My Life in the IRA: by Michael Ryan Padraig Yeates

Author:Michael Ryan, Padraig Yeates [Michael Ryan, Padraig Yeates]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781175187
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Mercier Press, Limited, The
Published: 2018-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

6

The Final Phase,

1959–60

When I arrived back on the Louth–Armagh border in autumn 1959, I set about organising operations for the south Armagh area. Given our limited resources my instructions were to target customs huts, transformers, bridges and so forth, although if the opportunity arose we could do so in combination with attacks on British forces.

I had been appointed to the seven-man Army Council at the 1959 general army convention. Theoretically this provided me with a new level of authority, but Dundalk was a town of personalities permanently at war with each other. The official OC was Billy Stewart, a veteran of the 1940s who had served eight years in Portlaoise Prison, two of them in solitary confinement, and been given thirteen strokes of the cat o’ nine tails. However, as in many places, by the autumn of 1959 the local movement was unable to provide effective back-up service for a column. Billy Stewart did his best but he had few resources, apart from the nebulous one of being a long-standing republican with the myths deriving from that. He was unable to mobilise many republicans in and around the town behind the effort to reopen an effective campaign that autumn and winter because of the aforementioned personality clashes, a general disillusionment with the campaign and a consequent absence of hope in the chances of success.

My main means of transport remained my bike and Mark McLaughlin’s car, a local publican and businessman but also a devoted member of the movement. By this time, those of us the police knew to be active and full-time were at constant risk of arrest anywhere in the South. Internment had ended in April, but after the Meath training camp raid there was an intensification of Special Branch surveillance and the Fianna Fáil government left us in no doubt that, while internment had ended, we could expect no respite from surveillance and arrest. This acted as a deterrent to many members who had been interned and didn’t relish the idea of doing six months simply for refusing to account for their movements.

After two weeks trying to create some semblance of a back-up organisation, I moved to the border. I had two billets on the southern side and one on the north, but none of them were safe. I had the services of two excellent guides, one near Crossmaglen and the other just south of the border, who also billeted me. I now had with me an excellent full-time northern volunteer, Tommy Smith. In the course of the next week I reconnoitred Crossmaglen RUC Barracks and a couple of less important targets, as well as assessing information on a regular combined British Army–RUC patrol that accompanied a post office van as it travelled on the Crossmaglen to Ballsmill road on Friday mornings, just a mile north of the border. Prospects for an ambush of this patrol began to look good.

I was still in the process of hardening up the intelligence on these targets when some high profile and damaging arrests were made.

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