Crossmaglen Revisited / Telegraph Magazine 4.2023

Breege Quinn cries as she recounts what happened to her son, Paul, in 2007. The 21-year-old had an argument in a bar with the son of a local IRA chief, she tells me as we drink tea in the kitchen of her bungalow in the pretty rolling countryside outside Crossmaglen, South Armagh. Later that evening the man’s mother followed Paul into a chip shop in the nearby village of Cullyhanna. “She told Paul he’d be found along the side of a road in a black bag,” Mrs Quinn says.

She points across the fields to a house on a nearby hillside. She says the owner telephoned Paul three weeks later and asked him to help clean out a farm shed just across the Irish border in County Monaghan. When Paul arrived he was seized by ten men wearing balaclavas and boiler suits. They beat him with iron bars and nail-studded clubs. They broke every major bone in his body, then poured disinfectant on him to destroy DNA evidence. Paul died in hospital that evening. “I’m sorry. They left nothing to fix,” a doctor told his parents.

The Quinns live in a small, tight-knit community. Everyone knows who the local IRA men are. Mrs Quinn knows exactly who killed her son. She sees them when she goes shopping, in  church even. “They wouldn’t look me straight in the eye…they look away,” she says.

But knowledge is not proof. Fifteen years after Paul’s death, not one person has been charged with his murder. Despite numerous appeals for information and widespread outrage, nobody has come forward. “They’re all told not to open their mouths,” Mrs Quinn says. “The people are still ruled by fear of the IRA.”

She and her supporters even put up placards in Crossmaglen asking: ‘Is Paul Quinn’s Murder On Your Conscience?’. Most were torn down.

Mrs Quinn says her family was “devastated” by Paul’s murder, and calls her husband a “broken man”. Most days she visits Paul’s grave, whose headstone says he was ‘savagely beaten to death’. But she vows to “fight to the bitter end” to bring those who killed her son to court.

As for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which was supposed to end all paramilitary violence, she says: “It brought peace, but where do we go in it to get justice? I maintain Tony Blair let Sinn Fein and the IRA off. Once they didn’t kill policemen or soldiers, they could do what they liked.”

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I’ve come to Crossmaglen because 25 years ago I was one of hundreds of journalists camped outside Stormont Castle Buildings, a drab 1970s Belfast office block, to cover the climax of the 22 months of tortuous peace negotiations that led to the GFA.

I well remember those final 33 hours of non-stop talks: the swirling rumours of breakthroughs and setbacks, the arm-twisting and cajoling, the repeatedly extended deadlines and finally, late on Good Friday afternoon, the momentous announcement of a deal to end Europe’s longest conflict after 30 years of bitter bloodshed that cost 3,200 lives.

As the exhausted politicians departed, we journalists were left to digest an agreement whereby Unionists undertook to share power at Stormont, while nationalists and republicans conceded that Ireland could be reunited only with majority consent.

Has it worked? Where better to find out than South Armagh, the heart of militant republicanism during the Troubles? In 1975 this small protrusion on Northern Ireland’s southern border, roughly 20 miles in diameter and home to an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic population of around 30,000, was dubbed ‘Bandit Country’ by Merlyn Rees, then Northern Ireland Secretary, and the label stuck.

There were 1,255 bomb attacks and 1,158 shooting incidents in South Armagh during the Troubles. More than 160 members of the security forces were killed, plus 80-odd civilians and about 30 members of the Provisional IRA and Irish National Liberation Army. The IRA’s formidable South Armagh Brigade imported weapons from Libya, conducted some of the organisation’s deadliest attacks and built the bombs that caused such destruction in London and Manchester. 

South Armagh consequently became the most militarised spot in Europe - a virtual war zone. Police and army were flown in and out of fortified bases by helicopter, and regarded by the local population as an occupying force. It was so lawless and dangerous that two British governments seriously considered offering it to the Republic.

Thus I find myself driving down to Crossmaglen, its de facto capital, from Belfast’s international airport one recent afternoon, and discovering an astonishing transformation.

The rolling, green, gorse-flecked countryside, dominated by Slieve Gullion mountain, is as beautiful as ever, but gone are the ‘IRA’ and ‘Sniper at Work’ signs once nailed defiantly to telegraph poles. There are no longer any checkpoints, unsightly military watchtowers on the hilltops, convoys of heavily armoured police and army vehicles, or helicopters clattering overhead. 

One great Troubles scam was for farmers to claim compensation for livestock killed or injured by those panic-inducing helicopters. In 1994/95 alone, they lodged 38,634 such complaints and received £6.2 million. 

Crossmaglen has likewise changed dramatically for the better. I enter the town past a memorial to IRA hunger strikers and a hoarding commemorating 24 members of the South Armagh Brigade killed in the Troubles, but they feel more like historical markers than a threat.

Gone is the hideous, caged army sanger - a fortified observation post - which dominated the central square during the Troubles, though an ugly police station ringed by high protective walls remains. Named after one of the eight British soldiers killed in the square, the ‘Borucki sanger’ enabled the army to keep track of all movements in and out of Crossmaglen, and was several times attacked with mortars or doused with petrol and set on fire. The soldiers called themselves “bullet catchers”.

Once derelict buildings now house coffee bars, bakeries, beauty shops, a pizza restaurant, gym, ice cream parlour and children’s nursery. There is a smart new Credit Union, a fine new school, a new housing estate and a big new supermarket. A brown sign points to a non-existent tourist information office. “We put that up a bit too soon,” Joe Kernan, a local Gaelic football legend, chuckles.

An ordinary, unarmoured police car with blue and yellow livery drives past. Police officers now patrol on foot, give crime prevention talks and man stalls at community events. That would have been unthinkable 25 years ago, though the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), successor to the reviled Royal Ulster Constabulary, remains unable to recruit local youths.

The mood is palpably different too. There is no sectarian tension, not least because practically no Protestants still live in the area. Once insular and isolated, the townspeople no longer regard strangers with suspicion. Tourists have started arriving on ‘Troubles tours’, or to climb Slieve Gullion. East Europeans have moved in. “The town is buzzing,” says Linda McConville, a dentist who began practising in Crossmaglen two months before the GFA. Back then it was “dark and dull and grey.” 

There are only two visible relics of the Troubles. One is the police station, an eyesore which encroaches on the Crossmaglen Rangers’ Gaelic football ground. It is slated for closure, and the club wants to be given the land for a community centre to compensate for decades of what Eddie Hughes, a recent chairman, calls “occupation”. 

He tells me the army always treated the club, a symbol of Irish culture, as the enemy. Its helicopters landed on the pitch during matches. Its aviation fuel burned the grass. It banned floodlights and harassed supporters. Balls accidentally kicked into the base were returned punctured, or not at all. Vehicles carrying players to away games were searched “boot and bonnet”. Despite or because of that the team excelled, winning numerous titles and lifting the spirits of a town that felt besieged. “There was an element of defiance that knitted the community together,” says Hughes.   

The other relic is a hole in the wall of Murtagh’s Bar made by the sniper’s bullet that killed Daniel Blinco, a Grenadier Guardsman, in 1993. He was the last British soldier killed in Crossmaglen. Four years later Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick was shot in nearby Bessbrook, making him the last soldier killed in Northern Ireland. Since then the South Armagh Brigade has kept the peace, at least as far as ‘politically-motivated’ killings go.

The next day I explore the border created by Ireland’s bitter 1921 partition - the border across which IRA men would flee to escape the security forces or dump informers’ corpses. 

During the Troubles the smaller lanes leading southwards from Crossmaglen were blown up or spiked by the army to prevent their use, while the five larger roads had irksome customs posts and menacing checkpoints. Today it is all but impossible to discern where the UK and Northern Ireland end, and the Republic and European Union start.

Gingerly, I drive past the border-straddling farm in Ballybinaby of Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, the fearsome former IRA chief of staff who made a fortune smuggling oil and livestock from north to south or vice-versa. 

Gone are the two hilltop observation posts the army erected to monitor his activities. Gone, too, are the high corrugated iron screens he erected around his farm to thwart them. In 2015 the Irish authorities finally managed to convict Murphy for tax evasion, and he was jailed for 18 months. Nowadays he is seldom seen in Crossmaglen, say locals. A sign by his property advertises, without apparent irony, the Crossmaglen and District Community Safety Group.

The ‘hard’ border’s disappearance, and the end of the violence, have contributed hugely to Crossmaglen’s resurgence. The town is no longer cut off from its hinterlands to the south. Hundreds of its residents work in the Republic, where wages are far higher. Thomas Magennis, manager of Crossmaglen’s Eurospar supermarket, tells me 40 per cent of his trade is now in euros, with thousands of southern customers attracted by the north’s much cheaper wine and beer. Aaron Kernan, an estate agent, says he has rented about 50 properties to southerners in the past few years because rates are way lower.

The greatest threat to peace in recent times was the possible reimposition of a hard border post-Brexit. “Any attempt to put in any sort of infrastructure would be ripped out by the people. We’re not going back to being divided,” Pete Byrne, an SDLP councillor, says. 

Indeed the talk now is of Irish reunification, an idea propelled sharply up the political agenda by Brexit, Stormont’s frequent suspensions and demographic changes. “I’d like to think within a decade we’ll have a border poll,” says Declan Murphy, a former IRA prisoner who was released under the GFA and is now a Sinn Fein councillor.

Crossmaglen already feels more Irish than British. The tricolour, not the Union flag, flies in the square. A statue commemorates not the slain British soldiers, but those who died for ‘Irish freedom’. Shops accept euros. People have Irish mobiles and watch Irish television. Street signs are in Gaelic as well as English.

Over dinner at nearby Killeavy Castle, a derelict castle turned into a fancy hotel by a wealthy Australian with local roots, members of the recently-formed South Armagh Business Development Group tell me they’re determined to change the area’s image and encourage business investment. They explain that it’s an hour’s drive from both Dublin and Belfast and a beautiful place to live with hard-working people. They hate the outdated ‘Bandit Country' tag.

On cue, we meet Shona McNeela, 24, a racehorse trainer from Cambridge, who is bringing 80 English guests to her August wedding in Killeavy. A destination wedding in South Armagh? That, too, would also have been unthinkable not so long ago.

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Has Crossmaglen really achieved ‘normality’? Has the notorious South Armagh Brigade really melted away? Yes, say most ordinary townsfolk. “It’s history,” says Thomas Megennis at the Eurospar. “I don’t see any trace of them,” says Linda McConville, the dentist. Declan Murphy, the Sinn Fein councillor, says most of the brigade’s former members have gone into politics or gone home, their job done. But the truth may be a little more complicated.

Well-placed local sources, demanding anonymity, say the peace process split the Brigade, with a number of dissidents leaving to form the so-called Real IRA. It subsequently split again, with many traditional Republicans leaving in disgust as it morphed into a criminal organisation heavily engaged in smuggling subsidised agricultural diesel across the border, washing out the tell-tale marker dye, then selling it on at a hefty mark-up. The sources further contend that the authorities have ignored its smuggling provided it keeps the peace.

Byrne, the SDLP councillor, largely concurs. “I’ve challenged the South Armagh PSNI and Chief constable about the level of smuggling and other illegal activities that go on here as if a blind eye is being turned on it,” he says. 

So does Kenny Donaldson, a Protestant whose family have lived in South Armagh for 13 generations and who now runs a victims support group in neighbouring Fermanagh. “It’s true to say that some who were involved in the terror campaign have now become involved in criminal-based racketeering in this area, with almost a mafia-style operation,” he says when we meet at the Protestant church in Creggan, just north of Crossmaglen.

Though it has diminished, diesel smuggling in Northern Ireland still cost the Exchequer an estimated £30 million in 2020-21. Some undoubtedly still occurs in South Armagh. On back lanes around Crossmaglen many farms have high steel gates to thwart prying eyes. They’re called “Fuck off gates”.

The same well-placed sources say there was also an “unspoken agreement” at the time of the GFA that the IRA could continue to run its own “quasi police force” and “do its own housekeeping”. Beatings and other punishments have certainly been meted out to those who have crossed the local hard men, Paul Quinn being one of them. 

Again, Byrne broadly concurs. Even after the GFA “you had a group of people who felt they controlled the area, were the power in the area. It was like a boot on the throat of people in this community,” he says. “People were told there would be punishment beatings. They were warned if they didn’t do X,Y and Z they’d be meeting a group of masked men down an alleyway.”

That situation persists, he says. “Why are people who know what happened to Paul Quinn not speaking out? Because there’s still this fear…I find it appalling that 25 years after the political violence ended people still don’t feel comfortable giving information about a really brutal murder.”

I hear one more harrowing story before leaving South Armagh. Sitting in her neat Creggan home, Anna McShane tells me how her father, Charlie Armstrong, vanished while taking an old woman to Sunday Mass in Crossmaglen in 1981. His car was found across the border in Dundalk. He had nothing to do with the IRA, but Mrs McShane reckons he saw something he shouldn’t have.

For weeks his family hoped he would walk back in the door. For years they searched for his body - putting up posters, scouring ditches, even hiring divers to search lakes. For decades Mrs McShane passed her father’s abductors on the streets of Crossmaglen, but could say nothing. The family was warned to keep quiet. Friends and neighbours kept their distance. There was a conspiracy of fearful silence.

Nothing changed until the GFA 17 years later. Under pressure, the IRA finally agreed to help locate the remains of 16 people it had abducted and killed in the 1970s and early 1980s. The British and Irish governments established a commission to receive confidential information about their burial places while guaranteeing that neither the information nor evidence gathered from the graves could be used in criminal prosecutions. 

In 2000 Armstrong’s family was sent a hand-drawn map of a bog across the border in County Monaghan with an ‘X’ marked on it. After ten more anguished years, three digs and two more anonymous letters, his remains were finally found there - half-clothed, hands and feet bound with bailing twine and half the skull missing. He was buried in the graveyard of the church he never reached 29 years earlier.

Mrs McShane says she is now “at peace”. She has found her father, and accepts that his killers will never be held to account. “We felt if we went down the justice route none of the bodies would have been found,” she says of the families of the Disappeared. 

She adds: “I’d love to know exactly what happened, but what difference would it make? Crossmaglen is such a close community. We’re all married to each other. We know everyone. It would open a can of worms…If you’ve been fighting a case for the best part of 20 years and get to the other end you put it to bed the best way you can.” 

That is the price of peace in Northern Ireland. The GFA was a fantastic achievement, and it has ended three decades of conflict, but only by dispensing with justice; only by granting a certain impunity to violent men unthinkable anywhere else in the UK.

Mrs Quinn hopes her son’s killers will at least be tortured by guilt. “When they go to bed at night they can’t control their dreams,” she says before giving me a goodbye hug. “They have to think about what they did to Paul in that shed. They have to hear his screeching and begging them to stop.”