Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland by Mark McGovern;

Author:Mark McGovern;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

The Killings of Tommy Donaghy and Malachy Carey

Loyalist killing of Sinn Fein workers as well as elected representatives was even more evident in South Derry. It also involved targeting former IRA prisoners. Just four days after the killing of Patrick Shanaghan, 38-year-old Tommy Donaghy was shot dead by the UFF as he arrived for work at the Portna Eel Fishery, near Kilrea in South Derry. He had joined the IRA in 1971, when just 18, and had been interned, released and returned to the IRA before turning 21. Sometime after that, after he was warned ‘in a roundabout way’ by a soldier during a house raid that ‘the police had him marked down to be killed’, he went ‘on the run’.207 In 1977 he was captured following a shoot-out with a British Army patrol near Slaughtneil. After his arrest he was severely beaten, then taken to Maghera police station. ‘The police there asked the Army to take him back out to the spot he had been caught and shoot him’, says Tommy’s brother, Johnny – ‘when they said they would not do that the police were fighting with each other to get at him. They called police in from other areas too, so even before he went to Castlereagh, they half-slaughtered him in the barracks.’208 He was sentenced to 19 years for possession of weapons, IRA membership and attempting to kill members of the security forces, serving eleven years in the H-blocks before his release in late 1988.209 After prison, Tommy Donaghy returned to the rural family home near Kilrea and his father found him work at the nearby fishery, on the banks of the Bann. Soon after, he and his girlfriend had a child, born just three months before he was killed. They moved in together in Kilrea, ‘because he felt safer living in the midst of the town than driving back and forward in the country’.210 Well recognised as a republican in the South Derry area, Tommy Donaghy also worked for Sinn Fein following his release.

The Donaghy family home was long subject to security force surveillance but, says Johnny Donaghy, in the lead-up to Tommy’s death it was ‘very, very heavy ... genuinely never-ending’.211 This involved raids into the farmyard by heavily armed special police units (DMSUs) and UDR roadblocks placed either side of the house; ‘that went on more or less right up until he was killed’. On one occasion, while out walking his dog, Tommy uncovered British soldiers working on a surveillance camera. ‘They were changing the batteries’, says Johnny, ‘when Tommy came up they held him at gunpoint till a helicopter came out from Kilrea and lifted them away’. On another, a UDR soldier took photos of Tommy Donaghy after stopping him at a checkpoint. There were also death threats. ‘In Castlereagh they said they would “put him in the way” of loyalists’, says Johnny Donaghy, ‘they said the same thing at roadblocks. A lot of people were getting that, so you did not always

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