Sunday Times: Bomber who lost faith
Jerry Martín
From the Sunday Times, 29/03/98
Former terrorist Vincent McKenna tells Liam Clarke of his recruitment
to the IRA and of the disillusionment that turned him into a
campaigner for peace
Bomber who lost faith
VINCENT McKenna is well known in Northern Ireland as a peace
campaigner and an idealistic PhD student, whose Charter for Change
group is working for an honourable accommodation between the loyal
orders and nationalist residents along contested march routes.
Until now he has never spoken publicly about his past as a member of
the East Tyrone brigade of the IRA, working closely with Jim Lynagh,
the IRA hawk who died in a hail of SAS bullets at Loughgall.
Now McKenna tells his story, from the day he decided to join the IRA
as a 12-year-old schoolboy to the day he left it, after confronting
Caoimhghin O Caolain, the Sinn Fein TD who has worked exclusively on
the political side of struggle, with evidence that the IRA leadership
was in secret contact with British intelligence. "When Caoimhghin told
me it was true, I felt betrayed, absolutely, totally and completely,"
McKenna said.
His decision to join the IRA was made in an emotional atmosphere at
the wake of his uncle. Sean McKenna was a flamboyant IRA leader who
carried a black, pearl-handled pistol in his belt. The preparation for
his funeral came as a culture shock to young Vincent, whose best
friend, Trevor Stewart, was the son of a policeman. For two nights
masked men stood guard around the coffin.
"When they changed over, some of them used to take off their
balaclavas and sit on the bed and talk to me. I asked one, 'Can I join
the IRA like you?' and he told me, 'You'll have to wait a few years
yet, Vincent.' But he gave me an IRA beret and asked me to keep and
guard it."
Vincent began to paint IRA slogans all over the mainly loyalist town
of Aughnacloy where he lived, fought with Protestants in the street
and plastered the walls of his bedroom with republican regalia.
On July 10, 1980, he told his mother, Bernadette, he was leaving home
to join the IRA. "I'll get the guards to send you back," she told him
despairingly.
Monaghan was the base for a tough and secretive IRA unit. Run by
Lynagh, it had carried out a series of killings across the border in
Co Tyrone. "We have enough killers," an IRA officer told McKenna,
encouraging him to work instead on the campaign for political status
for IRA prisoners in the Maze, where his cousin Sean had just embarked
on a hunger strike.
Through this political work, McKenna met O Caolain, a former Fianna
Fail supporter who had left his job in a bank to devote himself
full-time to Sinn Fein. Unlike O Caolain, McKenna joined the IRA's
youth wing, Fianna Eireann, a low-level outfit which involved little
more than occasional drill.
At night, to prove himself worthy of full IRA membership, he would
walk the 13 miles to Aughnacloy to gather information on the security
forces who lived there and try to burn their homes.
By 1983 he had been arrested and was facing extradition from the
republic on charges of attempted murder and arson. In court he was
amazed to be introduced, by his lawyers, to a Northern Ireland Office
official who offered to drop all but the most minor charges if he
would travel voluntarily across the border in the official's car.
McKenna went to Sinn Fein headquarters to ask advice and was told by
Joe Cahill and Seamus McGarrigle to refuse the deal.
However, the Monaghan-based IRA cells had by now decided that McKenna
was a valuable recruit who could gather intelligence around
Aughnacloy. They secured clearance from the leadership for him to
surrender to police in Aughnacloy in 1984. In return, attempted murder
charges were reduced to arson and, after a period on remand, he walked
free.
It was on remand, in Belfast's Crumlin Road jail, that he was accepted
into the IRA and taught how to make incendiaries, letter bombs, fire
bombs and timing devices, and how to prepare under-car booby traps. He
was also given anti-interrogation lectures. "The advice was to think
of your interrogators as homosexuals so you would have contempt for
them. This reflected the traditional Catholic ethos of the IRA at the
time."
On release, he was given more intensive bomb classes in a series of
underground training bunkers near the home of Kevin McKenna (no
relation), former IRA chief of staff, in Scotstown, Co Monaghan.
He divided his time between the political struggle to drive Ruairi O
Bradaigh and the old-style leadership out of Sinn Fein and helping a
new military strategy, devised by Lynagh, to drive loyalists out of Co
Tyrone.
Lynagh was in prison in Portlaoise until early 1986 and McKenna built
up their relationship by visiting him. Lynagh outlined a strategy,
which he said was based on Maoism, of "getting anti-national elements
out of Tyrone and creating a liberated zone". McKenna said: "Our idea
was that we secure an area and then push it outwards. Jim knew how to
handle explosives and saw a great role for big bombs in the right
places."
He spoke of assassinating Ulster Defence Regiment members who intended
to buy farms, in order to claim back the county field by field. It was
effectively a policy of ethnic cleansing against Unionists, but
McKenna did not grasp the nakedly sectarian bottom line of the
strategy until years later. On Lynagh's release, McKenna worked for
him gathering intelligence in Aughnacloy. He joined local Gaelic
football and darts teams as a cover to visit the town and paced out
the perimeters of UDR bases, which were later mapped out in Monaghan
to try to identify strategies for attack.
On one of his intelligence gathering trips he was arrested and
interrogated by the RUC Special Branch in Gough barracks. They asked
him to become an informer and the extent of their knowledge of the IRA
disturbed him. "From what they said it was clear that they wanted Jim
Lynagh, Paddy Kelly in Monaghan town and Kevin McKenna, who lived
nearby. I was offered money and a gun, which I was asked to put in
McKenna's car. I refused and when I got out I told Lynagh everything."
The incident built up trust with Lynagh who sent McKenna on a computer
course so that they could build up a comprehensive database of the
security forces in Co Tyrone in preparation for a war of annihilation
against them. "Jim believed the campaign had another 20 years to run
and that any negotiation before that was premature."
Before this strategy could get under way, Lynagh was killed in one of
the attacks designed to clear security forces from the liberated zone.
The raid was on a remote RUC station at Loughgall, but the SAS had
staked out the building and opened fire, killing Lynagh and other
terrorists, as well as a passer-by, Anthony Hughes.
McKenna's disillusion set in with Lynagh's funeral, at which Gerry
Adams made a speech condemning contacts with the British. Later the
leadership circulated the story that the ambush had been possible
because all remote stations were now guarded by the SAS, but many IRA
members suspected that the dead men had been set up because of their
militancy.
The theory appeared to be confirmed when, in 1990, McKenna found a
document minuting a meeting between an IRA man and a representative of
British intelligence. "At first I thought I had found a tout, but when
I asked Caoimhghin he told me the IRA were in the process of talking
not only to the Brits but to the Irish government and the SDLP. He
said he honestly didn't know how long it had been going on."
McKenna no longer suspects that the Loughgall dead were set up by the
IRA leadership but he does believe that British intelligence
considered it a priority to kill Lynagh and a close associate, Paddy
Kelly, because they feared their 20-year ethnic strategy would drive
the hope of peace negotiations into the next millennium.
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Jerry Martín.
My tongue has a phenomenal pain threshold.
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