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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
2 8 April 2017
OBIT(CH)UARY
T
HE PROVISIONAL IRA killed 1,778 people, of
whom 642 were civilians, 456 British military,
273 Royal Ulster Constabulary, five English
police, seven Irish police, 182 members of the
Ulster Defence Regiment and Royal Irish Regi
-
ment and 23 prison officers. They killed 162 IRA members
and other republican paramilitaries - many of them
informers - and 28 loyalist paramilitaries. 292 IRA mem-
bers also died in the Troubles, of whom nine died on
hunger strike.
From 1971 Martin McGuinness is believed by many to
have served as leader of the Provisional IRA in Derry,
though he himself testified that he was merely second
in command. McGuinness was made head of the Provi
-
sionals’ Northern Command in 1976 and later Chief of
Staff of the entire organisation from 1978-82. In around
1985 he was again serving as head of the Northern
Command.
In the early 1970s McGuinness was involved in the tar-
geted bombing of Derry’s commercial heart, leaving it
looking as though it had been “bombed from the air”.
In 1971, the Provisional IRA began its armed campaign
against the British Army, 29 of whose soldiers were
killed in Derry in 1971 and 1972.
On January 27, 1972, three days before Bloody Sunday,
a routine police patrol on the fringes of ‘Free Derry’ was
ambushed by Provisional gunmen with automatic weap-
ons. Sergeant Peter Gilgunn, a 28-year-old Catholic, and
his Protestant colleague, Constable David Montgomery,
20, died as 17 bullets ricocheted through their car.
These were the first local officers to be killed after Mr
McGuinness took over the Derry Brigade.
In 1972, bombers arrived to blow up a hotel in Derry’s
Creggan where a Catholic wedding reception was being
held. When 17-year-old Alphonsus Patten, best man to
his brother, tried to intervene, he was shot in the face at
point-blank range and badly wounded.
That incident drew a furious response from the Official
IRA, which accused Mr McGuinness's Provisionals of
"callous cowardice".
In 1971 three young Catholic women were tarred and
feathered before jeering crowds in the space of a few
days in Derry. Their crime was going out with British sol-
diers. Even though the Derry Brigade controlled the
Catholic areas of Londonderry, it made no attempt to
prevent the mob's actions.
Patrick Duffy, a 37 year old father of seven, was shot
dead as an informer and his body ‘disappeared’ in a
County Donegal bog in August 1973 when McGuinness
was the local IRA commander, Outrage on the part of
neighbours and even fellow IRA members forced McGuin-
ness to arrange the return of his lime-covered corpse.
Blessed are the
peacemakers
Martin McGuinness
1950 - 2017
April 2017 2 9
Caroline Moreland, was a 34 year old single mother of
three from West Belfast who had betrayed an arms dump
containing it seems just a single IRA rifle. The IRA dis-
covered her treachery in the summer of 1994 as the first
ceasefire of the peace process neared. Her fate was
debated at a meeting in July of the IRA’s seven man (no
women) Army Council whose chairman at the time was
Martin McGuinness.
There was no disagreement about her fate. She would
die for her moment of weakness because to let her go
would send the wrong message to an IRA grassroots
already uneasy about the talk of ceasefires and
sellouts.
The real debate was about what to do with her body
afterwards. Most wanted to do what the IRA mostly
always did, which was to leave it in a public place as a
warning to others. But, apparently, McGuinness argued
that she should be ‘disappeared’, her remains hidden in
a secret grave so no-one, not least those in government
and the media sceptical about the IRA’s peaceful bona
fides, would know that she had been killed. Her violent
death helped settle grassroots IRA nerves and was a nec-
essary sacrifice to keep the rank and file on board for the
larger peace process enterprise further down the road.
In 1979 Martin McGuinness gave the orders to kill Lord
Louis Mountbatten and the Warrenpoint ambush the
same day when a first bomb blew up a British Army
convoy and the second targeted the reinforcements sent
to deal with the incident. IRA volunteers hidden in nearby
woodland also allegedly fired on the troops.
Patsy Gillespie was a 42-year-old cleaner at an Army
barracks in Derry.
The IRA took his wife Kathleen and their daughter Jen
-
nifer hostage, and bundled him away separately. ‘[He]
said: “Everything will be all right, don’t worry”, Kathleen
recalled later. ‘I think I knew then that he wasn’t coming
back.’
He was forced to drive a van packed with explosives
to a military checkpoint where it exploded, killing
Gillespie and five soldiers. The attack, dubbed ‘a human
bomb’, was approved by McGuinness in his capacity as
IRA Northern commander and was the first of several
such attacks.
Frank Hegarty was an Army informer who had told the
security forces about an IRA arms dump of Libyan weap
-
ons on the border and had to flee to England when the
Garda raided it. McGuinness visited Hegarty’s widowed
mother and talked on the phone to the frightened and
homesick 45-year-old, assuring him he was not under
suspicion from the IRA and promising him he would be
safe if he returned. According to one account McGuin-
ness, then IRA Northern Commander, promised
Hegarty’s mother ‘on bended knee’ that her son would
be safe to return to Ireland. In 1986 Hegarty was per-
suaded to return to Derry by his mother who had in turn
been assured he’d be safe by McGuinness. Within hours
of his return his bullet-riddled body was found near Cas-
tlederg in Co Tyrone. His mother had been guilelessly
implicated in his murder.
James and Ellen Sefton were murdered when a booby
trap bomb exploded under their car in North Belfast in
June 1990. James Sefton had quit the RUC Reserve four
years earlier after an IRA mortar bomb attack on a police
station in West Belfast had killed a colleague and injured
him. He was living quietly in retirement with his wife
when their lives were taken. James had long ceased to
be part of the Crown forces and his wife’s only crime was
to married to an ex-cop. The attack was approved by
McGuinness as Northern Commander of the IRA.
As a key member of the seven-man Army Council — on
which he remained for the rest of his life — McGuinness
would have authorised the Brighton bombing during the
Tory conference on October 12, 1984, in which five
people died and Norman Tebbit’s wife Margaret was left
paralysed.
McGuinness was in overall command of the IRA Army
Council when he authorised the sectarian Remembrance
Day bomb in Enniskillen in 1987 that killed 11 and injured
more than 60.
McGuinness maintained that while he was a member
in the early 1970s he quit the organisation in 1974.
Martin McGuinness lied repeatedly about his life in
the IRA.
for they shall be called
the children of God
Matthew 5:9
