Death In The Fields 📚 The IRA And East Tyrone

The Fenian Way 🔖 “The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy” - Nietzsche.

An on the ground British Army perspective of the recent conflict in the Six Counties is an invaluable aid in trying to unravel how that conflict ended on the terms which it did.

At a point where the need for propaganda or duplicity is roundly passed Jonathon Trigg’s above title, and his own background, dangled that prospect for those eager to explore it. The results are mixed, and unfinished.

Without question the author sets out his detached stall early by neutralising loaded terms associated with the conflict but nonetheless using them as their familiarity lends continuity to the narrative. In equal measure he credibly explains that the multiple sources he spoke to did represent the principle actors involved and, understandably in some cases, opted for anonymity.

For those on the republican side who eschewed anonymity their own calibre demonstrates the considered level of integrity in which they viewed the author and in turn the probity of the text is enhanced.

It was therefore disappointing to read the early introduction of the informer Sean O’Callaghan as a reference source without the addition of a very strong health warning. Notwithstanding O’Callaghan’s informer activities, he lent himself to being a tabloid propagandist against the Republican Movement as a desperate attempt to remain relevant to whomever was handling and paying him. In fairness, some of his disgraceful assertions were noted as strongly challenged later on in the text but an earlier recognition of this would have served both author and reader much better.

One could argue that the impartiality of the author can only be credibly assessed by the impartiality of the reviewer, because from my own perspective, that impartiality has more potential value than the nth degree accuracy of any information unearthed and presented in the book. To approach the work with a box ticking exercise for republican presuppositions essentially misses the core point of what the book is endeavouring to relate, and what republicans can potentially learn from it. That said there are a couple of essential points that need historical adjustment as they relate to the author’s initial take on the conflict.

Without being facetious there is a wry view of how the British interpret their own history. Given that the British people learn more about Irish history from Netflix as opposed to their schools and universities, invoking our history when addressing their conflict in Ireland requires a more nuanced approach.

Firstly, Edward Carson eventually admitted that himself: Ulster and Ireland were duped as a means to return the Conservatives to power and that perfidious Albion was not confined to Irish republicans, but that both unionism and constitutional nationalism were (are) fair game also when it came to core British interests. Home Rule (The Assembly) and the Boundary Commission (Border poll) were conveniently sacrificed in pursuit of those interests. There is no reason to believe that this perennial policy is about to change. Which begs another question: why did that PIRA leadership believe that it did?

Secondly, when concerning the UDR/RUC it is important to sketch the historical tradition that such bodies have played in the occupation of Ireland to give proper context to their targeting by the IRA. Not only were such groupings, like their forebears in the RIC, the local vanguard protecting British rule, they also enforced that rule when it came to the interests of British landlords and British businessmen. The RIC enabled mass evictions during the famine, and their sister organisation - the Dublin Metropolitan Police - used wanton violence against striking workers during the 1913 Lockout. That’s a psyche that runs deep and must be understood in the pursuit of genuine inquiry into the IRA’s targeting structure.

Since the beginning of the Provisional campaign the British strategy was to portray themselves as honest brokers between two warring factions, ultimately ensuring that if such was the nature of the conflict, by default, such would be the nature of any political settlement reached.

The book gives an account of the early evolution of the IRA in East Tyrone and the pivotal roles played by named individuals who brought influence to bear but whose end results made for very different outcomes. It is a common thread in the text of using the end of the campaign to try and understand its beginning and middle stages. This narrative is also employed to understand the motivations of individual and collective groups of Tyrone volunteers as they fought the war for an objective, whose early deaths deprived the most active of them ever realising.

The obvious danger of this approach is to feed into the many conspiracy theories that thrive in the lightless world of insurgency and counter insurgency and where memories of the dead are widely used to justify current positions that are head-scratchingly difficult to reconcile.

The East Tyrone Brigade had a military strategy to secure interim political objectives using armed tactics as its primary focus. To create liberated zones within their operational area would in turn allow for those military tactics to be finetuned to consolidate political aims already secured. In turn, other operational areas could adopt a similar strategy wherein the liberated zones could be put to best use by training and arming those areas to create such zones in their own combat zones, a domino effect.

How realistic such a strategy was is fair game for debate but in the absence of a leadership alternative the key question remains: what did the British make of this discrepancy between a highly active Brigade area and a leadership refusing or unable to give it strategic direction?

The British were certainly aware of the Brigade’s capabilities and the book goes into insightful details of the more prominent operations, closely linking the calibre of the volunteers with the calibre of the operation. From a slow impetus the British response gravitated toward an intelligence led strategy with deadly force at its terminus.

At the heart of this response was the operation at Loughgall which the author views as the pivotal watershed, not just in the scale of the IRA’s loss on the day, but also at the loss of the military and political acumen of the individual slain volunteers themselves.

It is to the author’s credit, and the books integrity, that he deals candidly, and with experience, in addressing the various theories as to how the SAS knew of the impending attack. This has echoes of Richard O’Rawe’s ‘common sense questioning’ in his book Stakeknife’s Dirty War where Occam’s Razor provides a prudent rule of thumb, both for author and reader alike.

For the IRA, and not just East Tyrone, Loughgall was indeed a watershed, but even in that self-recognition its leadership singularly failed to offer any strategic remedy, military or political. The author views the Brigade’s military response as resorting to one dimensional operations, mortar attacks on military posts, horizontal mortar attacks on military vehicles, hit and run ops, rendering the liberated zone strategy redundant.

The political implications for republicanism should have been explored more (perhaps above the author’s pay grade) but given what was settled for the British must have certainly made the republican leaders they were negotiating with aware that the cutting edge of the IRA was being continuously blunted under their watch. Readers can draw their own conclusions from what the book reveals for them.

There are also clear strains of naivete displayed most pointedly in the realm of security force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries where a Johnny Adair quote is used to dismiss at least its widespread use. Loyalist attacks were rampant and not always random and their net effect on the Brigade and their support base can in no way be dismissed. There is a sense of ‘British military honour’ perhaps, that local forces may well have engaged in such activities (Glennane is mentioned) but not the military element to which the author belonged.

That said it does lend to a realisation that just as all IRA compromised operations were not the works of informers equally, all Loyalist attacks on republican personnel were not the result of collusion. Between the lines, how Loughgall came to pass is not limited to a singular cause. There is a maturity in recognising this but once again readers can draw their own conclusions.

But at its heart is a British military perspective on a very bloody campaign in East Tyrone which draws some very interesting parallels with the views explored in John Crawley’s The Yank. And like that particular work Johnathon Trigg's own professionalism makes his observations that more difficult to dismiss. And that is also another step in the right direction if Powell's Equation is ever to be resolved.

Jonathan Trigg, 2023, Death In The Fields: The IRA And East Tyrone. Merrion Press. ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1785374432.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British.