Old tensions revive in N. Ireland

The boys of South Armagh -- real men, “hard men,” they call them -- never were ones to bow to anybody.

The British army for 30 years was mostly unable to drive in and out of its command here in the rolling green heartland of the Irish Republican Army. Roadside bombs and IRA snipers forced the soldiers into helicopters. And when they pulled out for the last time in August, they got a proper send-off. “The fools realize they will never break the spirit of republicanism,” said a sign wielded by the crowd assembled to say a resentful goodbye.

Now, this militant rural county on the dividing line between Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland is officially at peace. The IRA handed in its weapons, and the leaders of a new joint government between pro-British unionists and the IRA’s political ally, Sinn Fein, met with President Bush at the White House for the first time Friday in an effort to attract new investment into a newly peaceful Northern Ireland.

Maybe nobody told the South Armagh boys the war was over. The killing in October of Paul Quinn, a 21-year-old truck driver who grew up in this sleepy emerald village -- a slaying so brutal that lots of people start crying just describing what happened -- has rocked the new power-sharing government in Belfast and offered a stark reminder, if any were needed, that Northern Ireland’s legacy of paramilitary violence remains alive and well in these long-turbulent borderlands.

Sinn Fein leaders have attributed Quinn’s slaying to the shady workings of criminal gangs that still hold sway in this region long known as “bandit country.” But Quinn’s family and friends say he was beaten to death by men with links to the IRA, raising incendiary questions about the once-militant organization’s ability to control its rank and file as it disarms and joins the new government.

The fact that anyone was willing to call in the police and publicly point the finger at the IRA at all signals a remarkable transformation in a region that for decades has regarded the group as a national army, its gunmen as heroes and the police as dangerous British stooges.

Hundreds of residents have turned out at meetings over the last few weeks, demanding that the Sinn Fein leadership ferret out those they say are responsible for the crime.

“IRA are murderin scum” were the words painted, incredibly, on a wall in the center of town after Quinn’s funeral, attended by hundreds.

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has deplored the killing, insisted that no republicans were involved and urged full cooperation with the police, a course that has mollified unionist leaders in the power-sharing government and averted a collapse of the peace.

But many in the party’s stronghold here are demanding that the leadership go further and rein in the lawlessness and violence that are a legacy of its “freedom fighters” and the younger generation growing up in their wake.

Sinn Fein leaders suggest it’s more likely Quinn ran afoul of diesel fuel smugglers than the IRA, because he often drove trucks that may have carried illegal fuel. “There is no republican involvement whatsoever in this man’s murder, and all of us should be careful that we don’t end up playing politics with what is a dreadful, criminal action,” Adams said not long after Quinn’s death.

But the young man’s family has rejected that theory. “The boy didn’t have tuppence to put together,” said his father, Stephen Quinn. He believes his son was punished on the orders of local IRA commanders for getting into fights with the sons of at least two powerful IRA members -- and threatening a system of paramilitary law and order that for years most people in South Armagh preferred to the police.

Now, though, the Police Service of Northern Ireland patrols the streets of South Armagh, albeit in heavily armored vehicles.

“They were losing control. It used to be if somebody from the IRA said something up there, that was it, it was done. They were losing that grip, and they had to get that grip back, and the only way to get that grip back was to make an example out of Paul Quinn,” said William Frazer, who has long been an advocate for Protestant victims of IRA violence in South Armagh.

“It backfired, though, because a lot of people were disgusted with the severity of the beating,” he said. “If they’d have shot him, they probably would have gotten away with it. It was the fact they gave this boy who was an up-and-coming republican such a bad death.”

Quinn was a lively and good-natured young man who wasn’t averse to raising a little hell and letting fly with his fists if someone threatened him or his family.

After his violent altercations over the last few months, Quinn had received two warnings to leave the area.

He ignored them at first. Then, beginning to get worried, he moved back in with his parents in Cullyhanna.

“He wasn’t afraid of them. He was really afraid of nobody,” Stephen Quinn, 58, said of his son as he sat in the family’s tidy living room, a portrait of the Virgin Mary hung prominently on the wall. “He wouldn’t bow down to them.”

Late one afternoon in October, the younger Quinn got a call from a friend, apparently asking him to help clean out a cowshed just across the border, in Ireland’s County Monaghan, perhaps three miles away.

Quinn picked up another friend and headed over. They had barely gotten out of the car when the friend spotted a masked man coming out of the large, empty shed. “Run!” he screamed at Quinn. Too late. About 10 men in masks, some of them also wearing plastic coveralls and rubber gloves, pulled Quinn into the shed. The friend was taken aside and tied up with two others who had been beaten, bound and forced to phone Quinn to lure him to the remote farm. Inside the shed, the men proceeded to beat Quinn with iron bars and baseball bats studded with nails.

“It’s still hard to think about how he was killed. Every single bone in his body was smashed, from his toes to his head,” said Jim McAllister, a former Sinn Fein councilman from Cullyhanna who has organized a support group to demand accountability for Quinn’s death.

“It went on for half an hour. He was pleading for his life. He was calling for his mother, toward the end. But no response, nobody to answer. He went silent, and the boys say they still kept beating him,” McAllister said.

For many in South Armagh, something changed then. Sure, there had been beatings before, but not like this, not so awful.

“The community is basically incensed by the way they killed him. It was so brutal that they actually killed one of their own the way they did,” Frazer said.

Even if it wasn’t the IRA, many people are saying now, why is there such a culture of violence that young people grow up expecting beatings? Why is a young man beaten to death in broad daylight and no one is willing to come forward or testify?

“It changed a lot of things,” Frazer said. “You may not believe this, but we have people coming to us giving us information on the murder who before would never have spoken to us. There’s always been this tradition up there: You see nothing, hear nothing, tell nothing. But republicans are . . . starting to say, ‘We’re not going to live like this now.’ ”

The police investigation will get nowhere until Sinn Fein forces witnesses to come forward and expose the killers, many say now.

“The only organized groups in South Armagh who were capable of commissioning and carrying out a murder like this was the IRA, and I think everyone knows that,” Dominic Bradley, a member of the Legislative Assembly from the Social Democratic and Labor Party, the other major nationalist party, said in an interview.

“They may have decommissioned most of their weapons, but they haven’t decommissioned their structures,” Bradley said. “Sinn Fein have got to stop covering up. They have to face the fact that the IRA was involved in this murder.”

Conor Murphy, a Sinn Fein minister in the government and a member of the Legislative Assembly from South Armagh, said Quinn’s slaying was unconnected to the IRA but was being used by those unhappy with Sinn Fein’s agreement to enter the government to discredit the party and undermine the peace.

“To say that there was ‘republican involvement’ -- well, practically every family in South Armagh is an associate of a current or former member of the IRA. It’s a net of about 10,000 people,” he said. “Let the criminal inquiry take its course. There will be and should be no hiding place for those responsible.”

Community leaders say that only by breaking the region’s traditional code of omerta will any arrests ever be made.

“I frankly don’t expect anyone to be brought before the legal processes in this case,” said Danny Kennedy, deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. “I think that justice will be administered at some stage, South Armagh-style. And what that means is the local community will deal with it. They will either exclude those responsible, they will banish them from the local area, or they will take steps against them that could have a physical manifestation.”

The difference now, McAllister said, is that people are no longer willing to accept “justice beatings” as normal. More than 200 people turned up at a community meeting late last month called by the Quinn Support Group, he said, and all of them made it clear they are not prepared to go back to the way things were.

“One person said, ‘We’ve had 30 years of bombs and bullets, but we never had to be afraid of our neighbors,’ ” McAllister said. “This has given people courage to stand up and say, ‘All right, we’re not going to bow down anymore either.’ ”

kim.murphy@latimes.com