moving forwards and backwards. For me, I find that fascinating as it's a unique time in human history where we're (for want of a better term) 'stuck'. We're more aware of the past than ever but have little understanding of it and so many claim to act in a way that will be beneficial for their descendants. Maybe this milieu is what the future will be for the next few decades, who knows? But it's fun to explore this from a literary perspective and try to add your own interpretations or predictions so that it doesn't just become a diary but one that challenges

BS: "Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man not only changed my life but inspired me to become a writer. In what ways did it change your life?" More broadly, other than those you listed, what other works changed and/or influenced your life? Specifically, what difference did they make?

CO: The period of the film's release (1998) helped to shape my twelve year old self. I remember the controversy all too well. Released just before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, hearing stories about how this film could potentially "bring down the peace process" obviously intrigued the twelve year old me. This sounded like a dangerous film. Alongside A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, The Devils etc. Not only did I become aware of the power of art to outrage and provoke commentary, but the mix of history, politics and art gave me a frame for negotiating Ireland's recent history. It made me realise things were being swept under the carpet in the name of peace and I wasn't sure if I liked that or not. As an example the film only played for a few weeks in Belfast but regularly outsold Titanic despite being relegated to one cinema. Titanic (a film I enjoyed as a kid) was the kind of image that Belfast wanted to project onto the world (a spectacular piece of engineering modernity serving as the backdrop for a doomed love story), whereas Resurrection Man represented the squalid reality. Even more squalid when you realise that the only cinema in Belfast that would show it (Yorkgate) is not far from where the Butchers operated.

Naturally, being twelve years old, there was no chance of me being able to sneak into the cinema to see it. So, after noting it was based on a book, I borrowed it from the Falls Library in April 1998. The first thing that struck me about the cover was how nightmarish it was, seemingly managing to be a blend of both the esoteric and the realistic. Sure, to 2024 eyes, it's very much a product of its time thanks to the cross and crumbling terrace housing but to a twelve year old me it was revolutionary. The writing was something else. Although (at the time) I probably only understood a third of it, it did change my life in that it made me very aware of street names and the ghosts that haunt them. As I wrote on this site a few years ago:

In McNamee's hands, the city of Belfast becomes a character in itself. This isn't just a city at war. It's a gothic, Cormac McCarthyesque metropolis that holds secrets, ghosts and a grip of paranoia over the living (the character of Coppinger is a perfect example of someone who's been eaten up and spat out by the city). It also serves as a place of endless possibilities but, crucially, one that holds a power on the psyche of the population.

People who (as McNamee put it):

...preferred it when it began to get dark. By day the city seemed ancient and ambiguous. Its power was dissipated by exposure to daylight. It looked derelict and colonial. There was a sense of curfew, produce rotting in the market-place. At night it described itself by its lights, defining streets like a code of destinations. Victor would sit with the big wheel of the Zephyr pressed against his chest and think about John Dillinger’s face seen through a windscreen at night, looking pinched by rain and the deceit of women.

That idea (of other forces beyond your understanding at work in the background influencing you whether you like it or not) has never left me.

Christopher’s weekly column at TPQ

Other works (be they books, comics/graphic novels and albums) that have influenced me are:

The Butcher Boy 📚 Patrick McCabe

American Psycho 📚 Bret Easton Ellis

Crash 📚 JG Ballard

Last Exit to Brooklyn 📚  Hubert Selby Jr.

Post Office 📚 Charles Bukowski

Pop.1280 📚  Jim Thompson

Get Carter 📚 Ted Lewis

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 📚 Frank Miller/Lynn Varney

V For Vendetta 📚 Alan Moore/Dave Lloyd

2000AD magazine

Heavy Metal magazine

What's This For...! - Killing Joke

Children of God 📚 Swans

Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing 📚 Discharge

The Voice of America 📚 Cabaret Voltaire

Twitch 📚  Ministry


While I have been influenced by them in a variety of different ways, one thing all of them have going through them is an honesty and intensity that I found in Resurrection Man.

Buy Christopher’s books

BS:The protagonist is a man with secrets, a tormenting inner voice, and is also a man confronted by other men in a time-honoured performance of masculine dominance. Was exploring forms of masculinity present during the writing of Dethrone God?

CO: Not consciously. I try to avoid such themes when I'm writing as I find them very much present day concerns and I'm not interested in pandering to a particular interpretation. Of course I accept that, by putting my work out there, people will interpret it in whatever way they see fit. This is both part of the joy and despair at being a writer. Often, themes will only come through when the text has been completed but needs revising. That way, it's easy to identify what you want to say on a particular area and help craft the narrative in such a way that it accommodates this point of view. Often, in my experience, sitting down and thinking "I will write this book which will explore themes of...." often leads to a cul de sac.

BS: Broadly speaking, as a writer of fiction and a student of history, how much of the writer is in the writing? (I've tried a number of times to write something, but invariably write about myself, realised I'm doing it and then stop).

CO: It all depends on how much you allow yourself to be in the writing. Hubert Selby Jr, when teaching creative writing in California, once made the grand claim that male writers put their balls in the way of the story and that, in order to write, one has to destroy the ego (or take your balls out of the way) in order to tell a story as ego is never the truth. I'm not 100% convinced by this, but I can certainly see the point that he was making. Writing is a task that requires immense discipline but also immense imagination. You have to be prepared to piece things together that you might not have thought of before and you have to be prepared to see it through to the very end.

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist.

The Influence Of Books

Brandon Sullivan 🔖I was delighted to have the opportunity to review Christopher Owens’ new novella, Dethrone God.


Like his previous work, A Vortex of Securocrats, Owens has invited us into a Belfast that feels familiar to those of us who have lived there. But we are invited to be tourists, through the lens of our narrator.

I found reading this similar to a night out; encountering some morons that wish to harm you, and, perhaps, being revisited by demons when you least expect it. The protagonist takes us across the city centre, with street names, branded shops and eateries. 

The superb writing and imagery in Dethrone God makes the following reflections on a city, which is also a dominant character in this story:

Despite its many faults, and even in this weather, I worship this city. There are many cities that have more in the way of culture and subcultures. Many that offer more exuberant sights. Many with an even richer history. But none match this city for the hold it has on me. Life is an intangible puzzle of beauty, and the main one for me is just how much this city means to me.

He “worships the city” even as some of its inhabitants make his life difficult. But, perhaps more troubling than the all-too-familiar “spides” in the town is an inner-monologue hinting, and then screaming, about a dark past. Muct like Belfast, and even more like the centre of Belfast, the past makes itself known. Not for the first time reading Owen’s writing, a tangible sense of the familiar arrives with the intimidatory knowledge of what happened and to whom in the streets where people now shop and make merry.

Our narrator expands with erudite flair about the fate of many European cities and about the anxiety he has about it happening closer to home. Brilliantly observational, he wonders:

… if the 'monoculture' that's infecting cities around the world will take the character out of my beloved Belfast, reducing it to nothing more than an extension of the many shopping centres that pollute the sky.

An example of this that hit home to me was the fate of St Comgall’s School, just off the Falls, pockmarked with bullet holes that announced the dawn of the Troubles, and soon to be nothing more than a memory. As Owens eloquently put it: “The sands of time are not kind to footprints.”

The narrator and the city share dark secrets. They are observant of modernity, and some might say progressing. But they are weighed down upon the past.

I found this an exhilarating read. The prose is beautiful, and for me it was like having a conversation at times. But the author doesn’t let you get too close to the narrator, despite all you have in common. The jarring nature of memories and confession remain in the background.

Again like Vortex of Securocrats, troublesome flashes of memory dance across the pages, like a BBC News 24 compilation with the sound off. Never explicit, just hinting. The murder of young Jamie Bulger, the fate of the Titanic, the screams of the aftermath of the Ormeau Road bookies massacre. Victims, perpetrators, the jailed and the jailers. A haunting vista that elicits a kind of nostalgic horror, the opposite of 1990s retro Channel 4 documentaries with bought memories from Stuart Maconie. It’s something altogether more alluring, and much more sinister.

This is a fine book. 70 pages, so doesn’t take long to read. But it demands re-visits. And stays in the mind. Anyone with an interest in noir writing, Belfast, the Troubles, or the nature of guilt and trauma should read this.

It left me feeling a sense of loss for what was, and nervousness about the future. This is, perhaps, at odds with logic.

I eagerly away his next work. Belfast Noir par fheabhas.

Christopher, Owens, 2024, Dethrone God. Sweat Drenched Press. ASIN: ‎B0CT96J9JK

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

Dethrone God

Brandon Sullivan & Bleakley ✍ continue their examionation of the IRA war making capacity in the 1990s.

Republican Movement Thinking at the Beginning of 1992

Before starting this piece, we did two things. The first was watched Pop Goes Northern Ireland 1992. We cannot recommend this documentary series highly enough, and urge all those interested in the conflict to watch it. The second was reading the first edition of the Irish People – We had hoped to find a copy of the IRA’s traditional new year statement, but were unable to do so. But we did find some other articles that give an idea of where the IRA was at in 1992. The War News section detailed a number of standard IRA operations: blowing up security force bases, shooting soldiers, and also causing over £50m of damage in England. This total would be dwarfed in 1992. But the issue was fascinating for what else it contained.

Two of three cartoons were against the Free State – one seemingly condemning Garda harassment, and the other, rather cleverly it has to be said, showing the “empty suits” of Fine Gael members, with one saying “as in all the other sectarian murders of Irish nationalists the real culprits are the IRA, of course!” Later on in the issue, there’s an interview with an IRA spokesperson about the Provo’s decision to dramatically cutdown on punishment shootings/beatings. And there was also an article celebrating a “spectacular Sinn Fein election victory” and details of an IPLO murder headlined “Sinn Fein Call for IPLO to Disband.” Criticism of the Southern political establishment; a tentative move towards a form of “normalisation” of crime and punishment; political success; and calls for republican dissidents to disband. This is all a far cry from one of the IRA’s “Year of Victory” statements in the 1970s.


The IRA in the North - killing

As with 1991, the first IRA killing of the year was hard to justify. On the 13th January, 22 year old nationalist, Michael “Mickey” Logue was killed with an under-car-bomb, and died in hospital of his terrible injuries. This happened in Coalisland, and the IRA apologised for the murder, saying they had been acted on “erroneous information.” A neighbour of the dead man helped get him out of the badly damaged car, later saying he'd heard “in general conversation” that "Mickey was one of the boys working on the barracks in the town." The IRA in Tyrone were still dedicated to killing those they believed were repairing the security force bases they repeatedly bombed and mortared.

Four days after Mickey Logue’s unjustifiable killing, the IRA carried out an attack that was described as “the worst attack on Protestant workers since Kingsmill.” In one sense, this is true. But the targets were not Protestants, they were those working on security force installations. In this case, the base was Lisnakelly, and the IRA believed they were targeting employees of the Henry Brothers, a company the IRA detested, and which lost a number of men. In fact, the IRA had “erroneous information again” – the eight men killed and six injured at Teebane worked for Karl Construction. But, in the IRA’s eyes, they were as legitimate a target as Henry Brothers. The firm they worked for was Karl Construction – named after an RUC member, Karl Blackbourne (aged only 19), who, with two colleagues, was shot dead by the IRA in Newry. Karl’s father, Cedric, owned the firm. Three of the casualties were part-time members of the security forces.

Was Teebane indicative of an IRA in decline? Jonathan Trigg in his book Death in the Fields: The IRA and East Tyrone quoted someone saying that Teebane was done at the behest of the East Tyrone Brigade’s OC, who decided not to tell most of his brigade “let alone Belfast.” The IRA in Tyrone had experienced losses at the hands of the security forces. Their families and the wider nationalist community had been targeted by resurgent loyalist paramilitaries. Perhaps Tyrone IRA were keen to “return the serve” or perhaps it was simply the continuation of a brutal but effective campaign against security force contractors. Cedric Blackbourne told an American journalist that “at least 30” of his workers quit in the aftermath of Teebane, but he also said the company kept on doing security force work.

On Good Friday, the IRA killed a member of the nationalist community, Brandon McWilliams. He was employed as a storeman at a UDR barracks, and was himself a former member of the Royal Ulster Rifles, and the Territorial Army. The IRA claimed he had “passed on intelligence” to the security forces, and that he had ignored repeated warnings to stop working for the UDR. Republicans killed four RUC officers, four British soldiers, and three members of the UDR. This was a significant drop in terms of security force “kills” since 1991 (19). The IRA did kill a significant loyalist figure, but the IRA were extremely active in another area: bombing.

The IRA in the North – bombing

The numbers can be interpreted in a number of ways. Had the IRA reduced the number of lethal attacks being initiated on the security forces? Or were the security forces just getting better at not being killed? Or a bit of both? One side of the IRA’s campaign which seemed most assuredly not to be in decline was bombing commercial, economic, or security force targets.

This included the biggest bomb to be exploded by the IRA in the North. Toby Harnden’s essential book on the South Armagh, Bandit Country, described the operation:

On 23rd September ... the South Armagh Brigade hijacked a van near Newry, packed it with 3,500 of explosives, drove it to Belfast and abandoned it outside the Forensic Science Laboratory in Newtownbreda ... after a coded warning had been issued, the device exploded, almost demolishing the laboratory and damaging 1,002 homes in the area, most of them on the loyalist Belvoir estate.

The target had been the forensic laboratory – specifically, items of evidence being analysed which were to be used against two South Armagh volunteers. The evidence had been locked in a vault elsewhere and was not damaged in the attack. One of the homes badly damaged belonged to hapless UVF bomber Martin Snodden. He received no compensation, on account of his murder conviction. Alongside IRA evidence would have been numerous items relating to forthcoming loyalist trials. The Knockbreda attack suggests that the IRA were as unperturbed at destroying evidence that could lead to loyalists being imprisoned as they were at damaging and/or destroying hundreds of PUL houses, and the resulting fury/backlash.
The IRA carried out scores of incendiary bombings during 1992, sometimes causing millions of pounds worth of damage. They also detonated huge car bombs, often in the heart of majority Protestant towns and villages, as well as the centre of Belfast. In their book about the UDA’s Belfast Brigade C Company, Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and 'C Company', Jordan & Lister described some of these bombings and the loyalist reaction:

In November, the UFF issued a statement responding to an IRA bomb blitz that had damaged hundreds of Protestant homes in Northern Ireland. Two months earlier, as the Provisionals stepped up their campaign in Britain with a firebomb attack on the Hyde Park Hilton Hotel, a 1,000 Ib bomb had destroyed the Northern Ireland Forensic Science Laboratory in Belfast’s loyalist Belvoir estate, wrecking 1,000 homes. In October, as IRA bombs continued to explode in central London, a 200 Ib device ripped through the commercial heart of Bangor, Co. Down, while at least 100 homes were damaged when a car bomb exploded outside a police station in another Protestant town, Glengormley. In a telephoned statement to the BBC, the UFF warned that, as of midnight on 6 November, any further bombs in Protestant areas would be responded to with attacks against ‘the republican community as a whole’. Its riposte, it said, would be similar to its action after the massacre at Teebane, a grim reference to the carnage at the Ormeau Road.

The UFF “response” was murdering three politically uninvolved nationalists in a bookies, one of them a WW2 British army veteran and former prisoner-of-war. The IRA shot and killed a UFF member, Norman Truesdale, in 1993 alleging he was involved in the triple murder.

The IRA in the North – the IPLO

The IRA effected the single most complete wipeout of a paramilitary group in the whole conflict on Halloween 1992, an event which became known as The Night of the Long Knives. According to McDonald & Holland’s book INLA: Deadly Divisions, around 100 IRA volunteers were involved in a series of operations across the city which left one man, Sammy Ward, dead, and many others wounded, sometimes with devasting “kneecapping” injuries (IRA man Gerry Bradley wrote that “over 60” volunteers took part). That the IPLO ceased to exist following the assault isn’t in doubt. But interesting questions emerge about the timing of the IRA’s operation. Three key IPLO figures had died violently in the year leading up to Halloween 1992: Martin “Rook” O’Prey and Conor Maguire were killed by the UVF (Aug 91, April 92), and former French Foreign Legionnaire Patrick Sullivan was stabbed to death by criminal elements in the lower Falls (Feb 92). Sullivan’s killing has been investigated by the Police Ombudsman. Would the IRA have risked a republican feud if these three key figures were still active? It’s hard to say. But the IRA still had the personnel and equipment to launch city-wide attacks against an ostensibly armed enemy. The Night of the Long Knives was perhaps the final large scale operation the Belfast Brigade undertook.

The IRA in England

The day after (10th April) John Major’s surprise Conservative Party general election win, the IRA detonated the biggest bomb in England since World War 2 at The Baltic Exchange. It killed three civilians, wounded 91, and cost £800m (£1.73bn in today’s money) – 25% more than the cost of all of the bombs the IRA exploded in the North up until that point. A few hours later, also on 11th April, the IRA detonated a huge bomb elsewhere in London, but fortunately nobody was killed.

There were other IRA (and INLA) bombings in London in 1992. However, none were of the magnitude of the Baltic Exchange bombing. The effects of this bomb:

destabilised the market for terrorism insurance on commercial properties. Given both the potentially very high costs associated with terrorist attacks on commercial property and the high degree of uncertainty associated with predicting the frequency and severity of those attacks, many insurers had withdrawn from the terrorism insurance market. Given the damaging impact on the wider economy should commercial properties become uninsurable, government intervention was deemed necessary.

In other words, UKG was forced to become an insurer, or risk losing investment and jobs in London, because of the IRA threat.

Conclusion

It is arguable that the IRA in 1992 were less successful on their own terms than in 1991. That being said, the political and financial fallout of the bombs in London was immense.

The Chairman of the Police Federation said, in the December 1992 issue of Police Beat that “The past year has been difficult; the IRA have never been more destructive or the loyalists more murderous.” He was partially inaccurate – the IRA had never been as destructive, but loyalists had been more murderous during most of the 1970s. I couldn’t however find any calls for internment to be reintroduced. Perhaps it can be argued that the IRA was in decline in the North, but not in England.

Debate may continue as to whether that was managed decline, the result of attrition, or both.

1991 discussed here.

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

Was The IRA In Decline By The 1990s? Part 3 ◆ 1992 – A Case Study

Bleakley and Brandon Sullivan ✍  examine whether the loss of the arms ship Eksund in 1987 really doomed the IRA to a stalemate . . . 

Continued from Part I

Capabilities

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s sympathy for Irish republicans was made tangible in four separate shipments of machine guns, explosives, and rocket launchers to Ireland in the 1980s. However, two remaining items of heavy ordinance on the Provisional IRA’s shopping list were lost forever with the Eksund: 82 mm mortars and 106mm M40 recoilless rifles.

In A Secret History of the IRA Ed Moloney writes:

On board [the Eksund] had been military mortars that could have devastated British barracks and RUC bases throughout the North, enabling the IRA to launch damaging attacks from safe distances.

This is a problematic line for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s unlikely that 82 mm mortar rounds could have “devastated” British barracks and RUC bases. A typical 82mm mortar high-explosive round contains 0.42 kg of TNT. The 82mm mortar tube is intended to be transported by infantry. For comparison the IRA’s notorious “Barrack Buster” a 320 mm calibre home-made mortar projectile that debuted in 1992 could have upwards of 100 kg of explosive. Barrack Buster batteries mounted on lorries often counted several individual tubes.

Since the disaster at Newry in 1985 (when nine RUC officers were killed by IRA mortar bombs) and other attacks the British government had undertaken a costly campaign to reinforce and rebuild security installations. British Army outposts were fortified with concrete bunkers and new RUC stations were built with spaced false roofs to protect against mortar rounds.

Secondly, that phrase “throughout the North”. Twelve mortars is not a substantial quantity. There were many British Army and RUC barracks, bases, permanent checkpoints and watchtowers across Northern Ireland. It’s difficult to conceptualise how a handful of light mortars could form the backbone of a hypothetical “Tet Offensive”, especially with the inevitable attrition through combat or captured arms dumps.

Former IRA John Crawley offered his perspective on the infantry mortars:

I firmly believed that, provided the right men were professionally trained and secrecy maintained, the IRA could have attack any barracks in the North...adjacent IRA units could have used 81-millimetre mortars to destroy enemy Quick Reaction Forces and their helicopter transport on the ground. Potential helicopter landing zones in the vicinity of an IRA withdrawal could have been pre-registered for rapid mortar and machine-gun fire...

Moloney correctly notes that the range of the factory-made mortars far exceeded the IRA’s own models. A typical 82mm mortar round has a range of over 3,000 m versus a mere 250 m for the “Barrack Buster”. A trained crew could also aim a military mortar with a fair degree of accuracy, while for the IRA’s mortars hitting their intended target was usually a matter of luck.

Whether any IRA members received training on the 82 mm mortars (or M40 recoilless rifles) is unclear but they were an adaptable group; certainly there were a lot more people in Ireland familiar with the operation of infantry mortars than surface-to-air missile launchers.

As discussed in Part I, if the Eksund was unloaded in Ireland as planned it’s unlikely it would have been the catalyst for an earth-shattering redefinition of the conflict; that would have necessitated a different Provisional IRA. But if the IRA that did exist in reality got its hands on a dozen 82 mm mortars, what impact would they have had?

As irreplaceable weapons it’s almost certain their use would have been mostly confined to border areas. The cumbersome DShK heavy machine gun, another Libyan prestige weapon, was on only a handful of occasions used deep inside Northern Ireland. It was otherwise exclusively a border asset. According to long time IRA member Gerry Bradley, three separate “ops” in Belfast involving the DShK were cancelled, apparently for fear of civilian casualties.

The IRA’s engineering department weren’t going to run out of pipes or gas cylinders to convert to destructive devices. These home-made mortars were intended to be single-use weapons, detonating on a timer long after the IRA Volunteers involved had vacated the area. This suited the IRA.

An 82 mm mortar would require its crew to be at the launch site aiming and loading them. Afterwards they would need to pack up the mortar and return it to an arms hide. This is mitigated somewhat by the Volunteers being kilometres, rather than meters, away from the target.

The military mortars in the context of the IRA’s campaign should be thought of as a precision weapon rather than a tool of large-scale destruction. They could plausibly impose tactical dilemmas on the British Army in border areas. For example, permanent vehicle checkpoints might need to be built several kilometres “inland” to counter the new threat. Another response would be to dismantle checkpoints and replacement them with more flexible infantry patrols, as the British Army did with Derryard and Boa Island in Fermanagh in 1991. The ubiquitous watchtowers in South Armagh would be in danger. Theoretically the IRA could lob 82 mm mortar bombs at Crossmaglen’s helipad without even setting foot in Northern Ireland.

The other new capability promised by the Eksund was the American-made 106 mm M40 recoiless rifle. The M40 is a direct-fire anti-tank cannon firing a hefty shell out to a maximum range of seven kilometres, effective range depending on the munition type but usually falling within a mile.

The recoilless principle operates by allowing gasses from the propellant charge to be expelled from the back of the gun, resulting in a forward recoil force that counteracts the recoil from the muzzle and the projectile. This means that you have an artillery piece far lighter (and simpler) than a conventional model with felt recoil so mild it can be fired from a jeep.

These are obvious advantages for an underground guerrilla group like the IRA. No readily available source says how many they were given by Libya but a dozen seems like a good guess.

The 106 mm gun would have been a priceless asset for the IRA. Like the DShK heavy machine guns they would probably be used near the border. At over 200 kg and eleven feet in length transporting and hiding it would not be trivial, although the IRA had always shown an ability to move mortar-lorries and large bombs.

The 106 mm gun, like the 82 mm mortar, would have presented a new threat to observation towers in South Armagh and other border outposts. It could also have been used in its intended anti-armour role against RUC and British Army vehicles.

One potential target raised by both Moloney and Crawley is the British patrol vessel in Carlingford Lough. The South Armagh IRA had taken potshots at Royal Navy boats in the Lough, most recently in December 1993 when they fired two rounds from a Barret .50 rifle at Bird-class patrol vessel HMS Cygnet. Armed with a more potent direct-fire weapon they could have dealt a lot more damage, no doubt a propaganda coup for republicans.

Moloney raises another maritime scenario for the 106 mm gun: Sinking a ship (or ships) in Belfast harbour, blocking access to the sea. Sinking a single ship, let alone ships, large enough to obstruct passage into Belfast harbour, in the heart of the city, would be a significant undertaking. The loss of the 106 mm recoilless rifle involved seems a given. Had the operation succeeded it would have made great television and embarrassed the British government, but in a historical context IRA attacks on commercial and naval shipping were hardly unknown. In 1990 an IRA bomb crippled the 31,565 ton British naval vessel RFA Fort Victoria at dock, three months post-christening; she narrowly avoiding sinking after listing at 45 degrees and was stuck in Belfast harbour for two years.

In 1994 the IRA in South Armagh shot down two low-flying British Army helicopters using mortars. It’s possible the 106 mm cannon could be co-opted for a similar role, especially considering its accuracy and flat trajectory relative to the IRA’s home-made mortars.

Precedents

This is ultimately all speculation, but there are two new capabilities that the IRA introduced in the early 1990s that provide a potential blueprint of the strategic and tactical impact the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles might have had.

The high-powered Barret .50 rifle, which can penetrate body armour with ease, was first fired at the British Army in Northern Ireland in early 1990. However it wasn’t until August 1992 that the sniping campaign began in earnest. From late 1992 until the end of 1993 the IRA killed six British soldiers and three RUC officers in single-shot sniper attacks, all bar one in South Armagh.

The campaign imposed difficulties on the operational manoeuvrability of British security forces in South Armagh, not to mention the effect on morale. A British Army intelligence officer, Patrick Mercer, recounted a meeting discussing the sniper threat:

We’re all sat around talking then suddenly the Major-General, Commander Land Forces, said “I can’t believe it. I’m sitting here with a bunch of highly-paid and clearly bright, able people talking as if I was a Second-Lieutenant, dealing with a sniper. What have we come to?” And everybody sort of had a nervous laugh. “But this is the point isn’t it? Two or three expert gunmen can hold the British Army, the RUC, and the British government to ransom, by every so often killing or wounding a small number of men but in a particular style.”

The sniper campaign coincided with a significant escalation in the IRA’s mortar campaign via the introduction of the new “Barrack Buster”. Specifications varied, but broadly mortars in this class contained upwards of 100 kg explosives per projectile, effectively a flying car bomb.

IRA mortar attacks in Northern Ireland in the years leading up to 1993 were largely ineffective, compared to the series of devastating attacks in the mid-1980s. However the introduction of the Barrack Buster at the end of 1992 signalled the beginning of more destructive and injurious mortar attacks.

In January the IRA carried out a mortar attack on Clogher RUC barracks, landing in the car park and leaving several police officers with minor injuries. In February the IRA mortared XMG Crossmaglen, damaging the base and hospitalising a civilian worker. In March there was a mortar attack on Bessbrook base, damaging over thirty houses in the village. That same month the IRA struck at Keady RUC base, killing a civilian contractor operating a crane and seriously injuring three others. In April the IRA lobbed a mortar bomb at Crossmaglen again, injuring three British soldiers.

As mentioned previously, in 1994 the IRA in South Armagh used these mortars to shoot down two low-flying British Army helicopters.

This is far from an exhaustive list but should give a flavour. The IRA’s pride in their new artillery was evidenced by a live-fire demonstration for journalists in a border Sitka forest in March 1993.

The menacing sniper and mortar campaigns along the border, particularly in South Armagh, made the IRA a more dangerous factor in the region than they had been for some time. Author Chris Harnden described this period as the “zenith” of the South Armagh Brigade.

However viewed in a broader context this did not alter the military-political trajectory of the IRA. The British government were no closer to acceding to the IRA’s public demand of withdrawal. The road to the 1994 ceasefire was well advanced. The extent to which equipment as much as expertise played a role can be debated; three of the lethal sniper attacks in South Armagh in 1993 involved a regular 7.62mm rifle rather than a .50 weapon.

Had the IRA gotten its hands on the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless guns there could well have been more “spectaculars”, more pressure on the British Army in border areas, and more morale boosts for the republican movement. Conversely, surface-to-air missiles and flamethrowers from Libya were used once or twice before being relegated to bunkers in the South and that may have been the fate of the Eksund weapons.

Either way a greatly changed high-level strategic calculus for both sides was unlikely to emerge.

Conclusion

The Eksund, following the earlier Libyan shipments, would have presented a significant further boost to the IRA’s arsenal and enabled it to carry out some new kinds of operations, and provided a greater pool of arms for regular actions.

The idea, however, that receiving the Eksund’s weapons would have somehow had a transformative effect on the IRA’s training, tactics, and organisational structure, or changed the nature of the conflict altogether is hard to substantiate. Perhaps republicans would have had bigger arms dumps to use as leverage during the unending peace process-era decommissioning crises. Maybe dissident republicans would be better armed because there was more materiel floating around to fall into their hands.

The organisation would have been on the same path it was in our timeline, with a leadership who had long decided on a political strategy steering the movement to the 1994 ceasefire followed by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and an end to the campaign on the terms of constitutional nationalism, rather than traditional republicanism. 

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

The Eksund And The IRA's War-Making Capacity Part 2

Brandon Sullivan & Bleakley ✍ In IRA terms, it can be argued that 1991 was a successful year, and forms part of an evidence base which challenges the notion that the IRA was in decline in the 1990s.

Looking at the first two months of 1991 in terms of IRA operations gives a flavour of the capabilities and capacity of the IRA. I picked January and February pretty much at random, though I was aware of the unusual nature of the Downing Street mortar attack.

Two Months in 1991

The first IRA killing of 1991 was squalid. On the 21st January, five men in combat fatigues surrounded a car containing a 63 year old creamery worker named Thomas Edward Cullen Stephenson. One of the men opened fire, and Stephenson was killed. He had left the RUC two years previously, having served for 14 years. His wife took her own life a year after being made a widow. Former DUP First Minister Arlene Foster knew Mr Stephenson and described the “shockwaves through the community” following the shooting. The IRA claimed Mr Stephenson had been seen operating an RUC checkpoint, and that both he, and another man in the car who managed to escape, had been identified as RUC members.

Shortly after Cullen Stephenson’s killing, on the 7th February, an IRA unit drove a van into central London. The rear windows had duct tape which, when lined up with landmarks, created a crude yet accurate aiming mechanism for the mortars contained within it. Senior Met Police officer Peter Gurney is quoted in Toby Harnden’s excellent book Bandit Country as saying:

that the range and angle of firing had been worked out using scale maps and photographs before a reconnaissance run had been carried out. If the van had been just five degrees out then the Prime Minister might well have been killed.

That same day there was a bomb attack on an army barracks in Belfast. A few days previous, a UDR base had been severely damaged in a bomb attack.

There were three attacks on British army aircraft in the first two months of year. The first, at the end of January, was a helicopter being struck by an IRA bullet. The most serious attack resulted in a Lynx helicopter being shot down on the 15th February, with an internal MOD report saying it was "by a stroke of luck" that there weren’t fatalities. Another attack, two days afterwards, resulted in the helicopter’s mission being aborted.

Bombing London

As well as the Downing Street mortar attack, there were at least three other IRA attacks in England, including a bomb attack on an army base. The IRA decided to attack London’s transport system for the first time since 1976. The plan seems to have been one bomb to go off several hours before rush-hour to act as a statement of intent and capability, and then with real bombs and hoaxes to paralyse the city. A bomb at Paddington station went of with no casualties around 4am. At 7am, an IRA member stated in a telephone warning that “We are the Irish Republican Army. Bombs to go off in all mainline stations in 45 minutes.” The security forces did not evacuate all stations, which was the IRA’s intention. An IRA bomb at Victoria station resulted in one man being killed, and 38 injured. This, along with hoax warnings, caused chaos and terror across London. The IRA released the following statement:

The cynical decision of senior security personnel not to evacuate railway stations named in secondary warnings, even three hours after the warning device had exploded at Paddington (Station) in the early hours of the morning was directly responsible for the casualties at Victoria. All future warnings should be acted upon.

There were at least 85 IRA operations in January and February 1991, with targets ranging from the British Prime Minister John Major to a retired judge. Commercial targets were bombed, as were law courts, and indeed train stations in the North. Interestingly, at least two businesses publicly declared that they would no longer provide goods/services to the security forces as a result of IRA threats and/or actions.

Across the Barricades: The IRA & Loyalist Paramilitaries

The IRA relentlessly attacked those they claimed were involved in loyalist paramilitary attacks against nationalist/republicans in 1991. Ten men were killed, whilst others escaped the attacks, sometimes with serious injuries. On the very day that the Combined Loyalist Military Command announced a ceasefire, an IRA unit raked a garage with machine-gun fire. The garage, the IRA said, was being used by the Mid-Ulster UVF. This is possible. Two IRA targets, Leslie Dallas (shot dead in 1990) and Keith Martin (wounded in 1991) were Hot Rod racers, and frequented garages in that particular area: Dallas owned the garage where he was shot dead.

On the 9th of April, the IRA shot Derek Ferguson dead. Ferguson worked for Henry Brothers, a construction firm that specialised in renovating and repairing security force bases, but the reason that the IRA gave for his killing was his alleged membership of the UVF. The IRA said they had spotted Ferguson in a car that was used in a loyalist attack. Ferguson was a cousin of the wretched DUP MP Willie McCrea, and was an associate of Leslie Dallas. Contemporaneous media reports named Dallas as a leading UVF member.

Another attack was on former UDR member, David Jameson. Jameson’s brother Richard, a “UVF Brigadier”, would infamously be shot dead in a loyalist feud. David Jameson had convictions for arms offences, and was deeply involved in repairing and building security force bases. He survived the attack, though he lost a leg.

There were at least 20 attacks on named members of the PUL community, who the IRA said they had under surveillance and whom they planned to kill. These were not random assassinations, although that is not to say all of those targeted were responsible for what they IRA said they were.

Meanwhile, the War News section of Republican News continued to publish the details of businesses which had publicly said were now no longer supplying goods and services to the security forces.

Conclusion

None of this means that the IRA were anywhere close to victory. But neither were they in significant operational decline. Twice in 1991, the RUC police federation via their magazine Police Beat called for internment to be, at the very least, seriously considered. Others in the security establishment were even more pessimistic about the IRA’s decline. A “senior security source” had this to say about the IRA at the end of 1991 (Fortnight magazine):

The IRA terrorists are better equipped, better resourced, better led, bolder, and more secure against our penetration than ever before. They are absolutely a formidable enemy. The essential attributes of their leaders are better than ever before. Some of their operations are brilliant, in terrorist terms.

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

⏩Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

Was The IRA in Decline by the 1990s? Part Two ◆ 1991 – A Case Study

Bleakley and Brandon Sullivan ✍examine whether the loss of the arms ship Eksund in 1987 really doomed the IRA to a stalemate . . . 

Fate

1 November 1987.

Somewhere above the Hurd Deep, off the coast of Brittany, France.

The former grain hauler Eksund. Fifty years old and showing her age. Onboard: 150 tonnes of arms destined for the Irish Republican Army, courtesy of the ever-generous Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. A weight of weaponry equal to all the IRA had received from Libya in four earlier shipments of the preceding two years.

When French customs officials boarded the stricken vessel they discovered that the IRA men had tried to scuttle the ship and its deadly cargo. For them, secrecy was paramount. The British government couldn’t be allowed to discover that that IRA now had a large arsenal of modern military hardware.

According to journalist Ed Moloney in his seminal work A Secret History of the IRA the paramilitary group were planning to launch a massive offensive inspired by the Viet Cong’s famous “Tet Offensive” of 1968. In strict military terms Tet was a failure yet is credited with shifting US public opinion towards demanding a withdrawal from Vietnam.

In Moloney’s telling, the success of this offensive relied on the Eksund and its precious cargo arriving in Ireland undetected. The arms aboard the Eksund and the element of surprise were supposedly the two the key ingredients if the IRA hoped to pull off a startling escalation of a conflict that had by then settled into something resembling routine.

Moloney’s central hypothesis is that the dominant personalities within the IRA, conniving with the British, scuppered the Eksund venture to avert an escalation of the conflict many IRA members hoped for, thus saving the Peace Process and setting the stage for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Is this possible?

Variants of this account have been circulated by different authors. Were the IRA prepared for a large-scale military offensive that would have totally changed the dynamic of the conflict? Could the arms carried by the Eksund really have made that a reality? What capabilities could this weaponry have offered to the IRA, in any case?

Revolutionary Toolkit

Firstly it’s important to ask, what was the Eksund actually carrying on that fateful journey in late 1987?

The answer isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Virtually every source gives a different inventory. Media illiteracy on the subject further muddles the picture e.g. claiming one-hundred and twenty missile launchers were seized when they really meant their ammunition. However after combing through various books and newspaper articles here’s a preliminary list:


  • x 1,000 AK-47 type rifles.
  • x 10 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns
  • x 10 12.7mm DshK heavy machine guns
  • x 1,000,0000 rounds of 7.62mm and 12.7mm ammuntion
  • x 430 Soviet-type grenades
  • x 10 RPG-7 rocket launchers
  • x 120 RPG-7 warheads
  • x 2,000 electric detonators
  • x 4,700 fuses
  • 9 K32 Strela-2 surface-to-air missile launchers
  • 9 K32 Strela-2 missiles
  • 2 tonnes of Semtex plastic explosive.
  • x 12 82mm infantry mortars
  • x 106mm M40 recoilless rifles
  • LPO-50 flamethrowers
  • Submachine guns

An impressive catalogue. These were the arms that the IRA’s offensive supposedly hinged on. They can broadly be separated into two categories we’ll label Quantities and Capabilities.

Quantities

There’s an old saying in the military world: Quantity has a Quality of its Own.

However in the case of the IRA circa 1987, this arguably had ceased to be the case. Four Libyan deliveries in 1985-1986 had left the IRA with upwards of 1,300 AK-47 type rifles, forty 7.62mm general-purpose machine guns, twenty-six DShK heavy machine guns, and five tons of Semtex, amongst a swathe of other munitions. The only weapons systems not previously delivered to Ireland in some number that were aboard the Eksund were the 82 mm mortars and 106 mm recoilless rifles.

Were formations of IRA members sitting in camps in Donegal and Monaghan, trained in small-unit tactics and large-scale offensive action, waiting with bated breathe for the extra 1,000 AK-47s on the Eksund? Did the IRA’s fortunes really rest on having fifty general-purpose machine guns rather than forty, or thirty-six DShK heavy machine guns rather twenty-six? Before the Libyan donations the IRA had perhaps two heavy machine guns and a handful of general-purpose machine guns.

The IRA by the time of the Eksund’s loss had vastly more guns than they ever had before or indeed would ever need for the tempo of their campaign. Dumping more AK-47s into the organisation would not have transformed the IRA into an army capable of carrying out large-scale, synchronised operations, as former IRA Volunteer John Crawley in his book The Yank explained:

It’s a crude mechanistic view of war to believe that equipment alone is the answer. Training would have to reach a hitherto unimagined level, not just in terms of weapons and tactics but also advanced operational planning. We’d have to change our organisational culture.

Crawley knew what he was talking about. A former member of the US Marines most elite unit, Force Recon, in his compelling memoir The Yank he recounts that he personally drew up the list of types of weapons in 1984 that the IRA would later receive from Libya.

Frankly, there’s no evidence that the IRA was undertaking this sort of far-reaching transformation at the time of the Eksund’s seizure. A handful of Volunteers were sent to Libya for training on specific weapons but that’s a far cry from what would have been needed. The challenges in retraining and building a new knowledge base in an armed formation were exemplified in 2023 by the Ukraine’s failure to form new army units capable of acting in concert to breach layered Russian defenses.

Having seven ton of Semtex rather than five tons, along with the detonators and fuses, would have no doubt been a boost to the IRA’s engineering department. But it’s a stretch to hypothesise that those extra two tons of plastic explosive were the war winning special sauce the IRA needed.

Flamethrowers: The IRA received ten Soviet-made LPO-50 flamethrowers from Libya. One was seized in Belfast in 1988, another in Derry in 1989. The first outing of the IRA’s flamethrowers was in a famous assault on a border base near Rosslea in Fermanagh in December 1989. That attack was probably the one occasion where Libyan weapons were used near as envisioned by IRA men like John Crawley. It was also the flamethrower’s last outing and they were relegated to arms dumps through the IRA’s final 1997 ceasefire (one was found by Gardaí in County Meath in 1994).

RPGs. Again, the IRA would certainly have appreciated an extra dozen RPG-7 launchers but that surely wouldn’t have enabled the group to prosecute a very different sort of armed campaign then they had up to then. The 430 hand grenades likewise would have been helpful but the IRA improvised and continued to develop their own line of homemade grenades, culminating in the coffee jar bomb.

Soviet-made Strela-2 surface-to-air missiles. Popularly known as “SAM-7.”These were the great hope for republicans in the 1980s and in theory could have been a game changer in border areas, where the British Army was almost totally dependent on helicopters to resupply outlying outposts. However, in actual fact the Strela-2 turned out to be a damp squib for the IRA. It wasn’t until July 1991 that the IRA actually tried taking down a helicopter. In what was either a technical or training issue the missile failed to lock on and landed harmlessly on the ground. The attempt was not repeated; the IRA tried to pass it off as an RPG-7 attack. Gardaí found a Strela-2 thermal battery and grip stock in the same County Meath bunker as the flamethrower in 1994.

It’s been suggested that the capture of the Eksund alerted the British Army that the IRA was in possession of heat-seeking missiles and led to the installation of countermeasures on helicopters. This should be weighed against the famous leaked British intelligence document Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends raising the possibility as far back as 1978. Indeed, a British pilot interviewed in 1979 in the wake of the leak said counter-measures had been available for “six or seven years”. Even if the IRA had the element of surprise, and successfully used a Strela-2 missile to shoot down a helicopter, surely there was no reason the British military couldn’t add flare dispensers to their helicopters at short notice.

Point is, all of these portions of the Eksund cargo simply added to the quantity of weapons the IRA had already received from Libya and were unlikely to represent a game changer.

According to Moloney, the earlier Libyan shipments were placed in dumps to be held in reserve, and it was the Eksund delivery that was to fuel the “Tet offensive.” However if the IRA was truly prepared for a large ground incursion it seems plausible that organisation would have been able to improvise and use the large stocks of Libyan arms already in Ireland.

The surprise factor of losing the Eksund is also perhaps overstated. The IRA already had a close shave when informant-driven intel saw Gardaí uncover a large hide of Libyan weapons in 1986. In January 1988 a huge dump of Libyan arms were found hastily buried on a Donegal beach.

The IRA’s so-called “Tet Offensive” was unlikely to materialise, at least in the spectacular fashion popularly imagined. The reasons were multi-faceted and would probably justify a few articles in their own right. What did emerge in the summer of 1988 was still politically impactful but not at the level of, say, IRA units across Northern Ireland overrunning British bases. The Eksund arms should be examined in that context.

In part II we’ll examine the Capabilities lost aboard the Eksund and whether they really could have changed the course of history . . . 

⏩Bleakley is an IT consultant currently living in the south of Ireland. Covid-19 boredom spurred an interest in the nitty gritty of Irish history. 

⏩Brandon Sullivan is a middle-aged West Belfast émigré. He juggles fatherhood & marriage with working in a policy environment and writing for TPQ about the conflict, films, books, and politics.

The Eksund And The IRA's War-Making Capacity

Brandon Sullivan ✍ Many taxi drivers were murdered during the conflict, largely, but by no means exclusively, because they represented soft targets for loyalist paramilitaries.

I am going to revisit the killing of two drivers, and a passenger, who were shot dead 30 and 23 years ago today, respectively. I believe that both incidents are linked.

In one of my two articles about the IRA’s campaign against security contractors I wrote:

On the 21st October 1993, 51 year old John Gibson, a director of the company (Henry Bros.), became the fifth employee to be killed, shot dead at his home in Newtownabbey. In a statement published in the “War News” section of Republican News, the IRA said:

As a follow-up to last Thursday night’s execution of crown forces collaborator John Gibson, a company director for the Magherafelt building firm of Henry Brothers, the Belfast Brigade IRA are calling on the following companies and services to publicly withdraw their services from the crown forces:
Ashcroft Trailer Hire, Glengormley
Compass Catering New Forge Lane
Glover Crane Hire, Duncrue Street
BP Garage, Blacks Road
McNaughton and Blair, Boucher Road
We are aware that Henry brothers have taken control of a number of companies and quarries in and around the Belfast area over the past number of years. We are also aware that a number of individuals in the Stonyford/Lisburn areas are still working for Henry Brothers and the crown forces. We call on these people to cease their collaboration immediately or we will take action against them. We are determined that these people will not be allowed to make massive profits by supplying the crown forces with their means to oppress our people.

Mr Gibson was a leading charity worker for those in the North who had diabetes. He left behind a son, Peter, among other family and friends. Peter Gibson wrote movingly here about the murder of his father.

The day after Mr Gibson was killed, loyalists shot a Catholic taxi driver in the head. The driver survived the ordeal, which took place less than 100 yards from where Mr Gibson lived and died. The day after the attack on the taxi driver, the IRA carried out the notorious Shankill bombing.

On the 5th of December 1993, a UDA/UFF unit attacked a stationary taxi, driven by a man named John Todd. Todd was from a mixed marriage with a Protestant father, and the Belfast Newsletter reported that he worked at Short’s, working on aircraft, and “all his mates were Protestants.” Inside the vehicle with Todd was 15 year old Brian Duffy, who had been speaking to his father. Brian’s father witnessed the attack on the vehicle. The Newsletter reported “informed sources said the attack had shocked many people in the area for reports had been circulating of a ‘truce’ between the IRA and loyalist gunmen.”

John Todd had reportedly been threatened by loyalists around the time another Catholic taxi-driver, Kevin Flood, was murdered in 1991. A brave taxi-driver attempted to ram the UDA/UFF unit’s getaway car as they fled the scene.

UUP MP Cecil Walker condemned the murders, as did various left-wing and nationalist politicians, with Workers Party describing them as “sectarian savagery.”

Seven years to the day, late at night on the 5th December, 2000, Trevor Kell was working on his second night as a taxi driver, reportedly in order to buy Christmas presents for his wife and three children. He was shot dead by who were later described as “freelance” republicans, with guns belonging to the IRA. Crucially, this incident happened when there had been an international peace treaty that went well beyond a truce “between the IRA and loyalist gun-men.” So why was Trevor Kell attacked?

Mr Kell’s family believe that he was murdered in a case of mistaken identity, and that the actual target was Archie (brother of Johnny, and referred to as James in other articles) Adair. Archie Adair had been convicted of attempting to murder a Catholic man in a random sectarian attack in the early 90s, alongside the notorious Trevor Hinton, a rapist and murderer, convicted in relation to one of the most horrific incidents in the conflict. Archie Adair did indeed work for the same taxi firm as Trevor Kell, so this theory is plausible. IRA members, or indeed other republicans, would have a range of reasons to want to kill Adair.

Mr Kell was also member of the North Belfast UDA, and his name appears on a memorial plaque. A loyalist source said to me that his membership of the UDA “didn’t mean much: probably just a social thing” and, when I first wrote about Mr Kell’s killing (in a piece about Holy Cross) I wrote that “there is no suggestion that he was an active paramilitary.” However, I looked further into this at a later date. On the 17th August 2014, the Sunday Life reported that the man convicted of John Gibson’s murder, Robert Duffy, was "suspected of involvement in the sectarian murder of Protestant taxi driver Trevor Kell." The article also noted that Duffy’s “schoolboy brother was the random victim of sectarian murder.”

Whilst the IRA did carry out the sectarian murder of Protestant taxi-drivers, including on the very street Mr Kell was killed a quarter of a century earlier, they had not carried out a premediated, indisputably sectarian murder for some time. The last occasion I could find where a taxi-driver was killed by the IRA was 23rd October 1990, when a UVF man, William Aitken was shot dead.

Theories have emerged that suggest Trevor Kell’s killing wasn’t a straightforward sectarian murder. Firstly, there is Kell’s membership of the organisation that murdered “the number one suspect's brother. Secondly, there is the date the attack on Kell took place. Lastly, a republican source said to me that some in the IRA believed Kell was involved in the killing of John Todd and Brian Duffy.

A different republican source suggested that the targeting of young Brian Duffy was not “random” – it was, in fact, a targeted killing aimed at causing his brother, Robert Duffy who was on the run in the Republic for John Gibson’s murder, to cross into NI, and RUC jurisdiction, to attend his brother’s wake. Which did in fact happen.

I instinctively find it far-fetched to imagine Special Branch or a branch of the crown forces setting up a 15-year-old for murder, but I wouldn’t discount it out of hand. At one stage I would not have believed many things I now know to be true about many entities and personalities involved in the conflict. And maybe the UDA heard from their contacts that Robert Duffy was linked to John Gibson’s killing and wanted to attack his family. That’s entirely plausible. Equally plausible is that Robert Duffy, and/or others, wanted to kill a loyalist and knew that the firm Kell worked for, Circle Cabs, employed a lot of them.

What is true, though, is that the string of killings brought unbearable anguish and grief to large numbers of people.

Given that these incidents are relatively recent, I as ever hope to stimulate debate and discussion.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

An Anniversary Of Killings 🔴 The 5th Of December In 1993 And 2000

Brandon Sullivan 🎤 conducts an interview with Tortoise Shack’s Tony Groves.

I initially subscribed to the Tortoise Shack to get early access to the Shrapnel Podcast, with Gareth Mulvenna and Sam McIlwaine. I quickly found out that there’s a wide range of high quality content. 

Much like TPQ became a go to place for in-depth analysis of republican strategy, and also the Ukraine/Russia war, I found the Shack to be a place dense with detail about what’s unfolding in Gaza.

As I mentioned after my recent piece on documentary films about Israel/Palestine, the Shack was distributing eSIM cards (data allowance purchased online and loaded virtually onto an existing phone) to people in Gaza. This was invaluable and effective activism against a backdrop of Israel cutting communications.

The man behind the initiative is Tortoise Shack founder, Tony Groves. Tony was kind enough to give me some of his time, despite being laid up with Covid. Tony is a knowledgeable man, with an interesting background. My notetaking skills are somewhat lacking, but what follows are key points from a fascinating discussion that we had almost a month to the day since the Hamas attacks.

BS: How did you make your Gazan/Palestinian contacts?

TG: I blogged anonymously whilst working in a major bank. I was a young bank manager with an office on O’Connell Street. I was much more political than my day job allowed me to be. Writing the blog helped me establish some contacts, and one contact led to another. It was an entirely organic process. This was around 2017.

BS: How has Ireland's response been different to other EU nations?

At the moment, it is not politically advantageous not to show solidarity with Gazans. Ireland has a background of being in the EU but having been a colonised country. Ireland can identify with the struggle of wanting to be free. Solidarity has been built over decades. In France, Marine le Pen says she “stands with this” – but I think behind this is probably The Great Replacement theory.

The people of Ireland recognise and identify with a need for self-determination.

BS: Do you think there's been a change in response and reactions to Israel's actions this time? If so, why?

Yes, this is one of the first actions we have been able to watch on our phones. We have grown up with terms such as collective punishment and genocide, but we can now see it on our phones, and see Tweets from Israeli Heritage minister using the language of ethnic cleansing. The Israelis are "losing the streets" whilst they still have the political support of the upper echelons of Western countries.

A saying I often come back to is “they want you to ignore the obvious and accept the preposterous.”

BS: Do you have any thoughts on Norman Finkelstein not condemning or condoning the Hamas attack? (Using example of slave uprisings).

Finkelstein has earned the right to say what he likes. He is someone whose thoughts I have always considered. Tortoise Shack has never shied away from condemning the Hamas attacks. I don't like "condemnation karaoke" so sometimes it's a necessity, but I understands why Finkelstein is "holding his ground."

BS: Where did the idea for the SIM cards come from?

I had sent people messages in Gaza, and was aware that similar initiatives had worked in Afghanistan and Latin America. So I looked into the idea and discovered it was doable. Bought three, recognised they worked. It went from there.

BS: How does it work in practice? Who gets them?

They were sent privately to people known to Tortoise Shack, journalists, and others. I was buying Israeli, Egyptian SIMs. I was cautious, considering the power and track record of the IDF. I heard a great story about how one of the eSIMs was used. Someone couldn't get a submission into a uni in Europe to submit a PhD application. They were able to with the eSIM we got to them.

BS: Did you feel there was any conflict of interest in engaging in direct activism whilst being a significant media voice?

I don't hide my political views, so this means I can be unapologetic about things such as this. I consider himself more of an activist than a journalist - would much prefer to "pack a punch" politically than advance career-wise. I’m happy for the Tortoise Shack to be considered a left-leaning media outlet. The right-wing have theirs.

⏩ Tony Groves is the driving force behind Tortoise Shack.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

Getting Gaza Online In The Midst Of An Israeli Blockade

Brandon Sullivan ✍ Like many other people, I’m angry, worried, and somewhat despondent about the terrible news coming out of Gaza. 

I have tried to build on a limited existing knowledge and keep myself informed. This is an overview, rather than an in-depth review, of some films that I think are informative. Some of them are cinematic and artistic in scope. All, I think, add greatly to the body of knowledge.

Before I start on the films, I would like to direct readers of TPQ to The Free State Podcast with Joe Brolly and Dion Fanning. It is always worth listening to, but their coverage of the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza is excellent.

The Human Factor

I recently wrote about The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, which I consider a brilliant film. Whilst listening to The Free State Podcast, I was interested in a documentary they discussed - The Human Factor which is currently on Netflix. This film is directed by Moreh, and utilises some of the cinematic turns that made The Gatekeepers compelling. Photographs are made into 3D landscapes featuring giants of American, Palestinian, and Israeli politics and diplomacy. The story unfolds in chronological order, and despite it being likely that the viewer knows how things go, it is still excruciating to witness opportunities for peace and dignity being squandered.

Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Yitzhak Rabin are not flawless individuals, but they were formidable statesman and exceptionally talented individuals with, I would argue, a genuine desire for peace and stability. This documentary delves into their personalities via interviews with prominent and important American negotiators and diplomats.

Whilst not the intended purpose of the documentary, it is impossible not to bear witness to the awesome diplomatic and political powerhouse that the USA was under Bill Clinton, and I couldn’t help compare it to the embarrassing and degraded entity it was under Donald Trump.

The malevolent role of Bibi Netanyahu is covered, and rightly so. There are also several frankly hilarious moments, as the “human factor” of vain politicians, and low-brow revolutionaries, are discussed.

One Day in September

This is an exceptional film, covering the abduction by Black September of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Commonwealth Games . I’ll get one major criticism out of the way first, which is the minimal attention given to the overall political situation that was (and still is) the backdrop to Palestinian acts of terrorism. Scant coverage is given to Israeli airstrikes which killed numerous civilians in a refugee camp.

The film has the pace of a thriller, and makes skilful use of music and archive footage. See here for Led Zep’s Immigrant Song. Deep Purple’s Child in Time provides the backdrop to one of the more harrowing parts of the film.

This film is particularly relevant to today, because of what Israel did following the attack. Whilst they did the usual and bombed civilians, killing many people with zero link to the attack, they also patiently tracked down and killed many of those responsible. This film covers that, and in a considerable coup, secures an interview with one of the surviving members of Black September (some say only) involved in the Olympic attack. There is no reason why Israel could not have done likewise following the 7th October attacks – bided their time, and tracked down and killed those responsible for the attacks. That they didn’t is, in my opinion, indicative of a weak frightened leader with a despotic cabinet.

One Day in September is not an easy film to find, but worth doing so. Quillers wishing to see it can get in touch with me, and I’ll try and sort something out.

Far more easy to find, but much less interesting, is the film Munich which covers the same events. It’s worth a watch, but isn’t a patch on the documentary.

Waltz With Bashir (2008)

Massaker (2004)

Both of these films cover the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and both are notable in that they are not from the perspective of survivors, but instead either direct perpetrators (Massaker) or enablers (Waltz With Bashir).

Waltz With Bashir is centred around former IDF conscripts, and their struggle with remembering, let alone processing, their role in one of many Israeli military outrages. It is a watchable, sensitive film, with deep roots in the therapeutic process. It also contains an ending, which left me feeling like I had been physically assaulted.

Bashir is unique in that it is an animated documentary about significant historical events. This clip gives a flavour of how it works. It’s worth noting that that song is an anti-war song, one lyric not included in the film is “it was a nonsense.” Like On Day in September, this film contains pertinent lessons for Israeli politicians. Many of their young men were deeply damaged by what they did, allowed others to do, and witnessed. Another generation will be spawned as we speak.

Massaker should be a companion piece to Waltz With Bashir. Centred around interviews with six of the paramilitaries who entered the Sabra and Shatila camps, this is not a film for the faint-hearted. The men interviewed are barbaric low lives, their tattooed arms acting out in gesticulations the atrocities that they committed. One man explaining how throats were cut so that the victim “died several times” made me think of the likes of John White, Davy Payne, Lenny Murphy and “Cutlass” – men who stalked Belfast looking for members of a different tribe to knife them to death.

One of those interviewed, like Anwar Congo from The Act of Killing, seemed to have a degree of remorse. The rest didn’t. There isn’t even really much in the way of mitigation that they offer. They just wanted to murder, and some to rape.

I found both of these films unforgettable, and not really in a good way. That said, I recommend watching them.

Massaker is difficult to get a hold of, again, if anyone is interested, let me know and I’ll try and get you access.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

Documentaries About Israel 💣 Palestine

Brandon Sullivan 🎥 against a backdrop of the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel shares his thoughts on a 2012 film directed by Dror Moreh.


Frequent contributor to TPQ Frankie asked in a comment:

Am I the only Quiller (not the death toll) that thinks fair play to Hamas for embarrassing Mossad....

I'll leave aside my own thoughts on this, and apologise for pedantry in advance, but the main agency that will be embarrassed by the astonishing attacks carried out by Hamas will be Shin Bet, who are responsible for preventing such attacks, a task they took over from Mossad in recent decades.

I only know this because of an excellent documentary and accompanying book which I watched and read back in 2012. Having watched the news avidly this weekend, and feeling fairly gloomy at the inevitable Israeli onslaught against some of the most defenceless people in the world, I re-watched the documentary to review it. It remains a riveting and vital piece of work.

Interestingly, I think the first time I contacted AM at TPQ was when I saw this film. Someone had written some graffiti on the cinema celebrating the Sabra and Shatila massacre. I took a photo, sent it in, and it was published.

The film consists of archival footage and interviews with all of the surviving heads of Shin Bet. Sometimes, cutting-edge technology is used to present a photo as a 3D landscape. The effects are hugely effective.

It's worth taking a moment to discuss the surviving heads of Shin Bet before getting to the themes discussed in the documentary. Their names and years of their leadership are noted below.

Avraham Shalom (1981–1986)

Yaakov Peri (1988–1994)

Carmi Gillon (1995–1996)

Ami Ayalon (1996–2000)

Avi Dichter (2000–2005)

Yuval Diskin (2005–2011)

Diskin, a man who looked the part (along with Ayalon in particular) discussed how he felt after "targeted operations" to kill "terrorists." Like all of the leaders, with the exception of Shalom, he was reflective, and thoughtful, and seemed to carry a burden of responsibility. But, all that said, Diskin still gave the orders to kill, many times. Diskin was 11 when the Six-Day War broke out and was heavily influenced (some might say radicalised) by a book called If Israel Lost The War. . Diskin noted that even when he carried out a "sterile" operation with no "collateral damage" he still felt uneasy about the power that he could wield. About the Israeli campaigns against their enemies, Diskin simply states that they had "no strategy, just tactics." This thought is supported by Ayalon who notes at the end of the film that Israel "wins every battle but loses the war."

Avi Dichter uses an anecdote to discuss the misunderstanding between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel needed to know how many people were under its control in the occupied territories and, so, it sent soldiers, including Dichter to count them. They learned how to say "we have come to count you" but hadn't learned to accent the word so it would be properly understood by the Palestinians between the doors they banged on. When asked by frightened civilians what the heavily armed young men wanted with them, they were informed, albeit inaccurately, that "we are here to castrate you" rather than "we are here to count you." As with all of the other leaders, Dichter appears open and willing to embrace his former enemies and committed to a political settlement. It's therefore disappointing, and confusing, to see that he is currently a minister in Bibi Netanyahu's government.

The avuncular Yaakov Peri discussed the "identifier technique" when, as a young soldier, he could occupy a village or town, herd all the military-aged men into the middle and then use an informer, hidden behind a mask and in a vehicle, to point out who had "trained in Syria" or was otherwise involved in "terrorism." Many Quillers will recognise this methodology from British colonial methods, including in the North, when, among others, Jean McConville was alleged to have been an "identifier." Peri was one of the Shin Bet leaders deeply affected by the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and dismayed at the subsequent failure of the Oslo peace accords.

Carmi Gillon handed in his resignation over the murder of Rabin, but it was rejected. Under his tenure, physical brutality – involving the physical shaking of detainees – increased and was codified as legal. One small man died under interrogation. As Gillon put it "died of shaken baby syndrome."

The two most interesting men to me were Ari Ayalon and Avraham Shalom. I'll discuss Shalom in the context of an incident, which became known as the "Bus 300 affair."

The Bus 300 Affair

On the 12th April 1984, four men, including at least two teenagers (Jamal Mahmoud Qabalan, Muhammad Baraka, Majdi Abu Jumaa, and Subhi Abu Jumaa), who were reportedly not members of any paramilitary group, hijacked a number 300 bus. The New York Times wrote that:

Some of the bus passengers described three of the hijackers as young. One hostage gave the ages as 16, 19 and 20 and remarked, 'They behaved very nicely, this I must say.' The leader was described as older and harder.

The report went on:

Hostages and officials said the hijackers wanted to cross into Egypt and release the passengers there in exchange for the release of 500 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The army fired at the wheels of the bus, which sped to a halt. There was a standoff, in which one of the hijackers was killed, but two were brought off the bus unharmed. The army stormed the bus after identifying that the hijackers were "amateurs."

The condition of the two men brought off the bus is important. Here are photos of them:


Reports came out that all four hijackers had been killed in the assault to free the hostages. It was a lie. What had happened, according to Avraham Shalom was that "the army pounced on them … broke their bones … it was a lynching." Shalom arrived on the scene and asked what was going on. He was told that the two captured men had been badly beaten by the army. Shalom, the head of Shin Bet, a man with the highest political contacts in Israel, says in the documentary that he said "Hit them again and finish them." His men did as they were told, as Shalom put it they "smashed their heads in with a rock." Other reports state that it was an iron bar as well as rocks. Inquiries and a trial followed. Some were convicted. Shalom was ambivalent. Whilst he was steadfastly in support of a two-state solution for the conflict, he bluntly stated that he "didn't want to see terrorists in court." Other former heads of Shin Bet describe how people feared Shalom, and that he was a "bully." Nevertheless, he had to resign over his arbitrary death sentence.

Ari Ayalon, discussing the pardons of all those convicted of beating two defenceless teenagers to death, said that "the Prime Minister and the cabinet" failed.

Shin Bet and the Politics of Occupation

A total lack of trust in politicians, except for Rabin, is a constant theme amongst the leaders of Shin Bet, along with the need for a political settlement. Ayalon was dismayed at the illegal settlements, noting that the settlers were beginning to believe themselves as "the masters" and fearing their political and paramilitary power. Ayalon believes these fears were justified, citing the murder of Rabin as evidence.

Diskin is read a quote from an Israeli public intellectual, Yeshayahu Leibowitz:

A state ruling over a hostile population of one million foreigners will necessarily become a Shin Bet state, with all that this implies for education, freedom of speech and thought and democracy. The corruption found in every colonial regime will affix itself to the State of Israel. The administration will have to suppress an Arab uprising on one hand and acquire Quislings, or Arab traitors on the other.

Diskin simply replies that he "agrees with every word of it."


At a conference in London aimed at reducing conflict, during the second intifada, Ami Ayalon described being approached by the internationally renowned psychiatrist and human rights activist Eyad Al-Sarraj, who bluntly told Ayalon that, the Palestinians were victorious. Ayalon pointed out that they were losing hundreds, soon to be thousands of men, and that they were losing their "dream of statehood" asking "What kind of victory is that?" Al-Sarraj replied:

Ami, I don't understand you. You still don't understand us. For us, victory is seeing you suffer. That's all we want. The more we suffer, the more you'll suffer. Finally, after 50 years, we've reached a balance of power, a balance: your F-16 jet fighter versus our suicide bomber.

Ayalon said he suddenly understood the "suicide bomber phenomenon" and also " our reaction very differently:

How many operations did we launch because we hurt, because when they blow up buses it really hurts us and we want revenge? How often have we done that?

The final word can be left to the most vicious of the Shin Bet leaders, Shalom. Speaking more than a decade ago, he said Israel would have to "speak to everyone" and that for "Israel, it's too much of a luxury not to speak to everyone." He went on:

We are making the lives of millions of people unbearable … the future is bleak … we've become cruel … cruel to ourselves, but especially the occupied.

Sitting and waiting on the Israeli reaction to the Hamas rampage, it seems that nobody in the Israeli establishment listens to their most dedicated and professional killing outfit.

You can watch the film here. I hope that you do, and welcome your comments.

⏩ Brandon Sullivan is a middle aged, middle management, centre-left Belfast man. Would prefer people focused on the actual bad guys. 

The Gatekeepers 🔴 Inside Israel’s Internal Security Agency

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