{"id":4348,"date":"2018-10-17T14:08:11","date_gmt":"2018-10-17T13:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=4348"},"modified":"2018-10-18T10:50:51","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T09:50:51","slug":"what-if-brexit-brings-the-violence-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=4348","title":{"rendered":"What if Brexit brings the violence back?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On August 22, 1972 Mary Casey\u2019s father was killed along with eight others when an IRA bomb prematurely exploded at the Customs Office in Newry, she fears a hard Brexit could see customs checkpoints becoming targets again.<\/p>\n

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Mary Casey<\/a> remembers how her father Jack gave pocket money to the children to buy sweets when he came home in his lorry to Inniskeen<\/a>, Co Monaghan. \u201cDaddy Cann,\u201d they called him.<\/p>\n

Johnny McCann, as he was known to his fellow drivers, brought home tubes of Rolo chocolates for Mary and left them under her pillow, right up until she was 21.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how old she was when her father was killed in an IRA bombing of a customs centre a few kilometres over the Border in Northern Ireland<\/a>.<\/p>\n

‘I just knew when I seen her that it was Daddy, that he had been killed<\/strong>‘ .<\/p>\n

To the republican paramilitaries, the post was a symbol of the British government, a regulator of partition \u2013 not just a division on the island of Ireland that blocked the free movement of people and goods.<\/p>\n

Mary (67) vividly recalls how she heard. On the morning of Tuesday, August 22nd, 1972, she was working in Dunnes Stores<\/a> in Dundalk<\/a> when her sister\u2019s mother-in-law called in.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just knew when I seen her that it was Daddy, that he had been killed,\u201d she says, recalling the moment as she sits at her kitchen table at home in Inniskeen, six kilometres from the Border.<\/p>\n

The bombing was the worst attack on a Northern Irish customs post and the single biggest loss of life involving HM Customs & Excise officials during the 30-year history of the Troubles. Jack McCann (60) was one of nine people killed that day. Four customs officials and three IRA men also died in the blast.<\/p>\n

Last week Mary, her husband Pearse, son Sean and cousin Seamus gathered around in their Monaghan home, the same home her father lived in, to recall a family tragedy almost a half-century ago.<\/p>\n

They hate the description of their relative as \u201can innocent victim of his country\u2019s Troubles\u201d or the \u201cawful habit\u201d of people saying he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was in the right place at the right time,\u201d says Pearse. \u201cHe was doing his job, earning his pay, making a living.\u201d<\/p>\n

The family express concern about how Brexit might bring a return of the Troubles along the Border.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrexit is the thing that could break it again,\u201d says Seamus.<\/p>\n

The family despair at the possibility of customs posts reappearing along what is now an invisible frontier should the politicians in London and Brussels<\/a> fail to find a solution to avoid a hard border in the Brexit negotiations. They are fearful about how the re-emergency of customs posts might bring a return of the kind of violent acts that might devastate families in future like it did theirs 46 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t see how it is not going to happen because there is nobody coming up with any better ideas,\u201d says Mary.<\/p>\n

Attempts to break the deadlock in the negotiations failed this week. EU and UK negotiators could not agree on the backstop \u2013 the fail-safe option to avoid a return to a hard border unless and until the issue was resolved in a post-Brexit trade deal between the EU and UK. It has become the final sticking point in talks around the divorce deal and the clock is ticking down with less than six months until Brexit.<\/p>\n

Today, EU leaders meet for a summit in Brussels to figure out the next steps. This deadline appears to have slipped, making a likely special Brexit summit in November the next make-or-break moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next month is going to tell a few tales,\u201d says Pearse.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there will be a hard border,\u201d says Mary. \u201cI don\u2019t know how else it is going to work, to be honest. It would be scary. I imagine it is going back to the way it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cway it was\u201d was a period marked by violence and fear. 1972 was the worst year of the Troubles when 497 people were killed. That year Mary\u2019s father was working for coal merchants MJ O\u2019Rourke & Co in Dundalk and had to navigate a hard border many times in his working week.<\/p>\n

On the day of the attack, he was transporting coal from Newry<\/a> to Dundalk and had to stop at the Newry Customs Clearance Centre on Dublin Road to have the customs paperwork on his load signed off.<\/p>\n

At 9.45 am, a black Austin A35 car drove into the forecourt of the centre, which was located a short distance from the Dublin-Belfast<\/a>motorway that now bypasses Newry. Three IRA men left the car, entered the building armed with a submachine gun, a revolver and the explosive device weighing between 50 and 70 pounds. Once inside, they started ordering people out, shouting that they had a bomb. A customs officer activated a push-button alarm as he left. Within seconds, the bom<\/p>\n

McCann was in the reception area of the building. He was killed instantly. Eight others died in the explosion, including another lorry driver Joseph Fegan<\/a> (28), who was standing next to McCann.<\/p>\n

Four customs officials were killed: Frankie Quinn<\/a> (30), Patrick Murphy<\/a> (41), Ronan Gilleece<\/a> (32) and Marshall Lawrence<\/a> (33). Lawrence was from Scotland<\/a> and the only Protestant to die in the attack. The three IRA members \u2013 Noel Madden<\/a> (18), Patrick Hughes<\/a> (35) and Oliver Rowntree<\/a> (22), all from Newry \u2013 were also killed. Six other customs officials inside the building were injured, one seriously.<\/p>\n

One official, who was in the centre at the time but did not want to be named, told The Irish Times<\/em>: \u201cAll I remember was the bang and a cloud of dust and struggling to know which door was the way out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the bodies were badly mutilated. The emergency services had difficulty in establishing how many had been killed and later in identifying the victims when they had a final count.<\/p>\n

Kate O\u2019Hanlon said her father Vincie Trainor, a worker at nearby Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry, volunteered to help and travelled out to the bombed-out centre in one of the hospital\u2019s ambulances. What Trainor saw \u201cleft him speechless and disturbed for a long time,\u201d she says. \u201cThis stoical, hard man who though he had seen everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe did not talk a great deal about it but he did describe finding pieces of human remains scattered right across the road, over the surrounding fields and hanging from the electricity wires. He himself found a human head on top of a nearby greenhouse,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

McCann ended up \u201cin a plastic bag,\u201d says Mary; there was \u201cnothing recognisable left.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey got the full belt of it,\u201d she says of the victims.<\/p>\n

The Provisional IRA accepted responsibility for the blast later on the night and said in a statement that \u201cthe unintended loss of life was regrettable.\u201d But this was never enough for McCann\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never had closure,\u201d says Mary.<\/p>\n

She later asked the Historical Enquiries Team unit of the Police Service of Northern Ireland<\/a> who investigated McCann\u2019s killing in 2010 about a suspected fourth bomber who is thought to have waited outside the centre in a getaway car and escaped uninjured. The team could never confirm his identify and nobody was ever arrested over the attack. To this day, Mary still has trouble trusting people she meets.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t know who they are,\u201d she says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t trust anybody afterwards. It still lasts.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Newry bombing had a devastating effect on the wider McCann family. Cancer, which Mary\u2019s mother had beaten four months earlier, returned and she died 14 months after her husband\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt brought it all back,\u201d says Mary. \u201cShe threw in the towel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Artie Quinn says\u00a0the death of his brother Frankie, the third eldest in a family of 13, was \u201cjust immense\u201d and even 46 years later is \u201cstill very raw\u201d for the family.
\n\u201cIt was an extremely heavy burden on my mother, both mentally and emotionally. She never got over it. She lived another 10 years but that took her to her grave,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe effect that it can have on siblings and the wider family – you don\u2019t have what would be classed as a normal life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quinn, sitting in a Newry hotel, believes there was no justification for the attack on the Newry customs post in 1972, just as there would be no justification for any attack on any possible border posts that might spring up after Brexit.<\/p>\n

He feels the painful memory of the Troubles is too much for people in Northern Ireland to allow that to happen. Still, he is worried about what Brexit might bring.
\n\u201cI would have concerns that the symbolism of check points, queues and lorries have to wait to get checked out – the symbolism of division and disruption that would not be desirable,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would bring back memories of a time before when there was that visible division and nobody wants to see that again. If you take a straw poll around Newry, no one wants to see a return to that kind of violence no matter how romanticised it may be in the eyes of some. Only a minority would go to those lengths.\u201d<\/p>\n

His best friend<\/h4>\n

Conor McConville, now 76 and long retired as a customs official, knew all four dead customs men. Frank Quinn<\/a> was his best friend, he says. He attended Quinn\u2019s going-away party the previous Friday before his transfer from the customs centre at Belfast Docks to Newry. The day of the blast was just Quinn\u2019s second day on the job in Newry and the young customs official had high hopes from his job.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe said to me he was going to buy himself a brand new Hillman Hunter car,\u201d says McConville.<\/p>\n

Marshall Lawrence, says McConville, had got a transfer back to Scotland but delayed his return for two weeks to sort out his affairs. He recalls the Scot had a daughter with disabilities who \u201cadored him\u201d.<\/p>\n

Mary and her son Sean could not let the 40th anniversary of their father and grandfather\u2019s death pass in 2012 without marking it. They wrote to the local newspaper in Dundalk, the Argus<\/em>, calling for all the victims of the Troubles including civilians with no political affiliations to be remembered.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to make people remember somebody who was loved could be wiped out and never came back. There was a gap that never closed,\u201d says Sean.<\/p>\n

‘Those were terrible times and I hope that nothing like that ever come<\/strong>s back. The orange and the green both suffered, nobody gained’.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the letter was published in the Argus<\/em>, a woman who said she was the daughter of one of the dead IRA bombers dropped an unsigned handwritten note for the McCann family into the newspaper.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to say I\u2019m sorry on behalf of my father; so many people and families were destroyed that day,\u201d she told the family.<\/p>\n

The 1972 attack on the Newry customs office was not the first and would not be the last. There were 27 attacks recorded there out of 484 reported incidents on customs posts along the Border between 1969 and 1992, according to the 1993 book, The Northern Irish Land Boundary 1923-1992. Only three other customs outposts along the Border were attacked more.<\/p>\n

The psychological impact of another attack on the Newry outpost in 1976, was enough to force McConville out of work on sick leave. \u201cGet out the f**k; there is a bomb in this,\u201d the IRA man shouted at him after crashing a petrol tanker through the centre\u2019s gates and jumping out. He was just three feet away from the tanker when it crashed and momentarily froze before he shouted at people to run for it.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Terrible times\u2019<\/h4>\n

\u201cThose were terrible times and I hope that nothing like that ever comes back. They talk about the orange and the green, but the orange and the green both suffered, nobody gained,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsolutely no chance,\u201d says the old former customs man when asked about the chance of a return of customs checks returning along the Border. \u201cPeople power will dismantle any attempt at doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Brexit negotiations rest on a knife-edge, he is most critical of the DUP, the party keeping Theresa May\u2019s Conservative government in power, for their opposition against the EU\u2019s backstop proposal to avoid a hard border by keeping Northern Ireland<\/a> under EU economic rules.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the DUP weren\u2019t such idiots, the Border down the Irish Sea would solve the problem. When they say they don\u2019t want any border in the Irish Sea, they are talking bullshit. It already exists and all we would be talking about is an extension of what already exists,\u201d says McConville.<\/p>\n

Now a farmer, he speaks from experience: British department of agriculture inspectors regularly take blood samples to test his sheep when he transports them once a year to and from Carlisle for pedigree sales.<\/p>\n

Like McConville, Sean has concerns about the political situation in Belfast and London. He is concerned the lack of a Northern Ireland government at Stormont<\/a> and the fact that there are no nationalist MPs at Westminster representing the 56 per cent of Northern Ireland\u2019s population who voted to remain in the EU in the June 2016 referendum. He feels this means the importance of the Border issue in London is lost.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is nobody taking responsibility in the North and for the North and both,\u201d adds his father Pearse. \u201cThe worse thing you can do in the North is to let things drift.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mary sees the quick Brexit-related visits of UK cabinet ministers and politicians to the Border as tokenism, calling them \u201cone-day wonders\u201d \u2013 \u201cthey don\u2019t care because they are not living here,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

Sean uses the building his grandfather was killed in as an example of how trouble can escalate and how a building representing a UK government department is targeted and how it ultimately becomes a place with people to be protected.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are impeded from going about their day-to-day business and if there is something like these checks, they build resentment. Resentment is going to spill over into anger and this building bore the brunt of this anger,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He laughs off the idea that technology as proposed by hard Brexiteers like David Davis<\/a> and Boris Johnson<\/a> could be a solution along the Border to avoid the need for customs check points.<\/p>\n

‘Mary has painful, first-hand experience of the fragility of the Border region. She fears for the fallout from Brexit if the politicians get it wrong’.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology didn\u2019t work particularly well before; we had lookout towers, helicopters flying around, infrared cameras,\u201d remarks Sean, who says he \u201cgrew up with the sound of helicopters.\u201d<\/p>\n

McConville displays a clear love for the Border region he now farms. He notes that its drumlins, relics of the Ice Age, dominate the topography of the area; he describes them as \u201ca gentle slope up one side and a steep side down the other.\u201d Metaphorically, they match the gradual climb to peace in Northern Ireland over the past five decades but also the potential for it to fall away suddenly with something like Brexit.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the air, they look like eggs in a basket,\u201d he says of the little hills that dot the landscape.<\/p>\n

Mary has painful, first-hand experience of the fragility of the Border region. Still bitter about her father\u2019s killing, she fears for the fallout from Brexit if the politicians get it wrong. She is particularly concerned about the reaction of those not old enough to remember the Troubles. Her son shares her view and is worried too that the Border youth have a romanticised view of the IRA\u2019s conflict that would not help.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn awful lot of people around here wouldn\u2019t know. You see if Brexit brings the violence back, they will be younger and they will have no fear because they won\u2019t remember,\u201d says Mary, who will never forget.<\/p>\n

First appeared in the Irish Times<\/p>\n

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