Rebel Hearts by Kevin Toolis

Author:Kevin Toolis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781250088734
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

4

INFORMERS

A local woman out for an evening walk with her dog found him lying on the verge at the Coach Road junction, about a mile and a half from the village of Newtownhamilton in the IRA ‘bandit country’ of South Armagh. Patrick Flood’s hands were tied behind his back with masking tape and a black garbage bag had been pulled over his head; the bag dripped blood. It was a still July night in 1990, a quiet night for the quiet death of an IRA informer.

The following day the Derry Brigade of the IRA announced that Patrick Gerard Flood had been an IRA Volunteer for five years – a bomb-maker. For the last three years, the IRA said, Flood had also been a police informer who had sabotaged bombs and given the RUC information about IRA operations. When the Brigade leadership found out, they killed him.

Paddy’s body was found less than a mile from the border with the Irish Republic. All land movement in South Armagh was controlled by the IRA – the area is nicknamed the Provisional Republic of Crossmaglen – and Paddy’s final journey had been safe for his killers. The IRA gunmen would have crossed the border on a nearby unmarked road, turned on to the Armagh road for 250 yards, and then stopped at the Coach Road junction where the two-lane Newtownhamilton—Armagh road widens as the carriageway splits. It’s a lovely spot, surrounded by thick hedgerows and green rolling hills. The junction is a handy place to stop for a moment or two if you wanted to rummage around for something on the back seat or dump the dead body you had lying there – which is exactly what the killers did that evening.

The RUC were afraid of South Armagh – it was a bad place for them, and for the British Army, which lost one third of their casualties in its green fields. The discovery of a man’s body at the junction was first reported to the police at 21.07 pm on Thursday, 26 July, but the corpse had to lie all night by the side of the road until the safety of daylight allowed Her Majesty’s Armed Forces to examine the body.

That night, the powerful microwave radio masts atop Newtownhamilton Police Station, RUC HQ in Belfast and the main RUC Strand Road Barracks in Londonderry streamed with police messages, but no one would have been surprised by the news from the border road. A week before, British Army squaddies on foot patrol in the Catholic Bogside district of Derry had stopped people and asked if they were going to be ‘a tout like Paddy’. Flood’s Special Branch handlers, Detective Sergeant L and Detective J, code-named Mark and Phil, had already written him off and were fully engaged in trying to find a replacement.

In Derry the IRA came to the home of Paddy’s father, Seamus Flood, the same evening. ‘The night I did get word a man came to the door. He must have been five foot ten because I am not that tall myself and there is a double step at our front door.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.