'Bandit Country': The IRA and South Armagh

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The policing is a wee bit more normal than it was but let’s face it, it’s not normal,” McConville adds. Additionally, the author records various acts of sectarian massacres carried out against Protestant civilians. The massacre at Tullyvallen Orange Hall took place when the minister of my old Reformed Presbyterian Church was serving in Tullyvallen. Speaking of the RPs, the murder of RUC Superintendent Robert Buchanan, a ruling elder in an RP Church, is discussed in this book. Regretfully, one of his colleagues blamed Superintendent Buchanan's death on his belief in predestination, which, allegedly, meant that he did not take adequate precautions to avoid getting murdered. In places like Fermanagh you always got the sense that something might happen – in Crossmaglen, you always got the sense that something would happen,” an ex-British soldier tells The Irish Times. I remember we started to be successful at the football and going into him one day, and he says, ‘this is brilliant, we’ll no longer be known as bandit country, we’ll be known for the football we play’. For the residents who lived through the Troubles, how do they feel about their town’s “lawless” reputation post-conflict? And will it remain a “place apart” for the next generation?

Johnson has a passion for justice and a drive to investigate unsolved war crimes in different parts of the world. People have this image of what goes on in Cross and obviously certain aspects have fed into that over the years with criminality.

Mains was stationed at Forkhill but regularly went to Crossmaglen where he and his colleagues were flanked by 15 soldiers when they went out on foot patrol. As you went along, you got to know who was who. The paratroopers were obviously the ones with the red hats. So if they were in town you were afraid to go outside the door because they were the worst. They would literally batter you if they got you on your own.

The murky underside of a terrorist war . . . Joe Johnson finds himself in the crosshairs of a Northern Ireland serial sniper who is awaiting the US president’s arrival. And the 29-year mystery around an IRA killer’s gruesome death deepens. I’m getting married ... you’re both invited’: The former IRA man, UVF ex-prisoner and retired British soldier who became friends ] The idea of a Tourist Information office in the troubled Crossmaglen would have been almost unthinkable before the Belfast Agreement. Today Úna Walsh is an ambassador who leads walking tours in the village. Photograph: Stephen Davison In a thriller you obviously need your good guys and you need your bad guys. Knowing that the author of Bandit Country is an Englishman, living in England during the time of 'the troubles' and therefore absorbing things the way the English press reported them, you should have no problem knowing who the bad guys in this story will be.Given the level of detail on various operations - successful and unsuccessful - one can't help but marvel at the sheer scale of the inventiveness and determination that a small group of individuals could display in the face of Empire, regardless of how one feels on the political or moral logic of the armed campaign.

The branding of south Armagh as “bandit country” by former Northern Ireland secretary Merlyn Rees in 1974 is a tag that persists; it was reinforced by a photograph Byrne tweeted on Christmas Day three years ago, showing him posing at the station gates beside officers armed with machine guns. An engaging and revealing book on the modus operandi and spectacular armed capabilities of the South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional IRA, which might be, on a pound-for-pound basis, perhaps the peak 'domestic' 'terrorist' grouping of all time (i.e. excluding para-state factions like the Tamil Tigers, ISIS or the PLO that essentially operated in de facto sovereign or 'liberated' territory). Sniper at Work” road signs with silhouettes of gunmen are gone and an occasional police car patrols a town where soldiers and police only ever travelled by helicopter for fear of being blown up by covert bombs.My team were probably the most vulnerable in that policing world of Northern Ireland, that’s a fact. Yet the presence of Crossmaglen’s sprawling high-fenced police station with its reinforced concrete walls and cameras – PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne likened it to a “relic from the Cold War” – is a constant reminder of the past amid peacetime progress. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2013-09-05 20:57:26 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1178212 City London Donor