Britain’s war in Northern Ireland

It is January 2020 and I am travelling northwards from Cork to Armagh in Northern Ireland by train to meet Eugene Reavey, a friend of Stephen’s, and where I am going there are ghostly traces everywhere; everywhere, violence has left its mark. Everywhere, if you know where to look, there is a sense of loss that feels tangible-the resonance of violence, clinging on like an invisible and malevolent spirit.

It was the second time I’d met Stephen and he exuded a sense of profound loss and hurt-a man with all the grief of the universe in his eyes. A man, it seemed to me, seeking redemption for a crime he did not commit; searching for a way back home again; for some kind of consolation.

Stephen told me that he feels as if he has been in that field ever since, as if he left part of his soul there that night. Last year Netflix aired a documentary about the Miami Showband massacre in which Stephen talks candidly of his desire to escape that field-a psychological need no doubt to rinse himself of the imprint of politicised sectarian violence and the stain it has left on his soul.

Stephen is a victim of a monstrous act perpetrated in the name of cynical political expediency, a crime not just by self-appointed terrorist avengers in Ireland’s 1970s murder triangle, but indeed a crime committed by the state itself in the guise of a paramilitary death squad. 

In a nondescript suburban pub in the south side of Cork just before Christmas last year we talked and he told me how he sometimes feels like the character of the boy in M Night Shyamalan’s 1999 movie The Sixth Sense, who sees and talks to the dead-so vivid and stark are the images seared in his memory, and that its “always there in minute detail”. Stephen’s eyes moisten up as he tells me of how he has on occasion driven back up north to that by-lane at Buskhill, off the main Belfast to Dublin road where it happened. “There are times Mark when there is no place that I can get any peace, nowhere, except at the scene of the incident. All the things that happened to me after, even the great things were contaminated by what happened [there].”

Maybe traces of the dead are everywhere I thought as I drove home in the cold midwinter night after talking to Stephen, sparse Christmas lights illuminating the pitch-black countryside around me. Maybe only the best of us can see them. War had visited Stephen and it killed three of his band mates. They were known as the Irish Beatles such was their fame. It left one of them, Fran O’ Toole, who looked like an innocent, 1970s Irish version of David Cassidy, with his head blown off. It left Stephen like a man submerged in a memory frozen in time.

A friend of mine who lost his father many years ago once told me that he still sees him most nights in his dreams, and they talk in a way they couldn’t do when he was alive. In some ways he said it’s like his subconscious had never really fully accepted his death. Maybe that is only way most of us can deal with death. I thought of my friend as Stephen told me it was only many years after the massacre, when he was shown photographs of his dead band mates by a retired police man in a hotel bar near Dublin could he finally accept they were dead.

If at least one of the aims of counter-terrorism is to uphold the rule of law and maintain democracy (at least that is the theory anyway) the theory was upturned in a grotesque way by elements of the British security services in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.  An attempt by the state to impose order on the chaos of low intensity war by creating murderous chaos became, in itself, deeply subversive, brutal and downright immoral. Covert war became an extension of cold, cynical realpolitik. Kitson may have been the abstract military strategist, war-gaming it out away from the battle field, but the application of his ideas, and the subsequent killing, was carried out by the Glenanne gang “in the field”.

On the ground McGovern argues that this counter insurgency doctrine was played out in the context of “a social order shaped by long-term sectarianised social divisions and violence, embedded in localised power structures, which framed the very institutions and agencies of the state, not least the police and other state forces.” In Armagh, the Glenanne gang bore all the hallmarks of a counter insurgency pseudo gang adapted to Ulster’s unique context as both a kind of colony and an administrative outpost of the British state itself.

In official circles the truth of collusion has been known for years and often ignored for expedient diplomatic reasons. A report initiated by the Irish government in the early 2000s on the 1974 Dublin & Monaghan bombings, in which 33 people were killed, stated that the suspects (almost all members of the Glenanne gang) had “relationships” with British intelligence and elements within the RUC-the police force in Northern Ireland at the time.

Counterpunch