Kingsmill massacre

In the Kingsmill massacre on January 5, 1976, ten Protestant men were killed in South Armagh, Northern Ireland, by members of "South Armagh Republican Action Force". It has been alleged that this was a cover name for the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

The massacre

The victims were textile workers returning home to Bessbrook in a Ford Transit mini-bus along the Whitecross to Bessbrook road. Shortly after passing through Whitecross, at around 17:40, the vehicle was stopped by a group of about twelve armed men waiting on the road. The van occupants were ordered out and the single Catholic identified was ordered to walk away. The remaining men were shot, with over one hundred rounds expended in less than a minute. Ten men died at the scene, and one survived despite having eighteen wounds.

The perpetrators

The Kingsmill deaths were a revenge attack, in response to the many unsolved Ulster Volunteer Force sectarian killings of Catholics in the area. Specifically it was retaliation for six killings the previous day; three Catholic men were killed in Whitecross and three in Ballydougan. Journalist Susan McKay has alleged that the loyalist killings were carried out by a gang which included men who were dual members of the illegal UVF and the British security forces. This gang was responsible for multiple sectarian murders, including the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombs, which killed 33 people.

Although a group called the South Armagh Republican Action Force claimed the attack, according to Toby Harnden's "Bandit Country - The IRA and South Armagh" (1999), the Provisional IRA South Armagh Brigade was believed to have been behind it, as two armalite rifles used in the massacre were later captured by the RUC from them. The rifles were linked to 17 killings in the South Armagh area dating from 1974 to 1990. The RUC believed that future Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt was among 14 IRA men who planned the killings at the nearby Road House pub on New Years Eve and most likely participated in the massacre itself Harnden quotes a South Armagh IRA man, "Volunteer M", as saying that, "IRA members were ordered by their leaders to carry out the Kingsmill massacre". The same man thought that the attack was, "a gut reaction and a wrong one" .

According to Harnden's sources, the Kingsmill massacre was ordered by IRA chief of staff Seamus Twomey on the suggestion of Brian Keenan, who argued that disproportionate retaliation against Protestants was the only way to stop Catholics being killed by loyalists. However, more than twenty Catholics were murdered in Northern Ireland by Loyalist paramilitaries in the two months after Kingsmill. However, also, the full extent of security force direction of loyalist paramilitary activity, and the strategy that lay behind it, was not known at the time.

According to the IRA informer Sean O'Callaghan, then said to be head of the IRA Southern Command, "Twomey and Keenan did not consult with the Army Council on it and there was a lot of shit about it afterwards. Gerry Adams wasn't happy about it and said something like, 'there'll never again be another Kingsmills' ". Keenan went on to serve on the IRA Army Council.

The aftermath

On January 7 the British government officially announced the transfer of an Special Air Service unit into South Armagh. However, according to former British military intelligence officer, Colin Wallace the SAS had been deployed there since 1971, and were engaged in covert operations. Wallace, and another former British Army intelligence officer, Fred Holroyd, alleged that elements of the RUC Special Branch, MI5 and Military Intelligence, in various SAS sponsored guises, had been running loyalist 'pseudo gangs', that included RUC and UDR members, to carry out sectarian assassinations and bombings.

According to an Irish parliamentary report, the SAS was organised as follows,: 14th Intelligence (14 Int). The SAS, though not officially deployed in Northern Ireland until January 1976, had a proxy intelligence role via 14th Intelligence - a company of special surveillance units created to replace the discredited Military Reconnaissance Force in 1972 / 73. Former SAS officer Ken Connor - one of the team which recommended the creation of 14 Int - explained: “The SAS developed a selection procedure, ran the induction course and training and staffed the upper echelons of the company with SAS officers. That gave the Regiment a means of maintaining its influence over an area that technically should have been controlled by the Intelligence Corps... Fourteen Int was organised into three detachments, each about the size of an SAS troop. Weapons used in the killing of the Reavy’s and the O’Dowds were later linked to killings involving British Army Captain Robert Nairac of Fourteen Int (SAS) and numerous members of British security forces in the RUC and the UDR.

The IRA did not officially claim the killings, but stated on January 17 1976, "The Irish Republican Army has never initiated sectarian killings ...[but] if loyalist elements responsible for over 300 sectarian assassinations in the past four years stop such killing now, then the question of retaliation from whatever source does not arise" .

The mid 1970s were a period of savage sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The UVF killed 250 Catholic civilians in 1974-76 while the IRA killed 91 Protestant non combatatants. In late 1976, the IRA leadership met with representatives of the loyalist paramilitary groups and agreed to halt random sectarian killings and car bombings of civilian targets. The loyalists revoked the agreement in 1979, after the IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten but the pact nevertheless halted the cycle of sectarian revenge killings until the late 1980s, when the loyalist groups began killing Catholics again in large numbers. Nevertheless, sectarian killings never again reached the levels of the mid 1970s .

Future UVF, then (after UVF expulsion) Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), leader Billy Wright cited the massacre as the reason he subsequently got involved in paramilitarism; "I was 15 when those workmen were pulled out of that bus and shot dead. I was a Protestant and I realised that they had been killed simply because they were Protestants. I left Mountnorris, came back to Portadown and immediately joined the youth wing of the UVF. I felt it was my duty to help my people and that is what I have been doing ever since" .

No one has ever been charged in relation to the deaths. In 1999, Ian Paisley used parliamentary privilege in the British House of Commons to name those he believed responsible - apparently quoting from a "police dossier" Paisley's claims have been disputed, not least by the sole survivor of the Kingsmill massacre, Alan Black, and by the person accused by Paisley of being a well-known republican who set up the Kingsmills massacre. The latter was Eugene Reavey whose three brothers were killed by UVF assassins the day before, three of six nationalists shot that day by loyalist gangs staffed by British security force members.

Susan McKay, author of Northern Protestants, a troubled People wrote in the Irish Times (February 25 2006):

As soon as he heard that the Rev Ian Paisley had stood up in the House of Commons and said Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmills massacre, Alan Black went straight to the Reaveys' house in Whitecross, south Armagh. He told Reavey that he knew he was innocent. The PSNI has stated that it had no reason to suspect Reavey of any crime, let alone of masterminding one of the worst atrocities of the Troubles. Paisley's Westminster claim, that Reavey was a "well-known Republican" who had "set up" the massacre, was made under parliamentary privilege.

The [then Northern Ireland]deputy first minister, the SDLP's Séamus Mallon, expressed outrage. Reavey went to the chief constable of the RUC, Ronnie Flanagan. Flanagan said he had "absolutely no evidence whatsoever" to connect him with the massacre, and that no police file contained any such allegation.

The Dead

• John Bryans
• Robert Chambers
• Reginald Chapman
• Walter Chapman
• Robert Freeburn
• Joseph Lemon
• John McConville
• Robert Walker
• Kenneth Wharton
• James McWhirter