PREFACE

Saturday, 13 June 1981 was a wet and windy day in east Tyrone, and Sammy Brush was in a hurry. A postie in Dungannon, he was keen to finish up his round and head over to the local Ulster Defence Regiment’s (UDR) Open Day in the town. A proud member of the regiment himself, Brush was going to pick up his young son and then join in the fun, despite the weather. But first he had one last delivery ‘for a Mrs Mary McGarvey, Cravney Irish, Ballygawley’, as Brush would later recount. There were no other letters for the road that day, and in truth Mrs McGarvey’s was only being delivered ‘because it had been sent First-Class’. Pulling up outside the house in his red Post Office van, he walked to the front door and popped the delivery through the letter box. As he turned to go ‘a gunman wearing a balaclava appeared … he fired the first shot and it hit me here [upper left chest], it was like being kicked by a donkey, and it spun me around’. Brush’s life was only saved by the body armour his UDR company commander – Ken Maginnis – had insisted he wear on his rounds a bare six weeks earlier. Then a second gunman appeared and ‘the next shot missed the body armour and went straight through my right lung and came out in the centre of my back’. Adrenalin flooded Brush’s system, somehow enabling him to pull his personal protection weapon – a pistol – from its shoulder holster and return fire. ‘My right hand was out of action – I didn’t know at the time but the bullet had cut the nerves to it – so I used my left hand and just turned and fired two shots at one of them.’ In the confusion ‘I got back in the van, reversed out and drove to Ballygawley police station about a mile and a half away, and just sat there and blew the horn until George Gilliland [an RUC officer at the station] came out.’ Miraculously Brush survived, but looking back on the attack he believed he’d been set up: ‘That letter was deliberately sent, it was a notice about the Benburb Sunday event but wasn’t from the Benburb Priory.’

The attempt on Sammy Brush’s life was just one of hundreds of operations carried out by one of the deadliest units the Provisional IRA ever produced – its East Tyrone Brigade. In British Army circles at the time the saying went that ‘in Belfast the Provos are trying to make the 6 o’clock news, in east Tyrone they’re trying to kill you’.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) – the Provos – were birthed in the violence and mayhem of 1969 as the Troubles erupted and the old-style, or Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA), was found wanting in terms of its ability to protect local Catholic populations under attack from Protestant unionist (people pro the union with Great Britain) mobs. Given it was in the cities where the violence was most pronounced, this was where the infant Provos first made their mark, forming themselves into the Belfast and Derry Brigades. As for rural Northern Ireland, it was initially stony ground for the Provos, but within a few years the new organisation had spread across the entire north, local units springing up to take on the British Army and Northern Ireland’s police force – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).

Not structured, trained or equipped like a standard army, nonetheless individual Provisionals saw themselves as soldiers – Volunteers – and fashioned themselves into companies and battalions that usually operated close to home. Above that level the Provisionals across the bulk of Northern Ireland were fairly loosely organised, with Tyrone and Fermanagh, north Armagh, south Londonderry and, at times, east Donegal, structured as an amorphous ‘Mid-Ulster Command’, which proved itself too unwieldy to be truly effective. Only South Armagh unsurprisingly an exception – kept its distance and quickly became a recognised brigade alongside Belfast and Derry.

As for counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, the Provisionals there were dominated by a series of local hard men – many from families with staunchly republican backgrounds – who imposed themselves on their areas and, to an extent, fought their own almost private wars. This was especially true of Tyrone, a county with a keen sense of its own history and a distinct feeling of exceptionalism.

At first, the Tyrone Provisionals found themselves up against state security forces that were just as unprepared for the war as PIRA was itself. Scrambling to respond, British government policy shifted to one of ‘Ulsterising’ the war as the saying went. That meant wrestling the lead role in combating the Provisionals away from the Army and giving it to the RUC, and establishing a different type of military force to anything the British had up until then: the Ulster Defence Regiment. Locally recruited, its ranks filled with a mix of full- and parttime members, UDR soldiers patrolled their own streets and fields and weren’t liable for service outside Northern Ireland. As such the UDR was a very different beast from the rest of the regular Army and posed a unique problem for the Provisionals. With the RUC taking the lead, the non-uniformed men of RUC Special Branch (SB) – known simply as ‘the Branch’ – came into their own, recruiting and running ‘sources’ – individuals providing information from within the organisation – who soon peppered the Provisionals. As the 1970s ended and the war entered its second decade it was clear PIRA needed to change before it drowned under the weight of its own informers. The mayhem of the first years of the campaign ended, to be replaced by the Long War strategy, devised by Gerry Adams to slowly but surely defeat the British and force them out of Northern Ireland. The new strategy was to be delivered by a new IRA, one based on small cells of volunteers to minimise the threat from informers – these were PIRA’s Active Service Units, their ASUs. Along with them came two new rural brigades: Fermanagh and East Tyrone, which would become pivotal to PIRA’s war, and none more so than East Tyrone. Across its claustrophobic patchwork of farms, fields, villages and towns, sweeping east from Ballygawley and the republican strongholds of Cappagh mountain and Pomeroy, through Cookstown, Coalisland and Dungannon, down to Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh, the East Tyrone Brigade held sway. Its members may not have been professional soldiers but they were dedicated and extremely active, as one former IRA volunteer proudly stated: ‘East Tyrone was the Provos’ engine room.’

That engine room went up a gear after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, as the Brigade attempted to seize the initiative and decisively turn the tide of war in favour of the Provisionals. Then, on a warm spring night in early May 1987, as millions sat in front of the TV to watch the latest episode of the Wogan chat show, East Tyrone PIRA’s war was ripped asunder. In a few short minutes a Special Air Service (SAS) ambush in the north Armagh village of Loughgall killed eight of its most committed and experienced volunteers – its so-called A Team – and that was just the start.

Over the next five years East Tyrone PIRA suffered a bloodletting like no other. The Brigade wasn’t helpless and the deadly traffic was far from being one-way, but in operation after operation the forces at the cutting edge of Britain’s war with the Provos exacted a heavy toll. By the time the peace process began to get into gear one Tyrone republican commented ruefully to the Irish journalist Ed Moloney that ‘we [East Tyrone PIRA] had nobody left’.

But if the history of militant Irish republicanism teaches anyone anything, it’s that there’s always someone left – always.

East Tyrone PIRA didn’t materialise out of thin air; they sprang from a tradition they believe goes back centuries, to a time of Norman knights and Gaelic warriors, the Plantations of the 1600s and on through the 1916 Easter Rising and AngloIrish War – the Tan War as it is known across Ireland – and the Border Campaign of the 1950s and ’60s. That is their back story and they see themselves as simply the latest incarnation of an ongoing struggle – a struggle they have not forsaken. This is the story of the men and women, from all sides, who lived and breathed the Troubles in the villages and fields of Tyrone until an imperfect peace finally took hold in 1994. Long may it last.