More than three decades on, the former British army officer, and now author of two books on the IRA, Jonathan Trigg still remembers the foot patrol in Tyrone, the farmyard and the suppressed rage.
Then a 23-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Anglian Regiment, Trigg and his platoon had been dropped by helicopter – the roads deemed too dangerous for them to travel on because of IRA roadside bombs. The British Army was deployed in the North from 1969 until 2007.
“We’d gone about two kilometres from the drop-off point. We were walking through a farmyard and ran into the farmer. A long-serving IRA volunteer. A bombmaker, that was his speciality,” says Trigg.
“He was loading the back of one of his wagons, farm stuff. He saw us come through. He just stopped and stood absolutely stock-still while staring at me. His hands were down by sides, fists clenched.
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“I got closer. He was actually shaking. I realised straight away that he was not shaking with fear. That’s for sure. He was shaking with suppressed rage. It wasn’t anger, it was rage. His jaw was clenched.
“The muscles in his neck were standing out. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that if he could get away with it he would have killed me with his bare hands there and then,” Trigg tells The Irish Times from his Essex home.
Later in his six-month tour in Tyrone from November 1993, based in Dungannon, Trigg came closer to the work of IRA bombmakers when he and his platoon found a bomb hidden by a road near Cappagh.
Having raised the alarm and called in bomb disposal teams, Trigg and his soldiers continued the search. Trigg looked over a waist-high wall near a derelict house. Partially hidden, he saw another seven explosive-filled beer kegs.
Trigg ordered his soldiers to halt. It was, he puts it drily, a “victim-operated” improvised explosive device. In a follow-up search, the soldiers found that a pressure pad had been hidden in the field covered by a door and sods.
“The idea was that the soldiers would walk over the covered door. That would create the circuit. The guys in the field were within feet of walking on it. The first bomb had been ‘the come on’,” he says.
Trigg, who served in the British army until 1998 and retired as a captain, says he has in recent years met many former IRA members in very different circumstances since he began to write the history of their times.
Getting people to talk has been slow work – perhaps unsurprisingly given Trigg’s background – helped significantly by Irish Academic Press publisher Conor Graham, who has published scores of books on Ireland over decades.
In 2023, Trigg’s book Death in the Fields: The IRA in East Tyrone, told the story of the IRA in that county. Now, he has written Death in Derry: Martin McGuinness and the Derry IRA’s War Against the British.
Trigg’s first encounter with a former member of the IRA as a writer, not as a soldier, came, he says, in 2021 in a Monaghan hotel: “He came in. He gave me the same look as the bomb-making farmer, that suppressed rage.
“I put out my hand. He made no effort to take it. I thought, ‘I’m not going to withdraw it. I’m just going to leave it, because we have to start somewhere.’ In the end, he gave it a very brief shake,” Trigg recalls.
Tyrone was very difficult to engage with. Trust is a huge issue. They don’t want books written
— Jonathan Trigg
The former IRA man insisted repeatedly that he would give 30 minutes “and not a minute more”. In the beginning, the answers were monosyllabic: “It was ‘Yes, No, I don’t want to talk about that’.”
In a while, however, the mood eased. By the end, they had talked for three hours, finishing only because Trigg had to leave for a long-arranged appointment.
“He had a raft of questions for me. I have seen this since. They are massively interested in how the British army were trained, what we thought of them, how we worked. Because they had always only seen it from their angle.”
Trigg has had many such moments since. For Death In Derry, he says he met last year with former IRA members in the Bogside, in Creggan, inside the city’s walls.
He had arranged to meet a man he identifies only as “Eamonn” in a lay-by in a small blue car. After he got in, “Eamonn” drove Trigg to a house nearby, parking by the side door.
“He left the keys in the ignition. The house was open. No one in it. In the kitchen, there was a table, a couple of chairs, a kettle, tea-making stuff. Nothing else. No photographs, little furniture,” Trigg says.
“The house is clean,” Trigg says “Eamon” told him, “We can talk without interruptions and without worrying about being overheard.” With the tea made, they sat down to talk. “We drank tea until it was coming out of our ears.”
“Eamonn” had clear opinions on deeply controversial issues. Firstly, he argued, according to Trigg, that the IRA in Derry was infiltrated from “top to bottom” by British intelligence and the RUC special branch for years before the 1994 ceasefire.
But he went further.
The brutal killing by the IRA of Patsy Gillespie in 1990, forced to drive a car filled with explosives into a British army checkpoint, and the Enniskillen bombing in 1987, were orchestrated by people within the organisation to “turn our support base against us”, he claimed.
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Trigg writes in his book: “In the kitchen of an old IRA safe house in the Bogside, with not a whisper of sound in the place, it was obvious that Eamonn wanted to say something more. The years weighed on his face.
“He was clearly desperately uncomfortable at what he was thinking of telling me, but it was also obvious it was what he had really brought me there to say, and it was about Martin McGuinness.”
A former senior IRA member in the city, and one involved in many attacks, “Eamonn” finally said what he had brought Trigg to hear: “I strongly believe Martin was an agent, or at the very least he was compromised.”
McGuinness himself strongly dismissed claims he was a British agent in 2006, and his supporters and others continue to dispute such allegations. The Sinn Féin politician, who died in 2017, became the North’s deputy first minister in 2007.
Decades on, Trigg argues, some former IRA members remain confused or feel betrayed by their leadership’s decision not to fully deploy arms supplied in the 1980s by Libyan leader Col Muammar Gadafy, although many in the North and elsewhere were killed or maimed with such weaponry.
Four shipments were landed, stored, mostly, in Munster arms dumps, before the Eksund was intercepted in 1987 carrying 120 tons of armaments, including three dozen RPG-7 rocket launchers and some 20 Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles and a 1,000 mortars.
Very little of the weaponry that did get through, bar some AK 47s, ammunition and some Semtex, was ever taken across the Border after the late 1980s, and much of the heavier weaponry was defective when it left Libyan arms stores. Trigg says: “To be honest, that still flummoxes me. And not just me.
“The majority of volunteers in Derry just scratch their heads. ‘Why didn’t we get any of it?’ they said,” says Trigg, who believes “a decision was taken at the highest levels” of the Provisionals not to use the deadliest equipment.
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Instead, he argues, McGuinness and others decided to “use it as a bargaining chip” because secret talks would have “evaporated” if they had hit British army bases from across the Border with mortars accurate up to 4km.
“They decided they needed to supply the IRA’s active service units in the North with just enough to keep going so that they had a military threat in the field, but not enough to swamp them,” he argues.
Life after the Troubles for former IRA members, Trigg argues, has offered different endings for many of those involved. Some people – some prominent, some not – have done very well.
In Belfast, he observes, some are living on the minimum wage: “They have no savings to fall back on. They’ll work until they get the State pension. Relationships have broken down, they’re estranged from their kids. Some are loners.”
In Derry, few, no matter the level of their unhappiness with McGuinness or Gerry Adams in the years before, and after, the 1994 ceasefire have drifted towards republican dissidents.
“They’ve opted out, if anything. They do their own thing. They’re taxi drivers or delivery drivers or whatever, plasterers. Their community knows who they are, but they’re not involved, any more.”
Most former Derry IRA members have more settled lives than those in Belfast, Trigg contends: “They got married later in life, often. The families know of their involvement, but not the detail. They keep that separate.”
The cultural differences between different elements of the IRA have struck Trigg vividly: “Tyrone was very difficult to engage with. Trust is a huge issue. They don’t want books written.
“By their nature, they’re quiet people. They’ve got a close family network, a network of friends. They don’t go shooting their mouth off,” says Trigg.
“When I said to the Tyrone guys that my next one’s ‘going to be on Derry’, they were going, ‘Oh, you’ll get people ‘speechy’ there because city folk are gobby. Same with Belfast.’”, he says, with a laugh.
“The Derry guys weren’t shouting off from the rooftops, either, but they were far more willing to talk, far more open about it, to be honest,” Trigg goes on. Already, his work on a history of the Belfast IRA is under way.
Death in Derry: Martin McGuinness and the Derry IRA’s War Against the British by Jonathan Trigg is published by Irish Academic Press at €18.99
