Loughgall 1987 The Ambush the SAS Won’t Talk About
Collins would later set down his account of these years in Killing Rage, published by Granter Books in 1997. The book described in pros that Resist sentimentality throughout the mechanics of IR intelligence work in South Armar and across the border areas. the targeting, the surveillance, the authorizations, the faces of the men he helped to direct.
He wasn’t at Lof Gaul. That distinction matters and will be maintained throughout this account. His knowledge of the eight men who died there and his later understanding of what their deaths proved about British capability gave him an analytical clarity about the ambush that few people on either side ever achieved.
He survived the ceasefire. He gave evidence in court against former comrades. He was bludgeoned and stabbed to death on a country lane outside Nuri in January 1999. This is the story he never got to hear told correctly. The East Tyrone Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army wasn’t by the mid 1980s an improvised collection of rural gunmen operating on instinct and available weaponry.
It was the most operationally effective IRA unit in the province. It had a coherent doctrine and it had been executing that doctrine with consistent success for 2 years before Laul. The doctrine was Jim Liners. Liner was born on the Tali estate in Monahan town on the 13th of April 1956. One of 12 children and had joined the IRA in the early 1970s.
He spent 5 years in the maze prison after being badly injured in a premature bomb explosion in December 1973 and used the time by multiple accounts to study Mao Zidong seriously. After his release in 1979, he was elected as a Shinfane counselor for Monahan Urban District Council, a post he held when he died.
The RU, who had interrogated him many times and charged him with nothing that stuck, knew him by the nickname the executioner. His theory was structural. Destroy isolated rural police stations, prevent the authorities from rebuilding them by targeting contractors, and expand the territory the British couldn’t patrol without risk. create liberated zones beginning in East Tyrone and gradually extend them.
Jim Liner believed he was applying lessons from a successful anti-colonial guerilla campaign to a new theater. IRA Northern Command approved a scaledown version of his plan. What remained was still ambitious. From 1985 onward, journalist Kevin Tulis would later write, “The East Tyrone Brigade led a 5-year campaign that left 33 security facilities destroyed and nearly 100 seriously damaged.
” Patrick Joseph Kelly, born March 19th, 1957, brigade commander from 1985, translated Liner’s strategic theory into operational practice. Kelly was the man who planned the attacks, assembled the units, and led them. Alongside McCernie, who had escaped from the maze in September 1983 in the famous mass breakout, and the wider East Tyrone network, he ran an organization that Mark Urban would later describe in Big Boy’s Rules as the producing unit for the IRA’s most dramatic operations in the mid 1980s.
Declassified documents from the National Archives of Ireland released in 2017 confirmed the scale of what the East Tyrone Brigade had built. The weapons recovered from the eight dead at Lo Gaul were linked by ballistic testing to 40 to 50 killings, including every security force fatality in counties for Mana and Tyrone in 1987 before the attack.
The Ruger Security 6 revolver found on the Loall site had been taken from the body of reserve constable William Clemens at Baly Gory on the night he was killed 18 months earlier. These men weren’t carrying unrelated hardware. They were carrying the accumulated forensic record of their unit’s entire recent campaign.
The attack on Baligoli came first. On Saturday the 7th of December 1985 at 1855. Patrick Kelly led two active service units to the RU barracks in Baligoli County Terrone. An armed assault unit and a bomb unit. As the officers on duty prepared for the shift change, two gunmen stepped out of concealed positions at the entrance and shot both guards at close range.
Reserve Constable William Clemens, aged 52, and Constable George Gilland, aged 34. Both died at the entrance to their own station. The building was rad with automatic fire, the bomb placed inside, and upon detonation, the base was destroyed. Three officers who had run out the rear survived. Constable Clement’s revolver was taken from his body before the unit withdrew.
8 months later came the Birches. On the 11th of August 1986, East Tyrone struck the RU base at the Birches near Porterown County Armar. The station was unmanned. The unit first rad it with automatic gunfire. Then Declan Arthurs, a volunteer from Galbali County, Tyrone, who had learned to operate construction machinery on his family’s farm, drove a stolen JCB backho loader through the perimeter fence.
In the bucket, a 200lb bomb wired to a fuse. The blast destroyed most of the base and damaged nearby buildings. Three civilians were slightly injured. The unit escaped before the roadblocks that went up minutes too late could close around them. Mark Urban called the Baly Gory and Burch’s operations spectaculars.
Both achieved every primary objective. Both units escaped without casualties. The JCB and Van doctrine had a two match winning record. The playbook worked. So when Patrick Kelly and Jim Liner began planning the third attack in the sequence, a strike on Lo Gaul RU station in County Armar, they had no operational reason to doubt it would work again.
They had a proven methodology, proven personnel, and at least one advantage their previous targets had not offered. Some of the same men who had attacked the first two stations were available for the third. Mccernie, Arthurs, Liner himself, men who had done this before and walked away. There was one difference at Laul the brigade’s planning had to account for.
The station wasn’t unmanned. Three local RU officers worked there part-time. The station open from 9 to 11 in the morning and 5 to 7 in the evening. The plan was to attack at the close of the evening shift, the moment the officers might be expected to emerge. The brigade intended to kill them as they came out.
That is the finding of subsequent European Court of Human Rights proceedings, and it isn’t disputed in any credible account. The plan took weeks to assemble and was the most elaborate operation the East Terrone Brigade had mounted. two vehicles, a stolen backhoe loader, a bomb of 300 to 400 lb of explosive packed inside an oil drum partially concealed by rubble wired to two 40-2 fuses.
The seexs and bomb components were transported by boat across Loach Nay from Arbo to Mahari to bypass the vehicle checkpoints on the roads. Even the logistics of moving the device were planned to defeat the standard interdiction methods. The vehicles were hijacked in the hours immediately before the attack.
A blue Toyota Hias van was taken by masked men from a business in Dunan. Jim Liner was spotted in Dunanon at roughly the same time. A detail that would later allow investigators to connect the vehicle theft to the operation’s command structure. The digger, another backho loader, was taken from a farm on Lizlessly Road about 2 mi west of Lo Gaul.
Two IRA members stayed at the farm under guard to prevent the owners from raising an alarm. The vehicle theft and the securing of the farm were timed to give the attack team its window. The eight-man assault unit divided for the approach. Declan Arthurs would drive the digger. Gerardo Callahan and Tony Gormley, aged 28 and 24, respectively, would ride with him, weapons in hand, in what journalist Peter Taylor described as literally riding shotgun.
The remaining five would travel in the Toyota van. Eugene Kelly, aged 25, driving. Patrick Kelly, the 30-year-old brigade commander, in the passenger seat, with Jim Liner, aged 31, Porri Mccernie, aged 32, and Sheamus Donnelly, aged 19, in the rear. Eight men. Between them, they had been involved in virtually every significant IRA operation in East Tyrone since 1985.
Mccernie had been in the maze breakout. Liner had devised the doctrine they were all now executing. Arthurs had driven the digger at the birches. These were the most capable operators the brigade had. Separate scout cars operated on the outer approaches carrying three further members of the unit who would screen the flanks and serve as rear cover.
What none of the eight knew, what Aean Collins, sitting in Nuri on the morning of the 9th, slowly worked out from the scale of the intelligence failure, was that the British security forces had known about the planned attack for weeks and had known the specific target for at least 10 days before the operation launched.
The tasking and coordinating group south TCG South operated out of Goff barracks Armar. Its function was specific. Take intelligence from multiple sources across RU special branch military intelligence and MI5 and convert that intelligence into operational direction for security forces in the field. It directed police and soldiers in the undercover war along the border from South Down to West for Mana.
In 1987, TCG South was commanded by Detective Superintendent Ronnie Flanigan, who would later serve as RU Chief Constable from 1996 to 2002. One subsequent inquiry described TCG South as the hidden hand behind the Lo Gaul ambush and that characterization hasn’t been seriously contested. The precise origin of the intelligence that enabled the ambush remains disputed in the open literature and the script won’t resolve what the official record hasn’t resolved.
Multiple accounts agree on the timeline. In broad terms, the British security forces received actionable intelligence about a planned IRA attack on an RU station weeks before the 8th of May and knew the specific target, Loaul, at least 10 days in advance. One published account in Agents of Influence records a branch handler receiving information from a source on April 30th, 1987, 9 days before the attack.
On the question of how the intelligence was obtained, three distinct theories appear in the academic and journalistic literature. The first is a human source, an informant inside the East Tyrone Brigade or its support network whose identity has never been officially confirmed. The second is signals intelligence or telephone intercepts with no human agent inside the unit.
The third is a convergence of methods, surveillance signals, and possibly a source at a higher level of the Republican movement feeding information down a separate channel. What isn’t in dispute is that the RU learned through some combination of these means that a mechanical digger had been stolen in the area in early May 1987.
When a covert observation post monitoring the stolen digger reported it was being moved on the evening of the 8th, the SAS was already positioned and waiting. Richard English, historian and former professor at Queens University Belfast has written that the specific intelligence didn’t come from within the eight-man assault unit itself.
Though he notes that one member, Tony Gormley, was known to special branch as a paid informant. Whether Gormley’s knowledge of the lock Gaul operation was ever communicated to his handlers remains unestablished. Some open source accounts have alleged that the informant, if there was one, inside the operational team, was killed in the ambush and that the search for him afterwards was therefore fruitless.
The IRA’s own internal investigation never produced a definitive conclusion. It’s possible the intelligence came entirely from technical means and that no human agent was ever involved. The phrase that belongs in this script and the only phrase that is defensible against the available evidence is this. The British had a highplaced source whose identity has never been officially confirmed.
Whatever the origin of the intelligence, the operational response was methodical. A team from 22 SAS regiment was dispatched to lockall. The three local RU officers were quietly removed and replaced by two headquarters mobile support unit officers and one uniformed constable maintaining the appearance of normal station activity. Six SAS soldiers in plain clothes including their commander positioned themselves inside the building.
18 further SAS soldiers in uniform were hidden in five locations in the wooded areas surrounding the station. The station faced a football pitch. Along the road opposite, concealed among fur trees, soldiers strung detonating cord, a device that would explode immediately before the ambush was triggered, creating noise and distraction at the precise moment the IRA unit began its attack.
Cutoff groups were positioned at either end of the stretch of Balazy Road to seal escape routes. Within the two main outer positions, soldiers carried L7 A2 generalpurpose machine guns, beltfed weapons capable of discharging several hundred rounds per minute. The inner positions and the teams inside the station were armed with M16 and Heckler and Cootch G3 rifles.
Every vehicle, every route, every timing, every tactic the brigade had rehearsed over 18 months had been anticipated. The East Tyrone Brigade was walking into an ambush its own success had made possible. The doctrine had worked at Baligoli and the Burches. It had been studied, mapped, and prepositioned against.
The unit arrived in Lo Gaul from the northeast shortly after 7 in the evening of Thursday 8th of May 1987. All eight wore bulletproof vests, boiler suits, gloves, and balaclavas. All were armed. They didn’t go straight to the gate. The digger drove past the station first. The van followed, doing the same. Two slow passes.
Members of the unit later told surviving comrades they had sensed something was wrong, that the station felt different, that the silence had the wrong quality. According to journalist Peter Taylor’s account, corroborated by the subsequent ECR judgment, a brief argument broke out in the van over whether to proceed.
The decision was made to continue. Tony Gormley and Gerardo Callahan climbed from the van onto the digger alongside Arthurs. At approximately 7:15 in the evening, Arthurs drove toward the perimeter fence. In the front bucket, 300 to 400 lb of explosive inside an oil drum wired to two 40 fuses.
The fence was light construction. The digger went through it. The van pulled up a short distance ahead. Patrick Kelly jumped from the passenger seat and followed by others opened fire on the building. At that moment, the detonating cord along the fur trees fired a fraction of a second before the SAS soldiers inside the station began shooting, creating the noise and confusion intended to draw the IRA team’s attention outward at the critical moment.
Then the fire from the station. Then from the hidden positions outside M16s, G3 rifles and the two GPMGs. The bomb in the digger’s bucket detonated. The blast destroyed the digger and badly damaged the building. Both HMSU officers inside were injured, one with severe head injuries, the other with a broken nose.
One SAS soldier sustained a facial injury from broken glass. 600 spent British cartridge cases were recovered from the scene. Some published accounts give other figures. The IRA’s eight recovered weapons produced 78 spent cases between them. The disproportion tells the story of the firefight with more precision than any narrative reconstruction can.
All eight IRA members died. All had multiple gunshot wounds. All had been shot in the head. Declan Arthurs was found in a laneway opposite the Lock Gall football club premises, unarmed, holding a cigarette lighter in his right hand. The lighter he had been preparing to use on the digger’s fuse. Three of the eight were shot at close range as they lay either dead or wounded on the ground.
Three members of the outlying scout cars escaped from the scene, passing through British Army and RU checkpoints set up after the ambush was complete. The Ruger Security 6 revolver found on the site had been taken from reserve constable William Clemens’s body at Baly Gory 18 months before. The last of the eight was still on the ground when a white Citroen GS came along the road.
Anthony Hughes and his brother Oliver were driving home. They had spent the evening repairing a lorry. They were wearing boiler suits because they worked in a trade, not as a disguise. Oliver, sitting in the passenger seat, had on blue coveralls similar to those worn by the IR unit. About 130 yards from the police station, soldiers opened fire on the car from behind.
Anthony Hughes, who was driving, was killed. Oliver was shot 14 times. He survived. The car sustained approximately 34 bullet holes. A mother and her child, sheltered in the church hall, had the rear window of their car struck by a stray bullet 250 yards from the station. Nobody in the village had been warned. No attempt had been made to seal off the approaches to the ambush zone because sealing the zone would have alerted the IRA unit before it was fully committed.
The soldiers who fired on the Citroen were in a kill zone in darkness immediately after a bomb had detonated against a unit that had just opened fire on a police building. Anthony Hughes and his brother were in blue boiler suits behind the van that was the target of the ambush driving toward the station that had just been attacked.
Anthony Hughes had no connection to the IRA. His family was subsequently compensated by the British government. A post-mortem was conducted at Craan Area Hospital on the 9th of May. Parliamentary questions about his death were raised in the House of Commons in December 1987. In March 2014, the Ministry of Defense issued a formal apology to the Hughes family, confirming that both Anthony and Oliver were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.
Nothing in that account minimizes what happened to Anthony Hughes or explains it away. He drove into an ambush he knew nothing about in a car that resembled the target vehicle and he was killed. His death isn’t a footnote to the operation. It’s the moment that transformed a clean tactical outcome into a legal and moral wound that remains open.
By 9:00 on the morning of May 9th, 1987, the facts as available were being processed publicly and privately on two parallel tracks. On the public track, UPI filed a wire report noting the SAS had been deployed as undercover agents to collect intelligence about the IRA. The BBC reported eight IRA members killed and one civilian dead.
The British government said very little. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher maintained the same silence that had governed all public acknowledgements of SAS operations in Northern Ireland since the late 1970s. Operation Judy was confirmed to exist. Its planning, its intelligence basis, its command authority, and its specific tactical decisions remained unressed.
On the forensic track, the scene at Logaul was worked methodically. The recovered weapons were logged and tested. Ballistic analysis eventually confirmed through documents released from the National Archives of Ireland in 2017 that the weapons in the dead men’s hands had been used in 40 to 50 killings. every IRA attributed security force fatality in counties for Mana and Terrone in 1987 before the 8th of May.
The director of public prosecutions for Northern Ireland reviewed the evidence and in September 1988 concluded that it didn’t warrant the prosecution of any person involved in the shootings. The IRA released its own statement almost immediately. Survivors from the scout cars, the statement said, saw other volunteers being shot on the ground after being captured.
The language was carefully chosen for a political audience. Three of the eight had in fact been shot at close range while lying on the ground. Whether they were dead, wounded, or surrendering at the moment of those shots is a question the subsequent inquest never fully resolved. IU Chief Superintendent Harry Breen stood in front of television cameras the morning after the ambush and displayed the recovered weapons to journalists.
He would be dead within 2 years. On the 20th of March 1989, he was shot dead in an IRA ambush near the Irish border alongside RU Superintendent Bob Buchanan. A 2013 tribunal of inquiry by Judge Peter Smi found that Breen had been specifically targeted in part to interrogate him about how the British security services had known about Lo Gaul in advance.
The intelligence picture at Loaul, it turned out, had done something beyond destroying a unit. It had announced a capability the IRA would spend years and lives trying to identify. The funerals were held in the Kappa and Galbilly areas of County Terrone. Thousands attended, the largest Republican funerals in Northern Ireland since those of the IRA hunger strikers of 1981.
An Fobla, the Republican newspaper, ran extensive coverage on the 14th of May, 1987. The eight dead were described as volunteers and martyrs. The newspaper printed four separate tributes in one issue, to the operation itself, to Jim Liner individually, to the wider unit, to Tyrone in mourning.
Jerry Adams gave a graveside oration. He chose not to use measured language. The British government, he said, understood it could buy off the government of the republic, the Shaine clan, but it does not understand the Jim Liners, the Porric Mckinies, or the Sheamus Mwaines. It thinks it can defeat them. It never will.
The erration was quoted in full in Republican media and referenced in security assessments across Whiteall. The Conservative government’s silence in response to the operation wasn’t embarrassment. It was a calculation. any public explanation of what operation duty had involved, how the intelligence was gathered, through what authority the tasking decision was made, under what rules of engagement the lethal force was authorized, would have required the government to answer questions it had spent years declining to answer in public. The silence was also in part
legally protective. The less that was said officially, the less could be used in subsequent civil proceedings. The IRA began its internal search for the informer it believed had compromised the operation. Some accounts suggest the organization eventually concluded that the informant, if one had existed inside the unit, had been killed in the ambush itself.
The search was never definitively resolved. Some within the Republican movement believe to this day that the intelligence came not from a human source inside the unit, but from surveillance or intercepts at a higher level. The uncertainty served British intelligence purposes. An unresolved informant question divides and demoralizes an organization in ways a confirmed betrayal does not.
On the 20th of August 1988, 15 months after Lo Gaul, the East Tyrone Brigade destroyed a British Army bus on the Kerr road near Baligori, killing eight soldiers returning from leave. The brigade killed 13 security force personnel in 1988. The year’s death toll was, according to one academic study, indubitably in direct retaliation for security force success at L Gaul the previous year.
The brigade had not been broken. It had been enraged. What the law subsequently made of Lo Gaul took years to develop and hasn’t yet concluded. Six families of IRA members and the family of Anthony Hughes commenced civil proceedings against the Ministry of Defense. Anthony Hughes’s widow settled out of court in April 1991.
In May 1995, a formal inquest ran for 4 days and returned a finding that all nine people killed at Lo Gaul had died from serious and multiple gunshot wounds. Lawyers representing six of the IRA families withdrew from the inquest on the second day because the coroner declined to provide copies of witness statements. SAS soldiers didn’t give evidence in person.
Their statements were read aloud into the record. Their identities remained protected. The cases then moved to Strasburg. The Lo Gaul specific application before the European Court of Human Rights was Kelly and others versus the United Kingdom. Application number 3054/96. The judgment was delivered on the 4th of May 2001 alongside a group of related cases from Northern Ireland.
Jordan versus UK, the Mccur case concerning a killing in 1982, and Shanahan versus UK, all decided on the same day. The court’s finding in the Lo Gaul case requires precise statement because it has been frequently misstated. The court found that the United Kingdom violated article two of the European Convention on Human Rights in its procedural dimension.
That finding means the investigation conducted into the deaths was inadequate. It wasn’t sufficiently independent, not sufficiently transparent, and didn’t satisfy the procedural obligations that article 2 places on member states when lethal force is used by agents of the state. The court didn’t find that the killings were unlawful.
It made no finding that the soldiers acted outside their legal authority or that the use of lethal force was unjustified as a matter of substance. It found that the investigation conducted afterwards was procedurally deficient. This distinction matters because it has been collapsed in a significant quantity of political commentary into a finding that was never made.
The applicable finding from an independent body specifically constituted to review legacy killings, the PSNI’s historical inquiries team, which reached its conclusions in December 2011, was that the IRA team fired first, that they couldn’t have been safely arrested given the threat they presented, and that the British army was justified in opening fire.
That finding hasn’t been subsequently overturned. In September 2015, a new inquest was ordered. In September 2019, the presiding coroner was told the proceedings might run for 3 to 6 months once they began. In 2016, the BBC reported that police would need to examine nearly 10 million intelligence records for disclosure before the legal proceedings could advance.
In October 2023, the Northern Ireland coroner stated publicly that there was not enough time for the inquest to be completed ahead of the Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy and Reconciliation Act 2023 coming into force. In September 2024, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal referenced 2024 NICA59 addressed multiple applicant families connected to LOFaul in the context of that legislation’s legality.
The inquest 38 years after the event remains unfinished. Phil Shiner is part of this story, but not in the way the name is sometimes used. Shiner was the founder of Public Interest Lawyers, a Birmingham firm that documented allegations against British forces primarily in Iraq, not Northern Ireland.
His firm pursued cases through the Iraq historic allegations team and related mechanisms and the pattern of retrospective investigation that his work helped establish was subsequently applied through other organizations and other legal roots to operation banner era cases. In February 2017, the Solicitor’s Disciplinary Tribunal struck Shiner off the role of solicitors.
It found him guilty of 22 charges of professional misconduct, including dishonesty and lack of integrity proved to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. His firm closed on June 30th, 2017. He subsequently pleaded guilty to fraud charges. Shiner’s removal from practice isn’t the end of the legal pressure on veterans of the Northern Ireland conflict.
It’s one chapter in a continuing narrative. The Legacy Act of 2023 attempted to draw a line under cases of exactly this kind, offering a conditional immunity framework through the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery. The Northern Ireland Court of Appeal found significant provisions of that act incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Secretary of State subsequently conceded on several of those grounds. The government has indicated its intention to amend the legislation. The soldiers who carried out Operation Judy at Lof Gaul have never been publicly named. Several have been the subjects of formal investigation. None has been publicly decorated for the operation.
The government that directed them to Lo Gaul on the evening of the 8th of May 1987 has spent nearly four decades declining to describe what they were asked to do and why. The East Tyrone Brigade didn’t collapse after Lo Gaul. Its immediate response was escalation. But its pattern of casualties after 1987 tells a different story than its operations do.
Ed Maloney in a secret history of the IRA recorded that the East Tyrone Brigade lost 53 members killed across the entire troubles. 28 of those deaths occurred between 1987 and 1992, the 5 years after Lo Gaul. The brigade launched further attacks. It killed soldiers. It attacked police stations. It carried out the TBain bombing in January 1992, killing eight Protestant workers.
It remained capable, but it was no longer the brigade that had walked to lock all with a working playbook and an unbroken operational record. In June 1991, three more IRA members died in an SAS ambush at Kog County Tyrone. In March 1988, three further PIR members were killed in Gibralar in Operation Flavius, a separate event that belongs in its own analysis.
The rural station attack doctrine, the specific methodology that Kelly and Liner had developed and the brigade had executed twice successfully, was never used again. No further occupied rural RU station was attacked with a diggerorn bomb by a multi-vehicle unit after lock. The doctrine had been watched, preempted, and destroyed with the men who devised it.
By 1989, according to the back channel record assembled by Father Alec Reid, the Redempterrist priest who served as the key intermediary in contacts between the IRA leadership, the SDLP, and eventually the British government. The Republican movement had begun the conversations that would eventually become the peace process. The relationship between military attrition and political calculation isn’t linear, and serious analysis does not flatten it into a clean narrative of one causing the other.
What the back channel record does show is that by 1989, within 2 years of Loaul, the armed campaign’s capacity to deliver strategic gains was being questioned inside the Republican leadership at the highest levels. Lockall was the most visible single event in that reassessment, though it wasn’t the only one.
Two years after Lockall, the conversations that would produce the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998 had already quietly begun. None of the eight men in the wreckage on Balazy Road lived to see it. Neither did Anthony Hughes. At the doctrinal level, Operation Judy is referenced in academic and military literature as a case study in intelligency precisely because of what it demonstrates about the relationship between collection and action.
A United States military thesis in the DTIC database cites Operation Judy as an example of the TCG committee structure working successfully. the coordination of human intelligence, surveillance, and tactical deployment into a single operational outcome with no prior warning and complete surprise. The ambush wasn’t a reactive contact.
It was a pre-positioned ambush on an anticipated target built on weeks of intelligence development. The firefight itself was the final 30 seconds of an operation that had been running for months. That is what the doctrine teaches and why the firefight is studied at all. Not as an example of tactical violence, but as the demonstration of what accurate intelligence preparation delivers.
Aean Collins left the provisional IRA in 1987. He gave evidence in court proceedings against former comrades through the 1990s. Killing Rage, his memoir, was published by Grantaer in 1997 to considerable attention from both literary reviewers and from people who recognized names in it.
He was still alive when the book appeared. He was found in a country lane outside Nuri in January 1999. He had been abducted, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death. No one was charged. The people most likely responsible for his death were members of the Republican network he had once helped to organize. The morning in Nuri, where this account begins, the news, the eight names, the slow arithmetic of what the intelligence penetration implied, was the moment Collins understood that Loaul had changed the war permanently.
Not because eight IRA men had died, men had died in this war before, but because every decision those eight men had made, the route, the vehicles, the timing, the target, the tactics that had worked twice before, had been mapped in advance and prepositioned against. The brigade had been defeated not in the firefight, but in the weeks before the operation left the planning stage.
That is the argument Lo Gaul proves. The firefight was the last few seconds of an operation that had already been decided. The intelligence architecture that produced the ambush was built over years by people whose names have never been published inside a command structure that the British government has never officially described in full.
The men who carried it out have never been publicly honored. Several have been formally investigated by the government they served for the act of carrying it out. The inquest ordered in 2015 is still not complete. The Legacy Act designed to end proceedings like it has been found partially incompatible with human rights law by the court that governs it.
The families on both sides of 8th May 1987 are still waiting for the British state to produce a full account of what it authorized, who it sent, and what it knew. 38 years is a long time not to find the courage to tell a story you own.