In Quillversation 🎤 With Jonathan Trigg

By AM Friday, September 13, 2024

Share Tweet Share Share Email

Brandon Sullivan 🎤 Quillversation with Jonathan Trigg, author of Death in the Fields: The IRA in East Tyrone.

Intro

I read and enjoyed Death in the Fields when it came out. Tyrone during the conflict was and is a contentious and contested subject. I listened to a long-form interview with Jonathan Trigg on the Good Listener podcast, interviewed by the host, John Hadden. I have a particular interest in the IRA’s campaign against security force contractors, as well as analysis around the methods and efficacy of security force and loyalists in attacking the Republican Movement. In both of these areas, Tyrone is distinct, and fascinating. I was therefore pleased to make contact with Jonathan Trigg, who graciously agreed to an interview.

Please note that when Trigg refers to veterans, it is veterans of all combatants, military and paramilitary. 

Anyone wishing to suggest questions for me to post in subsequent pieces, please leave a comment below.

BS: Could you start with discussing why you wrote Death In The Fields? Perhaps comment on the inception and research process, and how it may inform your work in the future?

JT: I was born in August 1970 so never knew a time before the Troubles. I also knew from a very early age I wanted to join the British Army – no idea why to be honest, no-one in my family served and I didn’t know anyone who was in, but it was always just there. I also always knew I wanted to join the infantry, so that meant going to Northern Ireland, I just accepted that reality.

Years later I read Toby Harnden’s Bandit Country and it’s such a fascinating piece of work I thought that if I ever write something about Northern Ireland I want it to be like that. So, having written over a dozen other books – mainly about the Second World War – and interviewed a host of veterans I thought the time was right to start what I hope would be a series of books about the different brigades that made up the Provisional IRA. As my work is based on interviews and first-hand testimony I needed to speak to veterans from all sides, and, given my background that gave me a problem – how could I get former Provisionals to talk to me? So that meant finding a new publisher – Merrion – who could put me in a room with the people I needed to talk to.

Researching the book was a joy – and a trauma. So much pain, all these years later it was still raw for so many, but to listen to them was a privilege, I only wish more people would have talked to me but I always knew that would be the case. The ‘sequel’ is on the Derry Brigade and I’m very glad to say that writing Death in the Fields has encouraged a lot more veterans to talk to me, which has been brilliant.

BS: In Chapter 3 (The Mallon and McKenna Years), you wrote about an incident at a republican commemoration when a Protestant man "with the mentality of a child" was seen by IRA men. Sean O’Callaghan in his memoir The Informer wrote that Brendan Hughes (the Tyrone IRA man, not The Dark) and a friend were beating the Protestant man and only stopped when O’Callaghan fired warning shots to get them to stop.

Hughes wrote in Up Like a Bird that he went to where the Protestant man was being held by two IRA Volunteers awaiting instructions on whether to kill the man, and ordered that he be released immediately. Hughes wrote that being "incensed at O'Callaghan's description” of this event was one of the reasons he wrote his memoirs.

Could you offer an opinion on which version you find more credible? And comment more widely on the sectarianism of the East Tyrone Brigade (ETB)? Perhaps how it was perceived within the PUL community, and also from within or around the ETB itself?

JT: I would’ve loved to talk to Sean O’Callaghan about it and ask him about that incident, but alas I couldn’t of course. As to whose version is the more credible I want Brendan Hughes’s to be true as it is more human, and having seen Hughes interviewed by John Hadden on The Good Listener podcast he is clearly a thoughtful individual who I feel is very credible, but am I just kidding myself? I don’t know. Basically, I’ve never spoken to any former Volunteer who hasn’t loudly and insistently proclaimed they don’t have a sectarian bone in their body, but really? Shooting unarmed men outside their church as they stand with their children? Kingsmill, Darkley?

Loyalists were nakedly sectarian – and it’s vile – and they accepted they were, and while I understand the argument that it was the uniform that was the target and not necessarily the person in it, that’s a tough line to defend in my view. Blood and soil are powerful things – I know, I’ve interviewed a lot of former German Second World War veterans – and I think that creed seeped into the minds of the ETB, generation after generation. The legacy it left in the Protestant community – who live cheek by jowl with them – is total poison.

BS: Volunteers would argue that if they wanted simply to murder Protestants, then they could have in very large numbers, almost any time that they wanted. In terms of Blood & Soil, Kevin Toolis made the point in Rebel Hearts that to this day, Catholic farmers can look at land owned by Protestants that was confiscated from their families centuries ago. Toolis also wrote that economic jealousy could have informed some individual IRA members' keenness to target certain Protestants, though they would have had to have approval from the PIRA hierarchy. With this in mind, could you perhaps comment on the Teebane operation? It has been debated widely on TPQ.

JT: I have no argument with any of that, yes they could have murdered so many more Protestants and yes, Catholic farmers could see ‘stolen’ land every day but at what point do we let the past be the past and forgive each other – I know it sounds all sunshine and flowers but what’s the alternative? Personally I blame the Norman Conquest for destroying an Anglo-Viking society in England that was working pretty well but I can’t curse the Normans amongst us for ever – I’m married to an amazing woman who from her surname is almost certainly descended from them.

As for Teebane – well, objectively it was an operation that ‘worked’, i.e. they hit their target, and although I have no definitive evidence I’d be surprised if it didn’t scare off other contractors, but even so I struggle to think of it as anything except an atrocity. That late in the war was it going to make a difference to any outcome?

BS: Was sectarian division obvious when you served in Tyrone? And what were attitudes like within the British Army towards the Catholic & Protestant populations respectively?

JT: Soldiers are venal creatures, I definitely was, and we measured the division in terms of tea and cake, nothing more fundamental – sorry but we did. We knew we were in a ‘friendly’ area when people would offer us tea and cake, and when they didn’t it was a ‘bad’ area.

The Protestant/Catholic thing in the Army is a very good question and one that doesn’t get any attention; OK here goes, it was irrelevant to 90% or more of soldiers, to be honest most (I accept some Scottish regiments in particular would be an exception) soldiers had no idea there was a difference between Protestants and Catholics – I know that’s difficult to except for many but that’s the truth. I took my soldiers to Bosnia for a ‘religious war’ and they couldn’t get the whole ‘Muslim/RC/Orthodox Christian’ thing then too - most thought we were all just Christians and couldn’t get the concept of two ‘versions’ – most of my guys had never gone to church ever. In my battalion a large proportion of the officers were Catholic, it was a ‘thing’ apparently because a lot of our officers had been to private schools in east Anglia that were Catholic.

In Tyrone most people either looked through us like we weren’t there or were pretty friendly – open hostility was very rare - and we left it at that, we had a job to do and we got on with it.

BS: The book is about the East Tyrone brigade of the IRA. What other agencies/organisations (within Tyrone) were important in terms of effectiveness and/or power? As an example, Republican War News frequently featured businesses publicly announcing cutting all commercial ties with the security forces due to IRA threats. How was the general civilian population affected by the various armed organisations in Tyrone - police, military, paramilitary?

JT: The most effective agency in Tyrone by far was Special Branch. Every agency is going to try and talk up its own impact – future funding depends on it for a start – but with SB the reality matches the hype. After them I’d give the nod to 14 Company. Least of all I’d tip the regular British Army. They were the ‘face’ of the war in many ways, but mainly provided the ‘framework’ within which everyone else operated, almost without being a major player themselves.

As for the economic war thesis I have big doubts; in a capitalist model there will always be those who see a competitor cutting commercial ties with a customer as an opportunity, and frankly if the Army had to fly bread in from Manchester it would’ve done, so was the idea flawed in the first place? It’s difficult to argue it wasn’t in my view.

As to how the mass of the population were affected, two short personal stories if I may; I was leading a patrol near Dungannon when we passed a school at kicking out time. A bunch of girls shouted at me to ‘Go home!’ When I said I’d like nothing more – I was exhausted and irritable at the time – one girl exclaimed loudly ‘What? You can’t leave us like this!’. A week later at the end of another 12-hour patrol I got the call that our pick-up helicopter had been re-tasked so we had to tab back to base – a dozen miles. We reached Dungannon hours later in mid-afternoon and as we patrolled up the high street not a single person gave us a second look – there we were in helmets, cam cream, full webbing, assault rifles, the works, and it was like we were invisible. I looked to my right and saw myself reflected in the window of a Wellworths as the people inside were doing the pick’n mix. It was surreal. Then I threw up blood on the window. I didn’t know it at that point but I had pneumonia. Most people were just trying to have a life, and all of us were just ‘in the way’, if that makes any sense.

BS: Where does the UVF fit into that picture?

JT: At that point they weren’t a big thing. We never made a distinction either. As far as we were concerned we weren’t ever going to ask an armed individual if they were in the UVF or PIRA, the rules were if you were caught by us carrying a gun and were endangering life we’d shoot you. What ‘organisation’ you were in was for your family to sort out. For local Tyrone republicans I can’t speak to that, but my guess is they detested them with a passion, and with good reason.

BS: In terms of the economic war, the bombing of commercial and industrial premises was one element. The campaign against security force contractors was distinct, I believe. I think you’re correct when you said that “in a capitalist model there will always be those who see a competitor cutting commercial ties with a customer as an opportunity” – The ETB arguably reduced the pool of “collaborators” (as they would term it) to Henry Bros, who they then attacked mercilessly and frequently. How was the campaign against security contractors perceived by the British Army on the ground, at by the contacts you interviewed when researching the book?

JT: To be honest at my very junior level over there I had no view – and didn’t hear anything either – as to the campaign against contractors. We were very self-contained and ‘cocooned’ really. If we did see/hear anything about it we would have just viewed it as part of the general stuff we were dealing with – we were very tasked orientated; operation to find a bomb, operation to clear a route, operation to find a weapons hide and so on ad infinitum.

On the ‘collaborators’ piece I’d ask the question where does it stop? Building a base is one thing, but what if you sell petrol from your gas station to someone who happens to be an RUC officer, or what if you teach a primary class where eight of the kids have parents in the security forces, are you a collaborator?

About Jonathan Trigg: Historian, writer and broadcaster, Jonathan Trigg has written over a dozen books with Death On The Don nominated in 2014 for the Pushkin Prize for Russian History. Latterly his Through German Eyes series exploring various Second World War campaigns and battles from the German perspective have been a critical and popular success. Inspired by events closer to home Jonathan has now embarked on a project to cover the Troubles. His first book on the subject - Death in the Fields: The IRA and East Tyrone was published by Merrion in Easter 2023.

Jonathan previously served in the 1st Battalion the Royal Anglian Regiment, reaching the rank of Captain, and completing emergency tours of East Tyrone and Bosnia. He left the Army after a final posting as a Military Instructor to the United Arab Emirates.

For further information and to contact Jonathan directly please visit his website 

To be continued . . . 

⏩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.