The Northern Ireland Troubles by Aaron Edwards

Author:Aaron Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Northern Ireland Troubles
ISBN: 9781849088718
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2011-07-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Queen’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, pictured on his retirement in 1965, served as the last Viceroy of India in 1946–47 and Chief of the Defence Staff from 1959 to 1965. Lord Mountbatten was murdered on 27 August 1979, when his boat was blown up by the IRA. (IWM MH 28465)

This posthumous portrait shows Captain Herbert Westmacott MC, who served with the SAS in Northern Ireland. Commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, he was killed on 2 May 1980 by members of the IRA’s infamous ‘M60 gang’ as he led his men in an arrest operation on the Antrim Road. (Courtesy of the Sandhurst Collection)

Although the IRA had by now reorganized, Roy Mason warned that the group was now in possession of more sophisticated weapons and had successfully smuggled in at least one US-made M60 machine gun, which, he said, ‘has probably been used’. Because of what he called ‘their diminishing resources’ Mason believed the IRA’s aim was ‘to find something different and the M60 is a new dimension’. Mason’s comments came after off-duty UDR member, William Gordon, and his ten-year-old daughter Lesley were murdered by the IRA when an under-car booby-trap bomb blew up their family car outside their home in Maghera, County Derry/Londonderry, on 8 February 1978. His wife was waving goodbye with the couple’s baby in her arms when the bomb exploded. The Gordons’ seven-year-old son Richard, who was in the back seat at the time, was blown out of the car and onto the footpath. One eyewitness said that most of the car ended up on the roof of a house 60 yards away. Speaking in the wake of the attack and a few days after the La Mon Hotel atrocity, which claimed the lives of 12 Protestants, the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave expressed the view that ‘the Special Air Service on our side could play a big role here’. Within a year Neave was himself assassinated by the INLA when he was blown up as he drove out of the House of Commons car park.

The IRA successfully assassinated other high-profile targets too. On 27 August 1979 the organization murdered Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, who was taking his pleasure boat out of the harbour at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in the Irish Republic, when the IRA detonated a remote control bomb. Lord Mountbatten’s murder sent shockwaves through the British establishment. Two young boys, aged 14 and 15, one of them Lord Mountbatten’s grandson, were also killed in the explosion. Civilians caught up in such attacks were regarded by the IRA and their apologists as ‘collateral damage’. The murder of 18 soldiers in a co-ordinated attack later that day in Warrenpoint, County Down, demonstrated that the IRA could also execute bigger and more sophisticated operations.

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