The Killings at Coalisland : British Tactics Under Fire After Deaths of 4 Young IRA Members

The bars were crackling with Sunday night tipplers out for a pint and a smoke after Mass when the familiar rumble of gunfire sent people ducking.

Outside, two men stood in the rear of a stolen truck, emptying a belt of ammunition from a heavy machine gun into the town’s fortified police station.

Within minutes, four members of the East Tyrone “brigade” of the Irish Republican Army, ages 20 to 22, were lying dead near a burning Roman Catholic church northeast of Coalisland.

Police said they died in a gun battle after trying to escape. To locals it seemed clear that the army’s elite Special Air Service had notched another ambush.

“The IRA claims to be fighting a war. Occasionally the British drop all pretense and take them up on their offer,” said the Rev. Denis Faul, a Catholic priest and prominent critic of both British army and IRA thinking.

“The IRA wants to drive them to this, knowing it will outrage the civilian population and boost their support.”

What happened the night of Feb. 16 may never be publicly known, but the questions were familiar: Was there a chance to arrest the gunmen? Who killed them? Was it a chance encounter, or an ambush by police and soldiers forewarned of IRA plans?

Killed were Kevin Barry O’Donnell, 21; Sean O’Farrell, 22; Peter Clancy, 21; and Patrick Vincent, 20, the only one of the four not under suspicion by army intelligence.

The night amounted to a security-force victory in a war that neither side has been able to win. It is debatable who gained more.

The Tyrone “brigade” of the IRA has lost 25 men in clashes with security forces since 1983, many more than any other unit of the republican guerrilla group.

“They say, ‘This is our territory, and the Brits shouldn’t be here.’ Very simplistic, and they tend to get shot down,” Faul said.

But sympathy for the IRA in the area is as strong as ever, reinforced by the image of martyrdom.

Barry O’Donnell’s father, Jim, said he believes that “the IRA has the ‘no vacancy’ sign up in East Tyrone since they killed my son and the other brave young lads. . . . The IRA will always be there as long as you have armed Englishmen in our streets.”

Specially trained units of the British army, led by the counterterrorist SAS, have refined a tactic of staging ambush-style operations reliant on advance information of IRA plans gleaned from informers, phone-tapping and detailed surveillance. SAS involvement in incidents is rarely acknowledged.

When the IRA men returned from firing at the police barracks, a potent array of army firepower was waiting near St. Patrick’s Church, where other IRA men were waiting to unload weapons and disperse in cars.

Vincent was shot dead behind the wheel.

Under the light of army flares and a hail of automatic fire, the others tried to flee. O’Donnell and Clancy were cut down a few yards from the truck. O’Farrell got to the road about 50 yards away before being hit.

The army shot at least two other men, one found in the adjoining cemetery, the other arrested a mile down the road after crashing his car through a hedge.

Those two men and a third are awaiting trial. The IRA said in a statement that one “active service unit,” possibly four men, escaped unharmed.

The dearth of official information about the incident provides fertile ground for inflammatory gossip and rising anger.

“When the lads were dismantling their weapons, they opened fire--no chance for return fire,” said Francie Molloy, 40, a member of the local council for Sinn Fein, the legal political party that supports the IRA.

“All the strike marks on the chapel and road were from the one direction. It seemed to be that our boys had run out of ammunition, that they had fired that much up in the town that they didn’t leave themselves enough to cover themselves. They hadn’t expected to be fired on.”

Republican News, the weekly Sinn Fein-IRA newspaper, said the gunmen had removed the ammo belt from the machine gun and were dismantling it when they came under fire. Republican News also claimed that one man raised his hands in surrender and was hit by more shots before dying.

O’Donnell and O’Farrell were well known to the British security forces and had constant brushes with police and soldiers. O’Farrell had been in police custody half a dozen times.

To all appearances a quiet student pursuing a degree in poultry husbandry in England, O’Donnell had been arrested with two loaded Kalashnikov rifles after a high-speed chase through north London in March, 1991.

He persuaded a jury that he was a devout Catholic who opposed the IRA, had been shocked to find the rifles in his cousin’s car and was trying to throw them away.

O’Donnell’s departure from the Old Bailey courthouse was all but overlooked in the drama elsewhere in the building: The Court of Appeal was freeing six Irish men who, it conceded, should not have spent 17 years in prison for IRA bombings in Birmingham, England.

Convicted on minor charges and released for time served, O’Donnell was rearrested and deported to Northern Ireland, returning to Coalisland as a hero in republican circles.

O’Donnell and O’Farrell, best friends since primary school, were arrested again in August at a Gaelic Athletic Assn. club in Coalisland after police found guns and rocket-launcher components in an associate’s car.

The two IRA activists were released, with unexpected swiftness, after a week. Tom O’Farrell, Sean’s father, believes he knows why: “They were let out to be slaughtered.”

Many nationalists suggest the timing of major strikes against the IRA is no coincidence.

Last June, undercover soldiers pumped more than 300 bullets into a car carrying three armed IRA men in the Protestant village of Coagh, 8 miles northeast of Coalisland. All three were killed, and their car was incinerated.

That shooting came three days after the IRA killed three soldiers and wounded several others in a bomb attack on the Glenanne barracks in County Armagh, 20 miles south of Coalisland.

Less than a month before the Coalisland incident, an IRA bomb killed eight Protestant men at Teebane crossroads, 15 miles northwest of Coalisland. That attack provoked angry calls to “take the war to the IRA” from Protestant unionist leaders, who saw the Coalisland killings as welcome toughness.

“I hope it’s the start of a consistent operational tactic against well-known terrorists,” said Ken Maginnis, the Ulster Unionist member of Parliament for the area.

In Jim O’Donnell’s eyes, his son was a child of “the troubles,” born the year after civil unrest brought British troops onto the streets of Northern Ireland.

“The house was searched from time to time. I can remember the police pulling young Barry from his bed at night to search under it.”

In the months before their son died, the O’Donnells said they had heard or seen unmarked police cars drive into their lane at night and sit there. A neighbor told them he had spotted two soldiers climbing down from a spy post in the roof of his farm shed beside the O’Donnell home.

“You can see from here their tower of cameras at the barracks,” said Jim O’Donnell. “They can certainly see when my car’s here and when it’s not. Who knows what they can see and hear?”

Coalisland town center is dominated by the massive brick building fronted by a bulletproof watchtower, surrounded by high metal grills, draped with anti-mortar netting and crowned by a battery of infrared-sensitive cameras keeping constant watch on the surrounding hostile populace.

It functions as a frontier fort, often housing more British troops than police.

“I see no point in attacks on the police station,” said Jim Canning, 57, a local Independent Nationalist councilor who runs a butcher’s shop beside the base.

“Whether you feel the British army and police should be there or not, attacking it appears to be a total waste of time--unless they put in a massive bomb that would blow the whole town up.”

Faul, the priest, said, “The IRA prides itself on its military skill. But this was an act of insanity, to go in with the tactics of 1920 against the high-tech armor of 1992.”

But Sinn Fein’s Molloy said such attacks are important politically.

“You have to do it every once in awhile to keep things honest, you know? If there’s nobody attacking it, if it’s not painted with paint bombs, if it’s not burned by petrol, then it looks as though it’s acceptable.”

Death is deep in the IRA tradition. The attitudes of many younger activists were formed in the tensions of the 1981 hunger strikes, in which 10 men in Northern Ireland’s Maze prison died trying to win political-prisoner status.

Republican News said O’Farrell and O’Donnell joined the IRA together in 1988. A year earlier, they had attended the funerals of the eight IRA men killed in an SAS ambush at Loughgall, 10 miles southeast of Coalisland, in which the army also killed a passing civilian. It was one of the very few incidents in which the army confirmed SAS involvement.

After last year’s shootings in Coagh, Barry O’Donnell helped carry the coffin of IRA man Tony Doris.

Niall O’Donnell, 17, said he is proud of his brother and the three others who died.

“Boys my age and younger on the street I know are thinking maybe we’ll join,” he said, referring to the IRA. “Definitely his murder will motivate us in the same way that the deaths at Loughgall affected Barry.

“Would you let your brother die for something he believed in, and let his death be in vain?”