The South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) operated during the Troubles in south County Armagh. It was organised into two battalions, one around Jonesborough and another around Crossmaglen. By the 1990s, the South Armagh Brigade was thought to consist of about 40 members, roughly half of them living south of the border.O'Brien, p. 204 It has allegedly been commanded since the 1970s by Thomas 'Slab' Murphy who is also alleged to be a member of the IRA's Army Council. Compared to other brigades, the South Armagh IRA was seen as an 'independent republic' within the republican movement, retaining a battalion organizational structure and not adopting the cell structure the rest of the IRA was forced to adopt after repeated intelligence failures.O'Brien, p. 206

As well as paramilitary activity, the South Armagh Brigade has also been widely accused of smuggling across the Irish border.Harnden, pp. 178-179, 204-205. Between 1970 and 1997 the brigade was responsible for the deaths of at least 165 members of British security forces (123 British soldiers and 42 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers). A further 75 civilians were killed in the area during the conflict, as well as ten South Armagh Brigade members.O'Brien, p. 160 The RUC recorded 1,255 bombings and 1,158 shootings around a radius of ten miles from the geographic centre of South Armagh in the same period.

Background

South Armagh has a long Irish republican tradition. From 1919, Frank Thornton, Third Director of Operations in Michael Collins' Intelligence Staff,Bureau of Military History 1913-1921 Statement By [ Witness Document No. W.S. 423 ] played a key role in organising IRA activities across South Armagh, Louth, Monaghan, Cavan, Longford and Down. "Thornton, Frank" Originally published October 2009 Dictionary of Irish Biography, Last revised October 2009 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.009237.v1 Many men in the area served in the Fourth Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and, unlike most of the rest of the Northern Ireland IRA, on the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Men from the area also took part in IRA campaigns in the 1940 and 1950s.

1970s At the beginning of the Northern Ireland Troubles in August 1969, rioters, led by IRA men, attacked the RUC barracks in Crossmaglen, in retaliation for the attacks on Catholic/nationalist areas in Belfast in the Northern Ireland riots of August 1969.Harnden (1999), p. 56 After the split in the IRA in that year, the South Armagh unit sided with the Provisional IRA rather than the Official IRA. The following August, two RUC constables were killed by a car bomb in Crossmaglen.Harnden, pp. 39-42.

However, the IRA campaign in the area did not begin in earnest until 1971. On 7 August of that year, Harry Thornton, a 29-year-old sewage worker from South Armagh was shot and killed by the British Army while staying in a car outside Springfield Road base in Belfast, he and his coworker Arthur Murphy having been mistaken for gunmen. Murphy was lightly wounded and arrested by the RUC. The incident caused outrage among South Armagh residents, provided the IRA with many new recruits and created a hostile climate where local people were prepared to tolerate the killing of security force members. The soon-to-be South Armagh Brigade saw an afflux of hundreds of Volunteers, with the 3rd Battalion alone, operating between Drumintee and Keady, zones more distant from South Armagh's heartland of Crossmaglen, having more than 60 new volunteers in the days following Thornton's death.Harnden, pp. 49-55.

During the early 1970s, the brigade was mostly engaged in ambushes of British Army patrols. In one such ambush in August 1972, a Ferret armoured car was destroyed by a 600 lb landmine, killing one soldier. There were also frequent gun attacks on foot patrols. Travelling overland in South Armagh eventually became so dangerous that the British Army began using helicopters to transport troops and supply its bases - a practice that had to be continued until the late 1990s. According to author Toby Harnden, the decision was taken shortly after a Saracen armoured vehicle was destroyed by a culvert bomb near Crossmaglen, on 9 October 1975. Subsequently, the British Army gave up the use of roads to the IRA in South Armagh.Harnden, Toby (1999). Bandit Country. Hodder & Stoughton. Photo caption # 10:"The Saracen armoured car blown up by a culvert bomb at Lurganculleboy, near Crossmaglen in October 1975, killing Corporal Edward Gleeson. Shortly afterwards, the Army abandoned road transport in South Armagh." "The last armoured patrol in South Armagh, attacked in Crossmaglen October 1975 killing Cpl Gleeson. Since then the security forces travel by helicopter for security reasons." IRA volunteer Éamon McGuire, a former Aer Lingus senior engineer, and his team claim that they were responsible for getting the British Army "off the ground and into the air" in South Armagh. He was identified as the IRA's chief technical officer by the Central Intelligence Agency.Oppenheimer, A. R. (2009). IRA: The Bombs and The Bullets. A History of Deadly Ingenuity. Irish Academic Press, p. 279-280. Another noted IRA commander at that time was the commanding officer of the first battalion, Captain Michael McVerry. He was eventually killed during an attack on the RUC barracks in Keady in November 1973. Around this time IRA engineers in South Armagh pioneered the use of home-made mortars which were relatively inaccurate but highly destructive.Harnden, p. 19.

In 1975 and 1976, as sectarian violence increased in Northern Ireland, the South Armagh Republican Action Force, allegedly a cover-name for the South Armagh Brigade, carried out two attacks against Protestants. In September 1975 they attacked an Orange lodge in Newtownhamilton, killing five members of the lodge. Then, in January 1976, after a series of loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) attacks on Catholic civilians in the border areas (including the Reavey and O'Dowd killings the previous day), the group shot and killed ten Protestant workmen in the "Kingsmill massacre" near Bessbrook. The workers' bus was stopped and the one Catholic worker taken aside before the others were killed.Richard English, Armed Struggle, A History of the IRA, page 172 In response, the British government stated that it was dispatching the Special Air Service (SAS) to South Armagh, although the SAS had been present in the area for many years. While loyalist attacks on Catholics temporarily declined afterwards and many Protestants became more reluctant to help the UVF, the massacre caused considerable controversy in the republican movement.

By the end of the 1970s, the IRA in most of Northern Ireland had been restructured into a cell system. South Armagh, however, where the close rural community and family connections of IRA men diminished the risk of infiltration, retained its larger "battalion" structure. On 17 February 1978 the commander of the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Corden-Lloyd, was killed and two other soldiers injured when the Gazelle helicopter he was travelling in was attacked by an IRA unit near Jonesborough. At that moment, a gun battle was taking place on the ground between British soldiers and members of the South Armagh Brigade. The helicopter crashed while taking evasive manoeuvres after being fired at from the east side of Edenappa road. In August 1979, a South Armagh unit killed 18 soldiers in the Warrenpoint ambush.Harnden, p. 135. This was the biggest single loss of life inflicted on the British Army in its deployment in Northern Ireland (Operation Banner).

A number of South Armagh IRA members were imprisoned by the end of the 1970s and took part in the blanket protest and dirty protest in pursuit of political status for IRA prisoners. Raymond McCreesh, a South Armagh man, was among the ten republican hunger strikers who died for this goal in the 1981 hunger strike. The South Armagh Brigade retaliated for the deaths of the hunger strikers by killing five British soldiers with a mine that destroyed their armoured vehicle near Bessbrook.Harnden, pp. 490-491.

1980s During the mid-1980s, the brigade focused its attacks on the RUC, killing 20 of its members between 1984 and 1986. Nine of these were killed in the February 1985 Newry mortar attack.Harnden, p. 167. Three months later, a further four RUC officers were killed by a 900 lb roadside bomb at Killean, County Armagh.Harnden, p. 29.

In 1986, the British Army erected ten hilltop observation posts in South Armagh. These bases acted as information-gathering centres and also allowed the British Army to patrol South Armagh more securely. Between 1971 and the erection of the hilltop sites in the mid-1980s (the first in 1986), 84 members of the security forces were killed in the Crossmaglen and Forkhill areas by the IRA. After this, 24 security force personnel and Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed in the same areas, roughly a third of the previous yearly rate.

In March 1989, two senior RUC officers were killed in an ambush near Jonesborough. Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan were returning from a meeting with the Garda Síochána in the Republic of Ireland, where they had been discussing a range of issues including ways of combating IRA attacks on the cross-border rail link, when they were ambushed. This incident was investigated by the Smithwick Tribunal into alleged collusion between the IRA and the Gardaí. As the divisional commander for South Armagh, Breen was the most senior policeman to have been killed during the Troubles.BBC On This DAY - 20 March 1989 "Senior RUC men die in gun attack" Retrieved 24 October 2011

South Armagh became the most heavily militarised area in Northern Ireland. In an area with a population of 23,000, the British Army stationed around 3,000 troops in support of the RUC to contain an unknown number of paramilitaries.

1990s

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the IRA elsewhere in Northern Ireland found that nine out of ten planned operations were aborted.O'Brien, p. 157 However, the South Armagh Brigade continued to carry out varied and high-profile attacks in the same period.O'Brien, p. 207 By 1991, the RUC acknowledged that no mobile patrols had operated in South Armagh without Army support since 1975.O'Brien, p. 205

On 30 December 1990, Sinn Féin member and IRA volunteer, Fergal Caraher, was killed by Royal Marines near a checkpoint in Cullyhanna. His brother Michael Caraher, who was severely wounded in the shooting, later became the commander of one of the South Armagh sniper squads.

These squads were responsible for killing seven soldiers and two RUC members until the Caraher team was finally caught by the Special Air Service in April 1997.Harnden, p. 291 The South Armagh Brigade also built the bombs that were used to wreck economic targets in London during the 1990s, specially hitting the financial district. The truck bombs were sent to England by ferry.Harnden, p. 230. On 22 April 1993, the South Armagh IRA unit took control of the village of Cullaville near the border with the Republic, for two hours, making good use of dead ground. The fact that the IRA executed the action despite the presence of a British Army watchtower nearby, caused outrage among British and Irish parliamentary circles.Transcripts of the Commons debate over the security situation in NI and the Cullaville incident (Column 196 in the first link and Column 184 in the second one): Commons debate, 8 June 1993, columns 192-197 Commons debate, 8 June 1993, columns 180-191Senead Éireann - 29 April 1993