Overall, the South Armagh Sniper operation carried out by the IRA was one of the most successful operations of that era of the troubles. 17 June 34-year-old Geraldine Corrigan died two days after being shot by what is thought to have been a member of the Official IRA during a botched robbery at her family's supermarket on the Cathedral Road. The UDR member who fired the fatal shot was later brought to court on manslaughter charges but was found not guilty in the non-jury trial. A unit of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade fired a heavy improvised mortar at the British Army base in Crossmaglen, County Armagh. Photo caption # 10: Richard English, Armed Struggle, A History of the IRA, page 172, Transcripts of the Commons debate over the security situation in NI and the Cullaville incident (. By the 1990s, the South Armagh Brigade was thought to consist of about 40 members,[1] roughly half of them living south of the border. ","isAccessibleForFree":"True","isPartOf":{"@type":["CreativeWork","Product"],"name":"Independent.ie","productID":"independent.ie:showcase"}} {"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Independent.ie","item":"https://m.independent.ie/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Irish News","item":"https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/"}]} const isGrantedBy = function (grant) { vars.article.userWall = ! On 17 February 1978 the commander of the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Corden-Lloyd, was killed and two other soldiers injured when the Gazelle helicopter he was travelling in was attacked by an IRA unit near Jonesborough. According to Lost Lives, it is assumed that he was killed in retaliation for a UVF gun attack on a Catholic man in the city earlier that day. Nine of these were killed in the February 1985 Newry mortar attack. const getBundleValue = function (purchase, purchaseType) { In 1984, his son-in-law Herbert Burrows will be killed in an IRA booby-trap explosion close to the scene of Wilson's death. When he was 17 he had witnessed his father Peter Corrigan, a Sinn Fin member, being shot dead by the UVF in the city. Then, in January 1976, after a series of loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) attacks on Catholic civilians in the border areas (including the Reavey and O'Dowd killings the previous day), the group shot and killed ten Protestant workmen in the "Kingsmill massacre" near Bessbrook. [45], In 1997, several members of the South Armagh Brigade, based in Jonesborough and Dromintee, following Michael McKevitt, left the Provisional IRA because of its acceptance of the Mitchell Principles of non-violence at a General Army Convention in October of that year and formed a dissident grouping, the Real IRA, which rejected the peace process. observer.observe(document, { According to author Toby Harnden, the decision was taken shortly after a Saracen armoured vehicle was destroyed by a culvert bomb near Crossmaglen, on 9 October 1975. if (isGrantedBy('purchase')) { In 1975 and 1976, as sectarian violence increased in Northern Ireland, the South Armagh Republican Action Force, allegedly a cover-name for the South Armagh Brigade, carried out two attacks against Protestants. vars.user.userID = subscriberCookie.userID || ''; if (!! vars.user.gigyaID = gigyaID || ''; The second most senior IRA man in south Armagh is being protected amid claims that he worked as an agent for British intelligence, according to usually reliable security sources. return; Wed 17 Sep 2014 11.51 EDT. By the end of the 1970s, the IRA in most of Northern Ireland had been restructured into a cell system. He was married and had nine children. 28 March In an identical attack to the one that killed Derek Monteith, 58-year-old RUC member George Starrett is shot dead in the kitchen of his home on the Newry Road by the Provisional IRA. subscriptionStartDate: '0000-00-00T00:00:00Z', [28] By 1991, the RUC acknowledged that no mobile patrols had operated in South Armagh without Army support since 1975.[29]. subscriptionFinishDate: purchase.granted_by_purchase.finish_at, Burrows came from Ballinahone Avenue in the city. bundle: 'none', [54][55] On 22 June 1998 a deadly incident involving fuel smuggling took place near Crossmaglen, when former Thomas Murphy employee Patrick Belton ran over and killed a British soldier attempting to stop him while driving his oil tanker through a military checkpoint. bodyAvailable) { [32] On 22 April 1993, the South Armagh IRA unit took control of the village of Cullaville near the border with the Republic, for two hours, making good use of dead ground. It was one of the few times the SAS didn't shoot members of an IRA 'active service unit' on armed operations. childList: true, He had just left Drumadd Barracks and was on his way to nearby. observer.disconnect(); vars.article.wallVisible = 'false'; [51][52], Since the army wind-down in 2007, security in the area is the sole responsibility of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. The dead man was a World War II veteran and had taken part in the. show_spinner: false, [12] IRA volunteer amon McGuire, a former Aer Lingus senior engineer, and his team claim that they were responsible for getting the British Army "off the ground and into the air" in South Armagh. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. subscriptionStatus: 'Whitelist', About Press Copyright Contact us Creators Advertise Developers Terms Privacy Policy & Safety How YouTube works Test new features Press Copyright Contact us Creators . window.showSubscriberElements = true; More people could be killed or forced from their homes in a feud between factions of the Provisional IRA in south Armagh, republicans and security chiefs warned . j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'? Sources say that shortly before they were captured, the team was given orders by the \u0026#039;OC\u0026#039; not to carry any weapons when they were directed to a farm to collect their sniper rifle for an operation. Whilst security forces arrested some south Armagh republicans in 1997, republican . The IRA wrongly claimed that he was a serving member of the, 18 May Gavin McShane (17) and Shane McArdle (17), both Catholic civilians, were shot dead by the, 21 May Reginald McCollum (19), an off-duty member of the, This page was last edited on 25 October 2022, at 17:26. Watch: Peter Crouch sings the Fields of Athenry with Liverpool fans in Dublin pub, Teachers union claims it was excluded from new pay talks, Jay Blades made chancellor of former university and receives honorary doctorate, Badenoch clashes with MPs over menopause discrimination law, Search teams using every resource they can in hunt for Constance Martens baby. In an area with a population of 23,000, the British Army stationed around 3,000 troops in support of the RUC to contain an unknown number of paramilitaries. [50], After the Provisional IRA announced its intention to disarm and accept peaceful methods in July 2005, the British government announced a full demilitarisation plan which included the closing of all British Army bases in South Armagh by 2007. })(); Premium subscribers enjoy unlimited access to all articles. const selectedRegional = localStorage.getItem('selectedRegionals'); When they arrived, they were surrounded by 16 SAS men, who ordered them to surrender. Three British soldiers and a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) member were wounded. 16 April 1997 - A group of sixteen undercover SAS members restrained four IRA members, part of one of the two sniper teams which operated in South Armagh and gave them to the RUC, after tracking the IRA men to a farm complex. Between 1971 and the erection of the hilltop sites in the mid-1980s (the first in 1986), 84 members of the security forces were killed in the Crossmaglen and Forkhill areas by the IRA. }); A . Orange County; Winter Garden; Seminole Street; 537 Seminole Street Winter Garden, FL 34787. The helicopter crashed while taking evasive manoeuvres after being fired at from the east side of Edenappa road. He regarded as exceptions the East Tyrone IRA unit, led by Jim Lynagh who was killed in an SAS ambush during an IRA attack on Loughall RUC base in 1987, and the "tight as a drum" South Armagh . 3 April 1993 - A British soldier was shot and injured by the IRA near Crossmaglen, South Armagh. [26], In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the IRA elsewhere in Northern Ireland found that nine out of ten planned operations were aborted. A group calling itself 'The Irish Freedom Fighters' claimed responsibility for his death, claiming that McGeary was a 'collaborator', but the killing was widely blamed on the Provisional IRA, who were accused of using a cover name to try and deflect blame for an unpopular action. const bundleValue = getBundleValue(purchase, 'corporate_account'); return key.split('granted_by_')[1]; [37] A sustained machine gun attack against a helicopter was filmed by a Dublin television crew in March 1991 outside Crossmaglen Health Center. The British patrol manning the checkpoint returned fire. Since then the security forces travel by helicopter for security reasons.". 8 November 17-year-old Protestant Trevor Foster dies in a Provisional IRA booby-trap bomb explosion meant for his father, a member of the UDR. 25 July 1994 - A British soldier was shot and wounded by the IRA in Crossmaglen, County Armagh. }); A farm complex by the village of Crossmaglen in South Armagh fell under suspicion and was put under surveillance. const updateSubscriberCookie = function (purchase) { Murphy was lightly wounded and arrested by the RUC. '&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src= There were also frequent gun attacks on foot patrols. The unveiling involved a large republican parade which failed to comply with the procedures of the Parades Commission. The men were taken out of their minibus and then . It is not clear how the 'OC' came to be exposed as an agent but he is believed to have been recruited by British Intelligence in the late 1980s or early 1990s. const grantedBy = Object.keys(purchase).filter(function (key) { }; [9] After the split in the IRA in that year, the South Armagh unit sided with the Provisional IRA rather than the Official IRA. Inside the council chambers that night Charles Armstrong had called for councillors to stand for a minute's silence for Adrian Carroll, who had been shot dead six days earlier in the city. subscriptionFinishDate: '1111-11-11T11:11:11Z', The latter is suspected of playing a role in the London bombings that marked the end of the IRA. 1,168 Following. After this, 24 security force personnel and Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed in the same areas, roughly a third of the previous yearly rate. Unlike other operations in which the SAS were involved, members of the sniper team were not killed. meteredAccess: purchase.metered_paywall, [39] By 1994, the only way for the British army to travel safely across South Armagh and some border areas of Tyrone and Fermanagh was on board troop-carrying Chinook helicopters.[40]. return 'epaper-access'; subscriptionStatus: purchase.granted_by_purchase.sku_code, 9 March James Hogg, a 23-year-old Protestant civilian and member of the Orange Order, was shot dead in what is thought to have been a sectarian revenge attack by the INLA. subscriptionStartDate: '1111-11-11T11:11:11Z', Originally from. (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start': The team, which included Sinn Fein TD Caoimhghin O Caolain's brother-in-law - Bernard McGinn from Castleblayney, Co Monaghan - were sentenced to lengthy jail terms, but released in 2000 under the Good Friday Agreement. 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