A group of loyalist paramilitaries detonated three bombs on the night of 28 December 1972 – in the towns of Belturbet, Clones and near the village of Pettigo – which resulted in the murder of two children, Geraldine O’Reilly and Paddy Stanley, and the wounding of many others. But was there a fourth bomb?

The war diary and reports of the British Army’s 3 Brigade, in command of much of the border counties, gives an account of another bomb on the same night as the cross-border explosions. At 1940 a telephone operator received a call warning that there was a bomb in the Castle Vaults, a popular public house at the corner of Main Street and Manse Street in the County Down coastal village of Dundrum. The caller told the telephone operator that the bomb would detonate in ten minutes. A 2 ft by 2 ft cardboard box was found in a hallway in the pub with wires leading out of it. Soldiers from C Company, 9^th/12^th Lancers hurriedly cleared patrons and residents from the streets. Michael Cunningham, the catholic proprietor of the pub, carried his sick mother-in-law from her bed to safety.

Main Street Dundrum

The bomb did not initially detonate; a British Army ammunition technical officer (ATO) was requested to come to Dundrum. But this was a busy night.  There were a number of bombs to deal with elsewhere, including in Lurgan and Crossmaglen. The bomb eventually exploded at 2235, five minutes before the ATO arrived. The Down Recorder described the damage:

The building was wrecked and windows in many nearby houses and shops were blown away. All householders had been warned, but such was the long delay that a few went back into their homes. In one case children were asleep in a bedroom which was showered by glass.

A witness claimed that two women had planted the bomb; another claimed that a man was present. In the hours after the bombing 3 Brigade reported that it was likely that local republicans had attacked the pub because its owner had served members of the security forces in the past and had been threatened if he did so again.

What makes this bomb stand out from the others in Northern Ireland that night and what potentially links it to the three bombs in the Republic of Ireland? The day after the explosion Captain Richard Wilkin, a 17^th/21^st Lancers officer serving in County Down, acted quickly to try to exploit a specific piece of intelligence he had received. Wilkin had a registration for a rental car – he suspected that the occupants had planted the bomb in Dundrum. The car had been rented from Hertz at Aldergrove international airport outside Belfast. It was due to be returned on 30 December, two days after the bombing.

17th/21st Lancers

As I have written about previously, British Army intelligence officers believed that William McMurray was the commander of an Ulster Defence Association “commando” unit that was suspected of carrying out a series of bombings in the Republic of Ireland in late 1972 and early 1973. McMurray was a serial renter of cars from Aldergrove airport. The Barron Inquiry into loyalist bombings and campaigner and author Margaret Urwin have described in considerable detail loyalist paramilitaries’ use of rental cars from Aldergrove to carry out attacks during this period. A licence repeatedly used to rent these cars had been stolen in August 1972 from a man called Joseph Fleming who lived in Derby, England, but occasionally visited Northern Ireland. A car rented from Avis rentals (with Fleming’s licence) in Aldergrove later exploded in Dublin on the evening of 1 December 1972 – one of two bombs that detonated in Ireland’s capital that day that resulted in the deaths of two people (131 people were injured, some of them severely). A PSNI Historical Enquiries Team report into the murder of Louis Leonard, a Fermanagh butcher and republican, related how McMurray, a suspect in the Leonard case, hired a car from Avis in Aldergrove on 15 December. Leonard was shot dead that night in his shop in the village of Derrylin; when the car was returned on 18 December, Avis cleaners found four bullets in the ashtray. Aldergrove was heavily policed, not least since it was also an important British military base. The ease with which loyalists – men already well known to the police and military – repeatedly rented cars to carry out attacks, from the same companies and in the same location, has been a source of great resentment among the families of their victims.

Captain Wilkin and A Company, 17/21 Lancers asked the RUC for help to track down and intercept the renter of the Hertz vehicle suspected of involvement in the Dundrum bombing. The RUC, initially at least, followed up on this request, reporting to 3 Brigade Headquarters that the Hertz vehicle had been rented by an individual who was staying in Omagh but normally resided at Ramsey in the Isle of Man. He could not return to the island until the following day (the first flight left at 1410 on 30 December).

The Isle of Man might seem like a curious location for loyalist activity or sympathies. But loyalist paramilitaries appear to have had some support on the island. According to research conducted by Iain Turner, paramilitaries would arrange weapons training on the island during Orange Order summer visits to the island. A loyalist suspected by the Irish police of having some involvement in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in May 1974 was later ruled out by the RUC since he had an Isle of Man alibi.

I do not know the outcome of Wilkin’s investigations. A later intelligence report compiled by 3 Brigade repeated the original assumption that republicans were likely to be behind the attack, although a note on the assessment acknowledged that no such attack by the IRA on a catholic premises had been carried out by local republicans in the past. This was, it concluded, “the first major incident in the area”.  No mention is made of Captain Wilkin’s enquiries and whether any attempt had been made to question suspect(s) seen in the Hertz car rented from Aldergrove. The names of individuals have been redacted, as have a lot of other details in the Ministry of Defence file I was given partial access to last year.

It is impossible to conclude that the bombing of Dundrum on 28 December 1972 was the work of loyalist paramilitaries. However, like the man with the missing fingers [name also redacted] identified by the British Army as driving the Clones bomb car on the same night, the bombing at Dundrum – the possible link between a bombing and a car rental company frequently used by loyalists during this period –  leaves more unanswered questions. Was the suspect staying in Omagh with an address at the isle of Man ruled out of the police investigation? Was Dundrum the intended target or was the bomb originally destined for somewhere else? As the British government legislates to shut down criminal prosecutions for Troubles linked violence, the absence of answers to events that may be linked to attacks in the Republic of Ireland – where police investigations will remain open – means that the international dimension of the Troubles may be impossible for the British government to ignore.

The post Was There a Fourth Bomb? appeared first on Political Violence in Ulster.

On 11 April 2021 the Sunday Times published an article by security correspondent John Mooney on my research into the loyalist border campaign of 1972-1974. I previously wrote a piece for the Irish Times on new evidence into loyalist bombings available in archives in London. This was based on my journal article for Terrorism and Political Violence, published in April 2020.  I later took part in an RTE documentary on the Belturbet bombing on 28 December 1972. As the Sunday Times reported, since that documentary was broadcast, I have acquired new material relating to the bombing in the town of Clones, County Monaghan, on the same night.

Who bombed Clones?

48 years ago, on the night of 28 December 1972, the Luxor cinema on Fermanagh Street in the Monaghan border town of Clones was showing A Fistful of Dynamite. At the critical point of the film, when the film’s hero, an Irish republican explosives expert turned Mexican insurgent, is about to blow a bridge, an explosion thumped the cinema. The Luxor’s proprietor later described how he was thrown to the ground by the “real blast” and hit by falling glass.

Patrons of the Luxor emerged to a scene of chaos. Dislodged electrical wires crackled above the dark, smoke-filled street. The sounds of screams, shouts and sirens were interrupted by the crump of debris falling from overhanging buildings. Narrow, steep Fermanagh Street acted as a funnel for the explosion. Residents of the village of Newbliss nearly five miles away felt the shockwaves of the blast.

Fermanagh Street, Clones, the day after the bombing

Two men were injured in the explosion; Luke McKiernan and Brendan Clancy were about to leave the Venice Café when they were blown back into the restaurant, suffering severe wounds to their legs. Local doctors and paramedics treated a number of other people injured by falling mortar and glass. Helen Donaghy was feeding her baby in a house on the street when the bomb exploded; doctors later removed a fragment of glass from her baby’s eye. Part of the axle of the bomb car was later discovered in a room at the back of a house.

Unlike the loyalist bomb the same night at nearby Belturbet in County Cavan – where teenagers Paddy Stanley and Geraldine O’Reilly died – nobody was killed in the Clones attack. The absence of fatalities in Clones (and in the other loyalist bomb on 28 December at Brittons’ pub near Pettigo in County Donegal) was by chance rather than design. In all three incidents loyalist paramilitaries placed a bomb in a busy area. This was indiscriminate, no-warning terrorism.

Businesses on Fermanagh Street – the commercial heart of Clones – were badly damaged and faced a long wait for for compensation before reopening. Some never recovered and closed for good. This was a time of repeated loyalist bombs in the Clones area – eight attacks took place between October 1972 and January 1974. Clones had already lost much of its County Fermanagh trade due to the cratering of roads and violence along the border. Now some County Monaghan customers also began to question whether it was safer to shop elsewhere.

Is there any intelligence that could identify those who placed the bomb in Clones? A 2004 report commissioned by the Irish government into bombings in the Irish state in the 1970s  (chaired by Mr Justice Henry Barron) named Enniskillen loyalist Robert Bridge as the lead suspect. Part of Barron’s rationale for singling out Bridge, who was convicted of a sectarian murder in Fermanagh, was “… the absence of any intelligence pointing to other groups or individuals.”

But such intelligence did exist. Ministry of Defence intelligence files in the UK National Archives indicate that the British Army and the RUC concluded in March 1973 that Billy McMurray, an Ulster Defence Association (UDA) commander, was a lead suspect when it came to the planning and execution of bombings in the Irish state during December 1972 and January 1973.

Originally from Newtownabbey in County Antrim, 36 years old McMurray was in County Fermanagh during late 1972 and early 1973. British Army and RUC intelligence reporting from the time claimed that McMurray led an UDA Commando unit responsible for cross-border attacks. One such report claimed that McMurray was an associate of Bridge, although the former was evidently regarded as the more senior and dangerous of the two. Five people died as a result of loyalist bombings in the Irish state between December 1972 and January 1973, including two children at Belturbet. Nearly 200 people were injured, some very seriously – mostly in the Dublin bombing of 1 December 1972 in which two people were killed.

McMurray later confirmed in a court appearance in Belfast on 16 May 1973, where he appeared on an arms charge, that he was the UDA Headquarters officer responsible for Fermanagh and Tyrone – a statement that was reported in the Belfast Telegraph the following day. Although a plumber by trade, McMurray had a history of involvement in criminality and paramilitary organisations. He was first convicted of housebreaking and robbery in 1964, where he appeared in court alongside 19 years old Sammy Duddy, then with an address in the Rathcoole/Newtownabbey area and later a well-known figure in the UDA.

The Ulster Defence Association

The operation to target three disparate locations on the same night would have been carried out by a group of loyalists, rather than simply two or three individuals. The Barron Inquiry noted that the bomb car for Clones – a blue Morris (Austin) 1100, registration number 431 LZ – was stolen from Quay Lane car park in Enniskillen town centre between 6.20 and 7.35 pm on the night of the bombings. The Inquiry was unable to locate the Garda investigation file into the Clones bombing. However, Barron did review Garda C3 (Security and intelligence) files and concluded that, “From the Garda reports seen by the Inquiry it would appear that no one else remembered seeing the car between then and the time it exploded in Clones.”

Last year I submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) Request for relevant Ministry of Defence (MOD) files which could shed some light on the attacks on 28 December 1972. The request was partially successful. What is revealed in the newly available Ministry of Defence documents is that on the night of 28 December 1972, before the bombings south of the border, the RUC believed that they knew who was driving a blue Morris (Austin) 1100 that had been reported stolen in Enniskillen. Although the registration is redacted in the MOD file, it seems likely that this is the same stolen blue Morris that was parked with an estimated 100 lbs of explosives in the boot on Fermanagh Street, before the bomb detonated at 10.01 pm.

Soldiers from 1st Battalion, The Staffordshire Regiment

Shortly after the theft of the blue Morris car in Enniskillen, the RUC told the headquarters of 1st Battalion, The Staffordshire Regiment – deployed in and around Portadown, Lurgan and Dungannon (Armagh and East Tyrone) – that they had intelligence on the identity of the man who now had possession of the car. The Staffordshire Regiment passed this information to 3^rd Infantry Brigade Headquarters, who made the following entry in the brigade log at 9.45 pm, 16 minutes before the explosion in Clones, “From the RUC. A car stolen from Enniskillen, a Blue Morris Reg No [REDACTED] is thought to be driven by [REDACTED] he has lost some of his finders [sic] from his left hand. Thought to be heading towards Dungannon.” At the same time a note was also made in the log that 16th/5th The Queen’s Royal Lancers – the British Army unit responsible for security in County Fermanagh – had already been informed of this intelligence.

Instead of continuing on to Dungannon, at some point the bomb car turned right, towards nearby County Monaghan and its final destination of Clones. Like the intelligence on Billy McMurray, this information does not appear to have been passed on to Gardaí or, three decades later, to Barron. It is unclear why not.

Whether Gardaí in Clones would have responded in time on the evening of 28 December if they had intelligence on the stolen car and its driver – available in advance of the bombing – is also uncertain. 1972 was an exceptionally busy, dangerous period; there were significant political tensions and resentment in both states when it came to cross-border intelligence cooperation. Four days after the Clones bombing the Garda Chief Superintendent in Monaghan, J.P. McMahon reported that the Gardaí’s main problem in countering loyalist attacks was “almost a complete absence of information on members of extreme Protestant organisations in Northern Ireland and the identity of vehicles used by them.”

In January 1973 Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Millen at the British Army’s Headquarters Northern Ireland correctly anticipated that loyalist cross-border bombings would precipitate a more robust approach by the Irish government to border security, which would serve to further restrict republican operations as well as those by loyalist paramilitaries. Like Millen, many in the British Army and the RUC were frustrated with what they regarded as a lax, if not occasionally obstructionist, Irish approach to border security.

In the early 1970s arrangements for the swift exchange of intelligence between the RUC and An Garda Siochána had some way to go. Nevertheless, nearly 50 years later we still do not know if the man with the missing fingers on his left hand believed to be driving out of Enniskillen in a stolen blue Morris car on 28 December 1972 was ever questioned or ruled out of enquiries into the Clones bombing.

The post Who Bombed Clones? appeared first on Political Violence in Ulster.

The diary entry of Franz Kafka on 2 August 1914 – “Germany has declared war on Russia, went swimming in the afternoon” – captures the tendency of the prosaic to intrude on moments of real historical significance. For the 1^st Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, headquartered at Cootehill, County Cavan, the arrival of the partition of Ireland was greeted with relief, if not delight. There had been few opportunities for sport in Cavan; the battalion could not find enough flat or dry ground in “drumlin country” in which to make a cricket crease. The ‘Die Hards’ had had enough.

Shortly after their departure from Cavan for Silesia, another European frontier zone, the officers of 1 Middlesex offered their rather caustic opinion of south Ulster in their regimental journal,

There are more comfortable places in the world than disused workhouses, and more interesting places than County Cavan, where to use an “Irishism”, if there had been a flat acre of ground for games it would have been a bog – and it was, therefore with few regrets that orders were received, late in January, to move to Gravesend on the 31^st, en route for the Rhine. On that date the Battalion, 640 strong, concentrated at the North Wall, Dublin, where it embarked on the L & N.W. Railway Company’s boat Rathmore. The quay was left at 3 p.m., the band playing ‘Rule Britannia’. This had the effect of turning the dock labourers into ardent British patriots – until the band finished, that is … the Rhine had come to be looked upon as a kind of earthly paradise, and now the horse’s head was pointing in the right direction.

Such opinions on leaving Ireland – even though 1 Middlesex had only spent a year in the country and suffered few casualties – are echoed in other regimental journals for this period. The campaign in Ireland, according to the Middlesex Regiment’s Captain Brian Horrocks – subsequently the commander of XXX Corps during Operation Market Garden in 1944 – was an “unpleasant sort of warfare”. His time in Cavan is lumped together in a short paragraph in his autobiography with a discussion of the Middlesex Regiment’s mobilisation during the coal miners’ dispute of 1920.

Horrocks says nothing about his close friend, Captain Eric Dorman-Smith of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the son of Edward Dorman-Smith, a local landowner at Cootehill and high sheriff of County Cavan, even though part of D Company, 1 Middlesex, appear to have been camped at the family estate in Bellamont Forest.  This was a difficult period for Dorman-Smith, who served with his own regiment in Carlow and Kilkenny during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921. Dorman-Smith was angered by RIC reprisals in his native Cootehill. On discovering that his former nurse at Bellamont was storing arms for the IRA, Dorman-Smith helped her to bury them in the estate, rather than turning her in.

Brigadier Eric Dorman-Smith

Dorman-Smith was a brilliant officer, one of the few in the British Army who understood the full potential of armoured warfare at the outset of the Second World War. He was later credited with playing a central role in planning the Allied counter-offensive in North Africa in 1942 that pushed back Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s forces. Unyielding in his views about the failings of the British Army, Brigadier Dorman-Smith fell out of favour with his superiors (and Prime Minister Winston Churchill) and was removed from North Africa. In retirement he changed his surname to Dorman O’Gowan and became an adviser to the IRA during the early years of the Border Campaign, 1956-1962, holding training and planning meetings in Bellamont.

Bellamont Forest

Other members of the gentry in Cootehill were much less conflicted about their loyalties than Captain Dorman-Smith. Elizabeth Adams lived at Drumelton House, southwest of the town; her father had also been the High Sheriff of Cavan and her brother was an officer in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. In her later application for compensation from the British government (through the Irish Grants Committee), Adams noted that her family were proudly “protestant and loyalist”.  Adams, although living at home with her invalid mother, increased rather than lowered her demonstrations of loyalty from 1918 to 1922. She frequently few the Union Jack from her house and entertained officers from the Middlesex Regiment. She claimed that Captain Geoffrey W. Kempster, the battalion intelligence officer, could vouch for the assistance she had given during these years. For Adams, the soldiers’ departure was a disaster – although she mistakenly recalls the departure taking place two months later, “…we were handed over into the power of our enemies by the British government on April 1 1922”. In June 1922 Adams was briefly imprisoned on a charge of firing on members of the new National Army (she was later released, and the charges dropped).

The response of the local regiment, the Royal Irish Fusiliers (Princess Victoria’s), to partition was predictably one of intense alarm. The Faughs recruited in Cavan and Monaghan as well as in neighbouring northern counties. For a period, the regiment faced the threat of disbandment. The officers appear to have been so outraged at recent events in Ireland that the opening paragraphs of the January 1922 editorial in their journal, the Faugh a Ballagh were blacked out by the censor in London. Serving and retired men of the regiment had been targeted during the past two years and some killed.

In July 1921, the Faughs’ journal recorded that a few weeks earlier, “Major W[illiam] Stewart, 3^rd Battalion, had has his house, Daily Hill, Clogher, burned to the ground by that curse of Ireland, the Sinn Féin organisation. Major Stewart was condemned to be shot, but the men left behind to do the work were rather saner than their fellows and refused to carry out their orders.” (the Stewarts were attacked by IRA volunteers from Scotstown Battalion, 1 Brigade, 5^th Northern Division). The Royal Irish Fusiliers survived the sharp blow of partition and were later involved in intense fighting in Italy during 1943 and 1944, before being amalgamated with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Royal Ulster Rifles in 1968 to become the Royal Irish Rangers (and ultimately the Royal Irish Regiment).

The lack of sentiment among the Middlesex Regiment following the rupture of the United Kingdom – leaving behind a vulnerable population, not least those Ulster loyalists who found themselves on the wrong side of the border – is perhaps reflective of the attitude of phlegmatic professional soldiers off to police a different part of Europe or empire. No mention is made of Elizabeth Adams or other Ulster loyalists in Cavan by the departing Englishmen.

Sentiment was wasted energy – what mattered were better billets, good sport, fit men and an enemy you could find. Captain Horrocks and many other young English officers showed little appreciation that this “unpleasant” business in Ireland was for others in the British Army, not least the Irish regiments, a moment of existential crisis. In the summer of 1922, a la Kafka and his swimming appointment, a grateful Middlesex Regiment found that the flat valleys of Silesia were far more amenable than Cavan for the construction of a cricket crease.

I was fortunate in August 2019 to visit Bellamont with Brigadier Dorman O’Gowan’s grandson, Charles Dorman O’Gowan, a much-respected International Committee of the Red Cross representative in Afghanistan, with whom I first came into contact with eight years previously. I am grateful to him and his daughter for showing me their ancestral home. I am also thankful for the hospitality and courtesy shown to me by Caroline Corvan, veterans and volunteers at the Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum in Armagh during a recent research visit.

The post Kafka, Cavan and the Departure of the Middlesex Regiment from Ireland in 1922 appeared first on Political Violence in Ulster.

My current Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project is called ‘the Greatest Weight’. The title is drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ – the ‘greatest weight’ being the realisation that we may be doomed to repeat our actions eternally. Since Ulster, unlike the rest of Ireland, experienced several periods of conflict in the 20^th century, I wish to discern the practical, operational influence of one generation – knowledge, tactics – on another.

Nietzsche taking sides…

The influence of the men of the ‘Old IRA’ on the Provisional IRA, in terms of inspiration and morale, was of course considerable. Henry Glassie, in his wonderful anthropological study of a catholic community in South Fermanagh during the 1970s, described this charismatic lure at the local level, “With people moving past, laughing, jamming in the doorway, a quiet handsome young man who has known the terror of midnight roads, the engine’s hum, the feel of a makeshift bomb in his palms, stands, looking at no one, and says softly, ‘When I hear the old men sing, I love Ireland more.’”

But there were those men, republicans and loyalists, who fought twice or even three times in Ulster – playing active militant roles in the 1920s, 1950s and again during the 1970s. Here, I will briefly discuss three men who were active participants in events during the 1920s and again in the 1970s (there are others). These men are George Mussen Sr of Hilltown in County Down, James Conaty of Stradone in County Cavan – both republicans – and a leading loyalist, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Brush from Magheralin in County Down.

George Mussen

George Mussen joined the IRA at the age of 16 – in 1922 he appears on the rolls for Hilltown Company, 2^nd (Newry) Battalion, 2^nd Brigade, 4^th (Northern) Division of the IRA. As well being a noted inter-county footballer, he was also a life-long republican. During the 1930s he was convicted of IRA related offences and he later stood as a republican candidate in County Down in the 1964 and 1966 elections (polling second and third respectively). In 1973 the Special Branch of the RUC wrote a report which suggested that 67 year old George Mussen was the most important explosives officer for the South Down and South Armagh area. Another intelligence report claimed that a network of middle-aged men brought explosives by rowing boat from Greenore in County Louth to a place near a lighthouse on the Down coast, where they were collected by Mussen. On this occasion the RUC tried, without success, to have Mussen imprisoned under an interim custody order – effectively internment. A later report noted that, “Unfortunately an ICO for Mussen was not forthcoming, and it only remains to be hoped that his advancing years will affect his dexterity…” These specific intelligence allegations against Mussen are unproven. However, local republicans do acknowledge his integral role in the wider provisional movement in South Down during the early 1970s. George Mussen was later suspected of being the target of a loyalist attack, which resulted in the death of Seamus Ludlow in 1976 (an independent inquiry into the Ludlow case was launched last month as part of the Barnard Review).

James Conaty

In October 1973 72 year old James Conaty, from Drumhirk, Stradone, County Cavan, appeared before the Special Criminal Court in Dublin charged with an array of crimes, including membership of the IRA, illegal possession of Garda documents and ammunition. Garda Superintendent James McNally told the court that during a search of Conaty’s home he discovered, “a number of confidential Garda circulars, the wax impression of a key … He also found a driving licence in the name of Eamon Ó Coileán of Youghal, Co. Cork; a number of blank insurance certificates; a copy of the Constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann and the general orders issued to the IRA”. Conaty told the court that he had joined the Irish Volunteers in 1914, carried dispatches in 1916, been an active volunteer during the War of Independence and fought beside Seán Lemass in the Four Courts in 1922 (Conaty claimed that Lemass saved his life at one point during the battle).

Fighting at the Four Courts, June 1922

Some of these claims are difficult to verify – however, a James Conaty from the Lavey area of Cavan is listed in a British Army intelligence report as attending an IRA training camp in November 1921. Conaty was born in the United States and moved back there in 1935 where he was a key organiser in Clan na Gael, raising funds for a variety of republican campaigns and causes. Conaty returned to Cavan in 1969, where he continued his involvement in the republican movement. During sentencing, the judge noted his advanced age and the fact that his wife was unwell; although Conaty was found guilty of possession of stolen Garda documents and the ammunition charge, he was not convicted of the more serious charge of IRA membership. He received a sentence of 12 months in prison, suspended for two years.

Peter Brush and Down Orange Welfare

At the onset of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Brush was a septuagenarian former army officer who had served as a young lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade during the British Army’s campaign against the IRA in 1920 and 1921. In his memoirs Brush describes a number of operations against the IRA in Dublin and in Donegal (he also guarded the Customs House shortly after it was burned in May 1921 and the Bank of Ireland on College Green). Brush retired from the army in 1946 and returned to the family estate at Drumnabreeze, County Down, a few miles outside the town of Lurgan. He later served as a High Sheriff, Deputy and Vice Lord Lieutenant of County Down, entertaining the Queen and the royal family during their visits to Northern Ireland. He was also chairman of the County Down Territorial Army (TA) Association and Northern Ireland’s representative to the Executive Committee of the TA. According to Brush, in 1971 he was approached by the grand master of the Orange Order in Down, who asked him to form a paramilitary organisation, one that would ensure that if the security situation in Northern Ireland deteriorated significantly, unionists in the county “would have a cadre of men ready to meet the unforeseen.” Brush established Down Orange Welfare, recruiting former servicemen in the county to run the organisation.

By early 1973 the British Army estimated that DOW had recruited between 1000-1,800 members. Despite mounting evidence that the organisation was working closely with the UDA and the UVF, the British government and the military largely ignored the organisation. DOW later joined the UVF and the Red Hand Commando in the Ulster Loyalist Central Coordinating Committee as part of the militant response to the Sunningdale Agreement in December 1973. Paramilitary organisations such as the UDA, UVF, USCA and DOW played an important role in mobilising the Ulster Workers’ Council strike in May 1974 that collapsed these institutions.

In 1979 Bill Hannigan, a former soldier and one of DOW’s leading commanders, was convicted of a variety of arms offences in relations to his effective role an armourer for the UDA and the UVF (including in the Portadown area). A lathe used for turning gun barrels was discovered at a farm near Kircubbin on the Ards Peninsula (24 weapons, a variety of gun parts, 42 magazines and 1,497 rounds of ammunition were also seized by the police). After Hannigan’s conviction, Colonel Brush petitioned unsuccessfully to the Northern Ireland Office for “… a Queen’s pardon for this old soldier”. An irritated Brush later wrote that “… Lord Gowrie replied to me through a secretary that he was unable to help.” Nevertheless, in the summer of 1980, barely six months after Hannigan’s conviction, military headquarters in Northern Ireland organised a party in Brush’s honour to celebrate the 60^th anniversary since his commissioning as an officer in the British Army. The event was hosted in Lisburn by the Commander Land Forces Northern Ireland, Major General James Glover and the Commander of 39 Brigade, Brigadier David Ramsbotham. Such an indulgent attitude to DOW’s leader was consistent with the security forces’ relationship with the paramilitary organisation during the decade or so of its existence.

Inter-generational influence

It is remarkable to think that in the early 1970s Peter Brush and George Mussen (both of whom spent much of their childhood near Dromore) would emerge at the forefront of militant movements in County Down. They – like James Conaty – may be exceptions but they remind us that this revolutionary (and counter-revolutionary) generation had not gone away. Their presence, as well as their example, could still turn events.

For more on Down Orange Welfare and loyalist cross-border violence my recent article in Terrorism and Political Violence is available here.

The post A 50 Years War? Republican and Loyalist Paramilitaries Active in the 1920s and the 1970s appeared first on Political Violence in Ulster.

Clara Madden (1856-1917) was the daughter of John and Clara Madden of Rosslea Manor in County Fermanagh, a branch of the Madden family of Hilton Park and lessors of the Slatmulrooney estate of Trinity College Dublin. It is more difficult to come across political commentary written by women in late 19th and early 20th century Ireland; most of the historical archives are self-evidently of ‘great men’ or their associates. It was a pleasure then to discover the diary of Clara Madden in the Earl of Harrowby Manuscript Collection at Sandon Hall in rural Staffordshire. The diary’s primary purpose is not as a political journal, but its author does occasionally throw light on her perspective of political events. Clara writes in French in her younger years. These passages are full of hope and passion. Rejected by  a local member of the gentry, to whom she had hoped to be engaged, and detached from her stepmother, she later switches to more laconic prose in English.

Sandon Hall, Staffordshire

Through Clara’s eyes we get a sense of a family (and an elite) struggling to respond to personal setbacks, the pressures of agrarian protest and the Home Rule movement. In 1875 Walter Wilmot Madden, Clara’s eldest brother, was thrown out of the Royal Navy for “deception” – he cheated in an exam to become a lieutenant. He departed for New Zealand, where he later worked as a teacher. Another brother, John Beresford Madden, a former officer in the Monaghan Militia, was paralysed in a horse-riding accident in New Zealand. He returned to Ireland to live with his sisters, dying in 1928.

The Land League and Lord Rossmore

The Roslea estate experienced significant unrest as a result of the National Land League agitation. The Maddens tried to face it down – in 1881 Clara wrote that,

Hussars, Rifles and extra police came [illegible] late Thursday, evicted a number of people for non-payment of rent. Great outcry. Father told me, ‘Everything concerning our future prospects, fortunes, settlement etc and the probable of our present means…’

John Madden subsequently struggled to find new tenants to replace those evicted.

There were brighter, more hopeful moments. On 16th October 1883 Clara described the Roslea counter-demonstration organised by the Earls of Rossmore and Erne in response to a mass meeting of the Home Rule MP, Tim Healy as a great victory,

Great demonstration in Roslea. Nationalists defeated. 11th Lancers, foot soldiers, and police came to keep peace. Lords Crichton and Rossmore and many leading gentry attended. We drove to the field. 5000 Orangemen collected. Many gentlemen came to lunch here.

In 1885 Rosslea Manor was destroyed in a fire. The family moved across the county boundary to Aghafin House, just outside Clones (John Madden served as Deputy Lord Lieutenant for County Monaghan and High Sheriff for Fermanagh). By 1890 the family’s fortunes had deteriorated further. At the beginning of December, Clara Madden (rather coldly) noted in her diary,

Preparing various things for Christmas evictions to begin. £7000 of arrears due to Pater and [illegible] to College.

Clara Madden’s father was a leading member of the Property Defence Association.  In 1891, Clara greeted news of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the great nationalist leader, with delight. Perhaps the worst was over – “11 years of Landlord persecution … Now for a new political era.”

Decline and Fall

Roslea historian Oliver McCaffrey has already described in expert detail the pressures on (and dismantling of) the College estate. Even with Parnell gone, there was no respite for the Maddens. Rent strikes continued in Fermanagh, even if the Maddens’ Monaghan tenants did intermittently pay the agents. By 1899 Clara Madden wrote of the family’s isolation, “No ones comes to visit. No one goes away.”

Perhaps the stench of military failure and financial decay affected the Maddens social standing among their own class. Nonetheless, Clara and her sister Isabel Madden were tenacious women. Clara took to cycling the winding boreens of east Fermanagh and north Monaghan, visiting former tenants of the Maddens, particularly during times of illness (Interestingly her visits in the Roslea area were overwhelmingly to Protestant farmhouses, even though Catholics made up a significant majority in the area). Nevertheless, protestant fealty to the patrician classes was limited when it came to the question of land. Clara observed that an equal number of protestants in the early 1880s did not pay their rents to the College estate.

Clara became ill and died just before the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921. Aghafin House was raided by the IRA in the early morning of 1 September 1920 – Isabel Madden was shot and seriously wounded but survived, dying at Aghafin in 1942 (more later). However, Clara Madden’s diary offers a useful means of tracing the networks that sustained the Anglican community in south-east Fermanagh.

The Madden Papers

Ian Beresford Madden (died 2008) placed the Madden Papers in Staffordshire, due to a distant connection between the family and the Ryder family. Ian Madden’s letters are also preserved. He was very aware of his family’s history and corresponded with many historians, including those who organised the bicentenary commemorations of the 1798 rising. In a letter to the 1798 Friends in Clones, he warned of the contemporary currency of history and hoped that the commemorations would not be used for modern day political purposes. Otherwise “… perhaps I should be seeking revenge for a Knox-line ancestor of mine who was spiked to death at Rathangan, Co Kildare, early on the 1798 troubles?” The Maddens also had long memories.

I am very grateful to the archivist, Michael Bosson, the Earl of Harrowby and his family, for granting me access to the Madden Papers.

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