Operation Santa Claus
ON FRIDAY DECEMBER 16TH at 5.40pm Chief Supt J.J. McNally left Don Tidey in an upstairs room at 87 Main Street, Cavan and came to talk to reporters waiting below in the Garda Station. by Tommie Gorman
"Chief Super, how do you feel after the day's work?"
"It was an excellent day's work, saddened unfortunately by the deaths of two very brave young men who set out to play their part and who played their part in trying to arrest those . . . desperadoes . . is the only thing I can describe them as ... "
A very close friend of McNally's listening to the interview as it was broadcast later that night winced on hearing the first syllable of 'desperadoes'. From his years chasing the Provos among the border counties, the Chief has beecome known as a man who uses blunt language. The friend was expecting to hear the phrase 'desperate bastards'.
Interview completed, McNally went back upstairs and at six 0 'clock Tidey was bundled past pressmen into the back of a Ford Granada car reg MZL 667 by four members of the Task Force. In darkness and rain the car shot off, unescorted, out the Dublin road. After 22 days in IRA captivity, Maurice Pratt's boss was on his way home.
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THE SETTING
Calling Ballinamore, population 860 and Leitrim's fourth largest town, "a Provo stronghold" is as informative as labelling Ireland "the island of saints and scholars". Its two best-known citizens were born within a year of one
another, are in business locally and hold important posiitions in well-known organisations. Merchant and publican, Pat Joe Reynolds is Cathaoirleach of the Senate: his father, Patrick, a Cumann na nGaedhea1 TD was shot dead in 1932. 66 year-old publican, John Joe McGirl, who like Reynolds is in business along Main Street, is Vice President of Proviisional Sinn Fein.
Ballinamore is the capital of South Leitrim, the only county in the country where the population continues to decline. In 1951,41,209 people lived in Leitrim, the 1971 i1gure was 28360: for 1981, 27 ,609. The town is ringed by drumlins. The land is desperately poor, the ground a hezyy daub with effective soil depth confined to three inches. The plasticine-like earth has positive peculiarities: some species of spruce trees grow more quickly in parts of Leitrim than anywhere else in the western world. From the Sliabh an Iarainn hills located north-west of Ballin am ore the view is one of dense young forests, thick hedges and ditches and the largest network of skinny roads per square mile in rural Ireland, leading to twenty to thirty acre small holdings, some occupied, more long since deserted.
In much of Leitrim afforestation is a dirty word. Many zssociate the planting of trees with the uprooting of people. ',Yith the land's limited potential for agricultural usage, the ':evelopment of a timber-related industry should be a relaatively easy proposition. But the marketing of the idea, through the 50s, 60s and 70s went disastrously wrong. Many sold their lands cheaply in the hope that trees might provide employment for a future generation, and then emiigrated. The people left, the planting took place but the jobs never came.
Three out of every five people living in Leitrim are covered by medical cards. The county has Ireland's lowest female/male ratio (878 per 1,000) and in every rural area elderly people live alone in the wooden buildings officially classed "demountable dwellings", During the December searches Gardai checked the house of an old woman, living alone. She was delighted they called: she hadn't seen a soul for a week.
Much more so than the Provos, some Ballinamore groups are extremely active. The traders are campaigning about money flowing away from them through cross-border shopping. The community council asks why have townsspeople still got a torturous manual telephone system desspite a commitment on paper from a Government Minister that direct dial service would be installed and working by mid-1983.
Those old enough in South Leitrim remember evictions, some of the last in the country, near the end of the last century. The younger ones saw McCartin brothers industries close in disgrace three years ago when failure to pay PRSI and VAT was a grevious sin. Nowadays it's practiced by companies up and down the country, at least one semiistate organisation included.
Still suffering from emigration, unheeded by successive administrations, Leitrim people from Ballinamore to Drummkeerin often have a distrust of authority and memories to support it. The isolated countryside north of Ballinamore through Cromlin, Derrada, Aughnasheelin and up to the Cullcagh mountains has been altered little by prosperity since the days when men on the run were "the boys" or "the lads", people to be feared if not respected. And nobody knows Leitrim history and geography better than the Provos.
The most celebrated kidnapping in Ireland during the 70s was that of Tiede Herrema by Eddie Gallagher and Marian Coyle. The initial act and escape were perfectly executed but the hide-out chosen, in the middle of a housing estate at Monasterevan Co Kildare, left the kiddnappers no chance of escape when they were located by Gardai. Could the same be said of Derrada, set in the Irish version of a jungle, close to the Cullcagh mountains and its caves, and beyond that a badly-patrolled border and another state?
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THE ESCAPE
In the back-room of Ballinamore's best-known public house a small group of women sat around. Business was slow. During the two hours since opening time only a trickle of customers had dodged under the hand-painted
"SF Mac Feargail" sign over the bar door. The boss was missing. In fact John Joe McGirl had been lifted. This was Friday, December 16.
According to McGirl the Gardai had arrived at his premises at lOam. Task Force men were at the front and rear. A warrant was asked for and produced. Then the house was searched. "They opened the post and they read letters. They also read through the book I have for County Council business. When challenged about reading the letters they said they had powers to do what they liked and they would do so," McGirl claims.
At II o'clock, after being given time to collect some clothes, Me Girl was brought through Killeshandra and Cavan, to Castleblaney Garda Station.
Three others were arrested in the Ballinamore area around the same time. Martin Donnelly, a native of Brocckagh (formerly Mountjoy), Co Tyrone, was one. He served time in Long Kesh for possession of explosives material and is married to McGirl's daughter, Aine.
Denis Downing, a native of Trillick on the Fermanagh/ Tyrone border, was also no stranger to arrest procedure. He served a sentence in Portlaoise after a time device was discovered at his Ballinamore residence. The third, Pat Rehill, is also a former Portlaoise inmate, resulting from conviction of a membership charge.
The men say they were conscious of increased Garda surveillance in the area prior to their arrest.
Martin Donnelly:
"The dogs at home were a lot more restless than normal.
You could hear the cars pulling up during the night." John Joe Me Girl:
"There was no doubt they were here, there and everyywhere, mostly in marked cars. I was searched a few times."
(One of McGirl's terms in jail, during the 60s came after ammunition was discovered in the hearse he was driving at Drumsna, between Leitrim and Roscommon. He is still an undertaker as well as a publican. During the opening weeks of December the hearse was in use but McGirl's son did most of the-driving.)
In the first half of December a priest returned to his parish in North Leitrim, following 'I few days holidays, to find his housekeeper more perturbed than usual. As he caught up with happenings in the area during his absence, the housekeeper blurted out: "And Father, while you were away we were raided." "Raided?" said he. "Yes, Father, the guards were here and when they searched upstairs they even asked for the key to the press you had locked before leaving. "
Operation Santa Claus was launched on Tuesday, December 13. Garda headquarters had been receiving rumblings from Chief Supt McNally in the Cavan/Monaghan district, of strange goings-on around Ballinamore , Gardai were attemppting to monitor the activities of some known Republican sympathisers in the area. The presence of at least one outtsider, a man called McKiernan, had made them suspect something unusual was afoot.
One of the possibilities was that the Provisionals had a winter camp in the area. They had some there in the past. But the Ballinamore peculiarities were taking place at a time when half the country was wondering where were Don TidE"Y and Dominic McGlinchey. Headquarters decided McNally's track record gave enough faith to gamble: Operation Santa Claus was on.
The Gardai insist they had no precise information that ncey was being held in Leitrim. Three weeks after the shoot-out in Derrada the IRA was still wondering who or what precisely led the Gardai there.)
J.J. McNally had overall command of the search teams.
The men were divided into ten units, named Rudolph 1-10, each consisting of the leader, an Inspector, two sergeants, a Garda who had either served or was serving in the area, two uniformed Gardai experienced in border-area searches, five (in some cases six or seven) detectives and nine/ten recruits, vith an Army member for each of the recruits.
The search area was to the North and West of Ballinaamore. The terrain was divided out among the 10 Rudolph units: the sections were bounded by roads on all sides. The intention was that, whenever the conditions allowed it, the men would move in a line through the countryside with the person on each end having some form of radio equippment. Ballinamore Garda Station, radio headquarters, was now 'Echo Base'.
Despite the weather and the terrain for some, at least, the work was a welcome change. They had just come from su pervising the disposal of diseased turkeys in Co Monaghan.
By the Friday unit Rudolph 5 had completed its check of the territory it had been assigned to and it was now working through a second area, four miles north -west of Ballinarnore . This new location was about one mile from a quaint little stone building, Derrada Post Office.
One of the few occupied buildings close to where Rudolph 5 was working was Bernie Prior's joinery workkshop. Bernie has a brother, Hugh. One of the lads who hangs around the workshop is 19 year-old Joe McGirl, a nephew of John Joe's and a brother of Francie who was acquitted on charges related to the blowing up of Lord Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, at Mullaghmore, Co Sligo.
On the morning of Friday 16, around 11 o'clock, a young man was seen running from fields within the Rudolph 5 search area. Around lunchtime, Hugh Prior, driving his own light blue Cortina car, was arrested near the same search area. It was about that time too that Joe McGirl, who alleged he was going to town for a haircut, was also a rrested nearby.
A little more than a mile from Derrada Post Office, one hundred and fifty yards up a sloping field from the tar road, there's a wood, 100 by 150 yards, on a hillside. Its trees are young, from ground level to three and four feet up they are almost choked in brambles, briars and underrgrowth. Looking up from the road, one can see nothing past the first line of trees. Even on the edge of the wood, looking in, the place seems like a den se, uninha bi ta ble tangle of tree and thorn. Within it Don Tidey was caged for more than 20 days.
Where he was held was a hide-out, not a dug-out. Those who constructed it took advantage of a ridge in the sloping ground and stretched polythene along the moist surface of the wood, up two feet along some trees and over then to form a roof. Resembling a gypsy's tent, it ran 15 feet long, 4 feet wide and 4/5 feet high. The polythene was expertly covered over in greenery, sticks and brambles so that from a distance of six yards and beyond, it was impossible to see. It's believed Tidey was held there continuously from soon after his abduction at Rathfarnham on November 24.
Around two o'clock some members of Rudolph 5 unit moved to search Derrada wood where the hide-out was located. Among them were Garda recruit, Gary Sheehan and Private Paddy Kelly. Three others, two Gardai and a soldier, approaching from a different direction, thought they saw something and were about to withdraw for reinnforcements. All this was unknown to Sheehan who by now had spotted a figure in front of him, dressed in Army-type clothing. He (Sheehan) passed some comment but there was no response. He then turned around to Private Kelly and was in the process of telling how some Army person in front wasn't talking to him. Those were Sheehan's last words; within seconds he and Kelly were fatally wounded. The young Garda had injuries to the face and side of the head; Private Kelly had multiple body wounds.
Within seconds of opening fire, Don Tidey's kidnappers threw a stun grenade in the direction of the searchers in the woods closest to them. (Gardai were to say later that evening that at least one of the two deaths was caused by shrapnel from a hand grenade. This was untrue.)
With their nearest adversaries reeling from the effects of the stun grenade, the IRA men concentrated on escaping. They took two Gardai and a soldier near them captive and ordered them to run ahead of them towards the top of the wood. Along the way they captured another Garda. As the gang, dressed like soldiers, emerged from the wood, they overpowered two members of the Army who earlier had been given the task of providing cover for the searchers inside. Having taken some of the weapons belonging to their hostages, the gang ran off.
They weren't the only escapees, for back in Derrada wood Don Tidey was making his own break towards freeedom. After the first burst of gunfire he had got away from , is captors and now, in brown and green paramilitary-style gear, he was running through the thicket like a hare, undaunted by the conditions. But as he emerged from the trees he came to an abrupt stop. An Army private, and then two Garda recruits, Smith and O'Connor, halted him 2 his tracks. A slightly physical exchange followed: the trio was not going to be duped by this bearded man, caught running from the scene of a gun-battle who was insisting he was innocent Don Tidey. They stripped him of his shoes and brought him down the field to the tar road.
The minimum of conversation between Tidey and some other security force members on the road to connfirm identities. No sooner had this been done when a blue Opel car came speeding behind them along the road. In it were the IRA men, one or two in the front, one in the rear and two more in the boot spraying bullets as they rushed past. (The car had been commandeered at McTeague's house, near where the gang had escaped from Derrada wood.) Gardai returned fire and in the exchanges a Detecctive Garda Kelleher was injured .
Prior to this gun-battle a Garda patrol car had been left at a junction on the road below Derrada wood. The Garda assigned to it now saw gunmen in the approaching Opel and he reacted quickly to block their intended getaway route. He let the patrol-car roll across the roadway, cutting off the exit point. "The Provos are shooting from a blue Opel car", the word went over the Garda radios. Fortune was about to favour the Provos. It was at this time that Hugh Prior, who had been arrested in his own light blue Cortina car, was brought by Gardai oblivious to what was going on there, towards the road below Derrada. Gardai and troops were exchanging fire with a gang in a blue Opel car. The word was still going out over some Garda radios:
"The Provos are shooting from a blue Opel car."
The response was a hail of bullets in the direction of Prior's light blue Cortina, one of which nicked him. The Gardai alongside him immediately shouted:
"Don't fire; there are Gardai and a prisoner in this car." Firing on both vehicles ceased. The Provos were no longer under attack. Had Hugh Prior's car not come along it is unlikely that they could have got away so easily.
Their way blocked by a patrol car, they abandoned the blue Opel and ran towards the northern hills. They made their retreat in an orderly fashion, moving very quickly, one man covering the others by continuously spraying bullets in his wake.
The Provos' good fortune was to continue. Unit Rudolph 5, the men they had confronted, was working quite a disstance from the other teams. More importantly there was to be a delay in reinforcements arriving because the transport vehicles weren't readily available. The discovery of Don Tidey in Derrada had taken place during lunchtime of Operation Santa Claus: many of the transport vehicles had gone back to Ballinamore at the time to collect food for the hungry search parties.
Almost two hours elapsed before proper reinforcements were ready to go hunting the gunmen. Behind them the Provos had left the makings of a twenty years jail sentence; in front of them stood the sanctuary of Leitrim's forests and hills, now on the threshold of nightfall.
Don Tidey was brought to Ballyconnell Garda Station, not Ballinamore, and from there to Cavan. Shortly after four 0 'clock, a local GP; Dr McDwyer, examined him there. The doctor found unusually large amounts of dirt caked around Mr Tidey's eyes and traces of matter running from his ears. The conditions were consistent with those of someeone who had his ears stuffed and was wearing a blindfold for a considerable period.
As the Tidey family in Dublin were talking on the teleephone to their father in Cavan Garda Station, Hugh Prior, was led, handcuffed and under armed guard, into Cavan District Hospital. Others receiving treatment there included more than half a dozen Garda recruits, brought from the Ballinamore area, suffering from shock.
In the hide-out at Derrada wood Gardai found large quantities of tinned foods and beer as well as cooking utensils, but no used food containers. In follow-up searches of the fields where the Provos had made off they disscovered a transistor radio, tuned to pick up "Echo Basel Rudolph" conversations.
(On the Saturday night, the Taoiseach, Dr FitzGerald, was asked during a television programme whether Garda reecruit Sheehan or Private Kelly had been shot by their collleagues. He promptly dismissed the suggestion. Gardai and Army refute the theory, too. They say both men were murrdered by the IRA with one and possibly a second gun innvolved. Such rumours, later proven false, were present following the murders of Detective Garda John Morley and Garda Henry Byrne at Shannon Cross, Co Roscommon. But the Irish capacity for suspicion is fuelled when there is strict secrecy about the forensic details of a shooting, three weeks old. The RUC made known similar details about the Darkley murders within 24 hours; indeed there were criticisms when it took the North's police force 48 hours to release forensic information about the shooting of an elderly woman at Pomeroy Post Office.)
On Sunday, December 18, John Joe McGirl, Pat Rehill, Martin Donnelly, Denis Downing, Joe McGirl and Hugh Prior were all released from Garda custody.
Gardai believe one of the Utley kidnappers escaped from their cordon on the Friday night of the gun-battle and that another three got away, in the Drumshanbo direction, on the Sunday night.
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THE SEARCH
Echo base, echo base to Rudolph one ...
There's grub wanted here for twenty hungry men ...
Echo base, echo base to Rudolph two ...
Three or four people have been spotted near a hayshed west of our position ...
We have that checked out ...
Echo base, echo base to Rudolph four ...
There S an area of grass here, crushed down and a man could have been lying on it . . .
Echo base, echo base to Rudolph one ... That grub is on the way out ...
Sound.
Echo base, echo base to Rudolph two ... We've had that checked out. It s three of our own lads and an Army man ...
While Garda radio signals buzzed in the surrounding hills, Ballinamore's Main Street was like that of a typical Irish country town during Christmas week. A large crib had been erected outside the local Catholic church. Fresh turkeys, heads hanging down, were being sold out of the backs of vans. The only shop not visibly affected by the Christmas season was Martin's Church Suppliers where the green vestments, altar crosses and statues in the front window were devoid of tinsel or glitter. The hotels hadn't been as busy since the summer's ration of foreign anglers. In one, hacks were feeling at home, munching sandwiches and pints before the blazing fire of the TV lounge. Others in a less salubrious establishment up the street were growing used to the grey towels, drying on radiators along the dank corriidors.
Mobilisation between 8 and 9am at the top of the town was a sight to be seen. Between the one-storey Garda station and St Felim's school hundreds of men poured through. The Army, under Lt Col Patrick Dixon, and later Lt Col Jack Donaghue, had its makeshift headquarters in what became known as "the green room" immediately innside the school's front door. The Gardai were set up in a classroom further down where Chief Supt McNally, Supt Tom Curran, Supt Patrick Jordan, Det Inspector Colm Browne, Insp Pat Mullarkey, and other officers held connferences each day.
One could pick out the Task Force members pulling up to report for duty by the cars they drove. Asconas, Carinas, Sentras, the classy, middle of the market range. All of the men had Belgian-made UZI sub-machine guns, more often than not, on view. The weapons, most suited to shorttrange combat, rise and veer right when firing and can go through some hundreds of rounds per minute. Task Force men carry six magazines, each of which holds thirty rounds.
The Army's Ranger corps were a much more elusive lot.
Unlike the ordinary soldiers who carry Gustav sub-machine guns or FN rifles, Rangers are equipped with the HK subbmachine gun range as used by the SAS during the Iranian Embassy siege in London. There's a hesitancy among Army spokespersons to say anything about the special nighttsights and French-manufactured night surveillance equippment the Rangers had in South Leitrim. The daily briefings where they got psyched up were held in the strictest seccrecy and, faces blackened, they were gone out on duty with the minimum of fuss.
According to an official handbook, one of the roles of the Defence forces is "to aid the civil power (meaning, in practice, to assist when requested, the Garda Siochana who have the primary responsibility for the maintenance or resstoration of the public peace and for internal security)."
The discovery of the IRA's Ballinamore hide-out and the searches afterwards were a unique landmark in Garda/ Army cooperation.
At times it was a flimsy alliance. On Tuesday morning December 20 a local Garda Superintendent was asked had any guns been found during the search of recent days.
"We have found no guns."
Shortly afterwards an Army spokesman confirmed that a soldier's rifle, missing since the Derrada wood incidents on the previous. Friday had been found the previous day.
It wasn't until the following day, Wednesday, that the Garda Press Officer, Supt Noel Anderson, confirmed that as well as locating the soldier's rifle on the Monday, searrchers had also found a sub-machine gun and a blood-stained jacket, presumably belonging to the kidnappers.
Communications was sometimes a problem in the search areas, too. On the afternoon of Thursday December 20 a television crew got approval through the Garda Press Officer to film the search operation in the Cromlin area and a marked Garda patrol car was provided to accompany it. Once out the road though, official approval meant nothing: an irate Garda Sergeant, usually based at the training centre, ordered the cameraman away from the area as he artempted to begin work. Two days before the same sergeant had mistakenly allowed a camera-crew through a :'::O'CktJoint. thinking the Ford Granada car full of detecc~5.
On Sunday afternoon, December 18, Chief Supt McNally emerged from one of his conferences and thought aloud:
"The reekers are up there somewhere but how do r get them out?"
Despite the public utterances, many Garda and Army officers were privately expressing the view after the first week-end of searching that the gang had gone. On the afterrnoon of Monday 19, morale rocketted again. Reports were coming in that two men, and maybe a third, had been spottted crawling through bushes towards a wooded area, little more than a mile from Derrada. Alerts like this were a regular feature - there had been reports of shots fired near Aughnasheelin village on the Saturday afternoon - but all of them up to now had proved false. Now though the inforrmation hardened: the man, a detective had definitely spottted two men, from a distance of two hundred yards, crawlling towards Ardmoneen woods.
As happened the previous Friday night, when the roads around Derrada were blocked off with checkpoints, visions surfaced of hundreds of men surrounding a band of weary gunmen in a small area. All that was lacking in the scenario was a loud hailer piercing the darkness with "This is the police, we've got ye surrounded, give yerselves up."
The reality was so, so different. Ardmoneen woods cover some thousands of acres. Darkness was falling and the first priority was to properly seal off roads leading to the area. There was always the chance that the sighting, if genuine, could be a diversionary tactic and so cordons elsewhere had to be maintained. During the night Rangers took up positions in some part of the massive woods and held them until morning. Search parties then began meticulously combing through them, sometimes having to descend on hands and knees to make their way through the young trees, surrounded by briars. The checking of the section of Ardmoneen closest to the alleged sighting was over by middafternoon Tuesday. Subsequent searches of adjoining wooddlands were carried out on the Wednesday, but yielded nothing.
Some of the patrons of the Army's "green room" were expecting a negative result.
By that evening of December 21 the search operation around Ballinamore was a dead duck.
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THE COCK-UP
Bar-counter generals all over Ireland were telling themselves the day after Tidey was released that the Gardai had cocked it up. They should have saved their criticisms for a few days later.
On Tuesday night, December 20, an IRA gang was stopped at a Garda checkpoint near Ballycroy, West Mayo. The men produced guns and tied up the sergeant and two Gardai but didn't strip them naked. They then made off. The next evening armed detectives, acting on information, went to Claremorris in the south of the county. The vast majority of them usually worked in the Ballina/Castlebar direction. They did not inform the Superintendent in Clareemorris what work they proposed doing in his area: they did not request roadblocks to be set up in and around the place where they suspected armed fugitives were sheltering.
The detectives, between nine and a dozen men, moved to surround a house one mile from Claremorris, on an isolated link road between Knock and Kiltimagh routes.
Three cars were to approach the bungalow, two from the left, the other from the right. One car got delayed. As the Garda party approached three men ran from the house, into a dark, open field, half the size of Croke Park. Because neither their lives nor the property of the state were in danger, the detectives didn't feel at liberty to shoot at the mer" though one warning round was let off in the air. Neither did they see fit to run after them.
When those in charge at Claremorris Garda Station were alerted to what had taken place, roadblocks were set up to cover a triangular area of some 500 acres. The next morning searches of the fields were carried out but these drew a blank. It seems all three of the IRA men had been able to cross one mile of countryside, avoiding roads, during a fourteen hours period of darkness.
(IRA sources deny the Ballycroy incident was a diverrsionary tactic to switch attention from Leitrim. The gang, it's said, was en route to a job planned for elsewhere. Some of its members from the North, the others from the Repubblic. There is some disquiet about the approach of the gang, using a silver Mercedes owned by a Charlestown businesssman and driven by his wife. Hardly the inconspicuous vehicle of your average Co Mayo resident.)
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THE FALL-OUT
Deputy Woods, in his scathing attack on Minister Noonan and Commissioner Wren, bluntly claimed: "They have made a mess of things." - from the Sunday Independent January 1 1984
In the first edition of the New Year, the Sunday Indepenndent slapped together a lead story about criticism of the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commissioner by the Fianna Fail spokesman for Justice, Michael Woods. The political fall-out had begun. The shooting dead of a soldier and a Garda recruit in Derrada wood marked a watershed in Irish history .
But the Provos are the people who most want to leave the events in South Leitrim behind them as soon as possible. The IRA is neither willing or able at present to extend and sustain in the Republic its Northern policy of armed connfrontation of the security forces.
In any debate about the freeing of Don Tidey, and its implications, the following points may merit consideration:
There is .no more difficult terrain in the country than the twenty-five square miles around Ballinamore where the search operations took place. The IRA knew this. Even if the Gardai had information that the kidnappers were shelltering in the South Leitrim area, it was as a result of pure good fortune as well as methodical searching that Tidey was found.
As the operation continued there was a notable change in manning techniques at checkpoints. During the first days motorists stopped were asked to produce identificaation and on doing so usually waved on. In many instances then, the checkpoint party of Garda/Army members were grouped together, all plainly visible. As the search wore on, checkpoint security became tighter. Motorists, after produucing identification, were usually asked to open the boot and thorough searches of vehicles increased. The strategy, similar 10 that of the RUC and British Army was seen more frequently, with some armed Gardai and soldiers crouching out of sight, keeping their guns ready for use.
(At the Claremorris roadblocks, the lax approach was back in fashion.)
Soldiers and Gardai worked side by side in South Leittrim. All Garda members are entitled to overtime; soldiers are not. Many of the Army contingent had witnessed war situations in the Lebanon. The discipline structure of the Army was always obvious. Physical fitness among officers and troops was also apparent.
One of the reasons volunteers join the IRA or the INLA is because they consider it necessary to sh oot an d kill. Members take a conscious decision to use force if and when they think it necessary to do so. Their activities directly lead them into confrontation situations.
The Gardai tied up by an armed gang in Ballycroy were more used to issuing summonses for traffic offences and checking on pubs at closing time than equipped to tackle the IRA. The two Gardai stripped naked and bundled into the back of a car outside Sligo by a gang of armed men four months ago had been on a routine patrol, trying to check a series of break-ins at old people's homes.
It is unrealistic to think that the average Garda from Belmullet to Enniscorthy could, irrespective of any new training programmes, be instantly willing to shoot when confronted, yet maintain the present level of community / Garda relations.
The Provisionals kidnapped Don Tidey to extort a £5 million sterling ransom. Conducting their business of shooting and bombing costs money: top quality black market weaponry is hard come by: for every successful operation there are countless dummy runs.
Propaganda victories are an important element of the conflict in the North and for years the Provos have been cherishing the prospect of shooting a British army heliicopter or plane from the sky. Now, as in the past, they are in the market for heat-seeking surface to air missiles.
They regard the Tidey episode as one which started efficiently and then graduated to disaster. It has not turned them against kidnapping as a method of fund-raising but certain sections believe the chances of getting £5 million sterling out of the Galen-Weston organisation diminished as the length of Tidey's captivity increased. Kidnapping strategy is being re-examined and there's a suggestion that in future time limits and ultimatums should be immposed.
On Thursday, January 5, Commissioner Laurence Wren met the country's senior Garda officers in Dublin to discuss security matters. Included among them was Chief Supt J.J. McNally of the Cavan/Monaghan district. A widower and father of two sons and.a.daughter , McNally has just one interest in his life outside of his family and work - fishing. In Cavan, where he has lived for the past twenty years, he is known as the man who halted the pollution of Lough Sheelin. Like any true angler he spends a lot of time thinkking a bou t the ones that got a way.
For the record, Provo sources deny any Maze escapees were involved in any stage of the kidnapping or holding of Don Tidey. They also say the gang's efficiency in getting out of the search area can be gauged from the fact that no diversions were needed to draw security forces elsewhere.
And a last word, Gardai want to interview four men in particular, a McFarlane, McAlister, McDonnell and McKiernan. •