00:00.10 - 00:00.18
Football
Commentator
Still a Dublin free on the home
70 yard line and Gayle Driscal’s
going to take.
00:00.22 - 00:00.26
Football
Commentator
And it goes to Peter
Stevenson, the whole Dublin team standing up there for a moment.
00:00.27 – 00:00.35
Football
Commentator
This is Mickey Lynch, and
Alan Larkin grabs hold of him there but the referee waves on the play, gives
the Derry man the advantage.
00:00.35 – 00:00.40
Football
Commentator
Up to John O’Leary, as
Brian Mullan has gone back to try to cover up, O’Leary now in towards Tom…
00:00.41 – 00:00.49
Football
Commentator
It’s a goal, a goal, it’s a
great goal! A great goal by John O’Connell, oh what a lovely goal!
00:00.56 – 00:01.00
Newsreader
The funerals have taken
place of the two victims killed in Tuesday’s attack at McGleenon’s
Bar in Armagh.
00:01.01 – 00:01.09
Newsreader
45-year-old John McGleenon was shot in the chest while 32-year-old Patrick
Hughes died, as the gunmen detonated a no warning explosion.
00:01.28 – 00:01.31
Victim
Is everything ok?
00:01.31 – 00:01.32
British Army 1
Have you your licence?
Step out of the car.
00:01.35 – 00:01.36
British Army 2
Come, out!
00:01.38 – 00:01.39
British Army 2
Come, quickly, come!
00:01.44 – 00:01.46
British Army 2
Get down, Get down!
00:01.49 – 00:01.53
British Army 1
Hey Stop, stop, stop –
stop!
00:01.57 – 00:02.04
Newsreader
The area was cordoned off
and at first light this morning British Army technical experts went in to
examine the bodies in case they had been booby-trapped.
00:02.08 – 00:02.10
Newsreader
Who do you think might be responsible?
00:02.11 – 00:02.18
Politician
Well ask anybody around
here and they'll tell you. This is within the, what we described as the murder triangle.
00:02.19 – 00:02.27
Portadown to Coalisland, up to Aughnacloy where
there have been more sectarian assassinations per head of the population than
anywhere else in Northern Ireland.
00:02.28 – 00:02.34
Politician
The awful thing is that not a single one has been sort of made amenable to justice for
them.
00:02.35 – 00:02.45
Fr Raymond Murray
Assassinations and murders,
UDA, UVF, UDR and Mi5, Mi6 politicians and murder gangs.
[Music]
00:02:59 – 00:03.13
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
The borderland of South
Armagh, an area of Ireland steeped in Celtic mythology, where the ghosts of Cuchulain, Queen Maeve, Finn McCool and Cailleach Bhéara haunt the county's many burial cairns and crypts.
00:03:15 – 00:03.30
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Its rugged slopes, green fields
and sweeping plains reach out to the fews that cradle
the resting places of 18th century poets such as Art McCooey,
Pádraig Mac Aliondain
and Séamus Mór MacMhurchaidh.
00:03:31 – 00:03.36
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
A land where ancient quarrels
have been settled but yet find time to reignite.
00:03:39 – 00:03.44
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
There's an ironic tragedy
between the beauty of this land and the dark secrets it holds.
00:03:51 – 00:03.56
Alan Brecknell
My father met my mother in
the late 60s and they got married and set up home in Belfast.
00:03:57 – 00:04.05
Alan Brecknell
At that time my father was working
in the Rolls-Royce factory in Belfast, until some of his work colleagues found
out he was a Catholic and he had to leave.
00:04:07 – 00:04.13
Alan Brecknell
He then worked as a postman
in the area for a while. At this stage we were living in the Stranmillis area of Belfast.
00:04:15 – 00:04.22
Alan Brecknell
There was a small number of
Catholic families living in the area at the time and we'd been warned on a number of occasions it was time to move out.
00:04:23 – 00:04.37
Alan Brecknell
I suppose the final straw
for us was whenever a pipe bomb was left in one of our near neighbour’s windowsills
and mommy and daddy obviously said at that stage it was time to move out of
Belfast, and the decision was taken to move on at that stage.
00:04:41 – 00:04.49
Alan Brecknell
Daddy being from Birmingham,
Mummy wanted to move there, she felt it would be safer, but my father loved the
countryside so, and loved South Armagh, so we ended up there.
00:04:52 – 00:05.01
Alan Brecknell
I suppose my last
recollections of my father are him leaving to go to the hospital to visit mummy
and my new sister Roisin, she was only two days old at the time.
00:05:02 – 00:05.08
Alan Brecknell
And that's really the last
that I can remember of him was seeing him going out through the front door to visit
them in the hospital.
00:05:12 – 00:05.21
Alan Brecknell
That particular
evening my aunt was with my father and the intention was to stop at Donnelly’s
bar on the way home and have a celebratory drink with his workmates.
00:05.26-00:05.49
Alan Brecknell
They'd only just arrived
about the same time as the gunmen. As they arrived
they shot up the front of the bar shooting Patsy Donnelly and killing him
almost immediately. Michael Donnelly, the bar owner’s son ran into the bar and
hid behind the door. He was followed into the bar by the gunmen who spread the
inside of the building with bullets.
00:05.54-00:06.00
Alan Brecknell
Shooting my father and a number of other individuals and seriously injuring them, they
then threw in a bomb.
00:06.05-00:06.18
Alan Brecknell
A piece of shrapnel hit
Michael Donnelly in the back of the head and killed him almost instantly. The
bomb exploded and my father was probably already dead because he'd been shot
before that.
00:06.21-00:06.41
Anne Cadwallader
I came to work in Ireland
in 1981 and I found myself increasingly drawn to cases of miscarriage of
justice when nobody else was taking a particular interest, and also in the
potential for the state to take life illegally, and as a journalist you're
always looking for stories that nobody else is investigating.
00:06.42-00:07.17
Anne Cadwallader
It was an ordinary Sunday morning
and I was reading the paper and a name sprang out of the page at me, Brecknell, somebody called Brecknell
had been killed in South Armagh some time previously and I thought ‘Brecknell?’, that's not a
South Armagh name. So I managed to contact the family and went down to meet them,
and I asked eyewitnesses who'd seen how Trevor Brecknell
had been killed to explain to his widow who was sitting in the room with me
exactly what had happened, and it was a shocking, shocking experience. It was
the first time that Anne Brecknell had heard how her
husband had been murdered.
00:07.18-00:07.27
Alan Brecknell
I think the shock of finding
out what we found out that day brought it home to the family really
how little we knew about my father's killing and who was actually
responsible for it.
00:07.29-00:07.55
Anne Cadwallader
I phoned my news desk
expecting them to leap on the story and say “Give us everything
you've got,” but the reaction was quite different it was “Oh no, not another Catholic
sob story”. I was just so, so disappointed and hurt but that was a reaction in
Dublin to what I had discovered. But I pushed for the story to be written and
in the end it was.
00:07.55-00:08.10
Alan Brecknell
In and around this time new
information started to emerge about what would have been known as loyalist attacks
in the area and I suppose I didn't know much more about what had happened other
than a group called the ‘Red Hand Commando’ had claimed responsibility for the
attack.
00:08.12-00:08.37
Alan Brecknell
So at this time we began to ask questions
of myself about what I did or didn't know about what actually happened and I
started to ask questions of local people about what they remembered about what
they knew about that night. But we didn't know really where
to go to try and find out more answers, and at that stage someone mentioned to
me that the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry helped families in similar situations
to ourselves.
00:08.37-00:09.13
Paul O’ Connor
I think it was 1999 Alan come into the office
very softly spoken, very friendly and he was wearing a suit and we thought he
was going to sell us a photocopier or, or a printer, and instead he began to
tell us about the attack on the bar and about his dad and what happened in the
background. He was aware that there was now an affidavit available, as was were we that made a number of very
serious allegations about collusive behaviour and a number of attacks in the area.
So we agreed we would look at it in detail and look at
all the different attacks that happened in the area at the time. It was all
very new to us.
00:09.15-00:09.34
Paul O’ Connor
Up to that point we'd been
active in a number of cases we've been active around Bloody Sunday and Bloody
Sunday justice campaign was based in the office, and we agreed to call together
a meeting of witnesses and the GAA club in Silverbridge and witnesses came
forward, a lot of witnesses came forward.
00:09.34-00:10.35
Mark Thompson
And I suppose the
significance of the meeting was that you had families with evidence and
information - but you also had witnesses at the events - and the significance
of this being that there were so many connections, so many leads to follow and obviously
these had never been followed by official bodies or people in authority. Even though it's been hugely painful and
traumatic, and we've lived with this, you know this is something we need to
do. We need to take this forward, and
you know what happened in my home when my loved one was killed, or the incident
is connected to what happened down the road is connected to what happened over
just across in the other county and the other parish. That day was powerful in that
sense that everywhere in the room where you pointed to, you're either a witness
to something that had a lead, a piece of evidence that connected to another was
unfolding was the sense that there was this gang of security force people that
were supposed to protect people, supposed to bring people to justice, were
actually out conducting these killings and carrying them out.
00:10.38-00:10.51
Paul O’ Connor
You might imagine that in a
normal situation they'd been, they'd been asked to give statements, that the
police would have asked them for statements. This hadn't happened, and they
came forward, and we began to realize that we were looking at something much,
much bigger.
00:10.56-00:11.23
Paul O’ Connor
As we began to research
this and to talk to people in the local area many of them told us that there
was actually an officer involved in the original investigation he was actually
in charge although he was an officer of very low rank, but they believed was a
person of integrity, they believed he tried to get to the bottom of this but
couldn't. He had talked to the families a number of times over the years and
they - the families
- told us that he would be an absolutely vital person for us to talk to.
00:11.33-00:11.40
Newsreader
In Belfast the families of
those killed in an attack on a bar in Silver Bridge 24 years ago have appealed
for a fresh inquiry into that atrocity.
00:11.42-00:11.54
Paul O’ Connor
So we arranged a press conference at the Europa
hotel and appealed for him to come forward. We thought it unlikely, but in fact
he did, and he made contact with us shortly afterwards
through a journalist.
00:11.56-00:12.14
Paul O’ Connor
It was quite an
extraordinary meeting in many ways, we were accompanied by a number of family
members and this police officer - he was still serving - made a number of
statements at that meeting that made us realize of what we were looking at was
actually a much wider range of attacks, that what we were looking at was the Glenanne gang.
00:12.15-00:12.35
Alan Brecknell
The main thing to come out
of the meeting with Gerry McCann was the term he used ‘permutations of the same
gang’ were also responsible for at other attacks in South Armagh, including the
murders of Sean Farmer and Colin McCartney in August 1975 who were returning
from a semi-final of a football match, and also the Dublin and Monaghan
bombings of May in 1974.
00:12.37-00:13.11
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
In a series of coordinated
attacks during rush hour traffic, three no-warning bombs exploded causing
mayhem across Dublin city centre. Eleven people were killed in Parnell Street, 14
including an unborn child in Talbot Street and two women in South Leinster
Street in almost simultaneous attacks. Ninety minutes later seven people were killed
when the gang planted another bomb in the centre of Monaghan town, the Glenanne gang had effected their deadliest
attack yet.
00:13.16-00:14.08
Margaret Urwin
I got involved in 1993. I
met with some of the families and I was helping them very much on an ad-hoc
basis to begin with. It wasn't until 1996 that we began to get things more
organized and we got a legal team, Greg O’Neill solicitor and Cormac O’Dulichan, barrister. We gave the organization then the
name ‘Justice for the Forgotten’. That was in January of 96. We went on then to
try to get the Irish government to provide a public inquiry into the Dublin and
Monaghan bombings but all doors were closed to us until 1999 which was the 25th
anniversary of the bombings, and the families met with the then Taoiseach
Bertie Ahern for the first time.
00:14.09-00:14.38
Charlie Flanagan
Thank you, Lord Mayor, all
the Senators and to everyone present, and in particular relatives
of those involved and representatives of Justice for the Forgotten. I want to
in the first instance express my gratitude and thanks to the committee for inviting
me here today on this important occasion to lay a wreath on behalf of the government
on the 42nd anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
00:15.16-00:16.22
Derek Byrne
When I was walking in to the
garage in Parnell Street at the Westbrook Motor Company and at about 5:30 that
evening a car came in and they were filling it up with petrol, and all of a sudden I hear a mighty bang and next thing all
I remember is the priest giving me absolution. And then I was put into an
ambulance and was going around to the hospital and heard another explosion, and
then I woke up about seven hours after, I woke up in the morgue. I was
pronounced dead on arrival. I woke up and I didn't know where was actually, and
then I pulled the sheet or something off me and I started moaning, and one of
the ladies I got to know then after from the hospital, she came over and she
ran out and she got the porters and doctors. They
came and I was brought to casualty and I was rushed straight up to theatre, and
I was 18 hours in theatre and then I was three months in intensive care unit in
a coma.
.00:16.26-00:17.18
Fiona Ryan
It, it took an awful long
time to have any closure because I never actually saw that she was actually
really gone, and I remember as a child when the doorbell would ring or
something like that I'd always go into the front room and look out the window
to see who was there, expecting that she had just had been hit on the head and
had amnesia and she would remember something and come back to us. So that went
on for months and months and months, and if I would see somebody out that kind
of had a hairstyle like her or looked like her from the back
I always thought it was her. So, you
know, it's just very, very difficult not having closure.
00:17.25-00:18.23
Anne Cadwallader
Although at that time the Pat
Finucane Centre and Justice for the Forgotten were beginning to investigate the
activities of the Glennanne gang already, two very
ordinary Catholic priests living in the area had done a fair amount of
investigating themselves. They'd even
started writing to the newspapers and trying to get the two governments
involved because they realized that there must be a cohesive gang working in
the so-called murder triangle carrying out these murders. It had to be - there were too many of them, they
did everything they could to highlight it.
After one series of 17 murders they issued a statement saying that the
RUC had a 100 percent failure rate in convicting anyone for these murders, and
they went to Dublin, they went to Belfast, they wrote letters to the papers - yet
it seems that the police were just not interested.
00:18.24-00:18.33
Fr Denis Faul
I have put in over 40
complaints, as far as I can see it's ‘no go’ with any complaints against the
special Branch of the RUC, and that is why you have ‘no go’ areas where the RUC
cannot go in Northern Ireland.
00:18.34-00:19.48
Fr Raymond Murray
Father Denis Paul was a
friend of mine and he visited prisons of course, and then he was very interested
in what was going on around Dungannon. We saw that
there were a lot of murders in what we called a triangle - Dungannon
area right into the Moy and over to Portadown, and we were keeping a list of
all these deaths and then I decided that we should list them, publish them and
published the first pamphlet on that subject, the triangle of death. And it was a name that was taken up by the media
because ever afterwards they talked about ‘the murder triangle’. So we listed
them and the little information we had from relatives at the time, and published
the pamphlet, it went very quickly so we published a second one, and there were
additions to it and we published a third copy with more editions so that became
a central, essential document. And we
noticed that so many of these murders were happening, and it seemed to us that the
roads were open for these murderers to come in and kill people and get away
again.
00:20.17-00:21.26
Margaret Campbell
There was a knock at the
door shortly after ten. I got up and went and answered it and two men were
standing and asked me was Pat in and I told him ‘yeah’
so I returned back to living room and told Pat there was two men at the door looking
for him. We had been sitting at our
supper and I was on my way to the kitchen to set them on the table when I heard
him say ‘anything you want to know you better ask me here, I'm not going with
you’ and I immediately knew then but the tone of his voice there was something
wrong and these two men had him out through the front door. One drew a gun, a hand gun first and fired a
shot and when I realized what was happening the power had left my legs, I had
fell and just crawled tight up against the wall, and another man stepped in with
an automatic and opened up.
00:21.30-00:22.25
Margaret Campbell
I just lay there for a
moment or two until I heard the feet run and a crawled around to do what I
could, then I had to call for Donna, one of the children, and she came and I got
her to kneel down and hold her father's head for he was moving about through broken
glass and stuff, and I crossed the road to a neighbour - Mervyn - to come and
help me, and he came and took the children out. Later then the police arrived,
a doctor arrived, and the Ambulance came and we went to
Craigavon, but Pat had died on his way there going through Guildford.
00:22.32-00:23.00
Margaret Campbell
Out of the blue, it must
have been about a month, four weeks, the police came to the door and said they
had an identity parade lined up, would I come? I did ask if I could take somebody
with me and they said 'No, you're better on your own’. I didn't get time to
change clothes, I was put in the back of the car and no one spoke.
00:23.02-00:23.23
Margaret Campbell
I was took to Belfast, all
strange, not a sinner did I know, and when I got there they told me I had to go
into this room there was a line of men … and to go down it and see did I
recognized anybody.
00:23.28-00:23.29
I went in.
Margaret Campbell
00:23.36-00:25.13
Margaret Campbell
The policeman stood at the
door and there was one man inside the door, but he stood there and the other policeman
stood beside him, and I had to walk up this room to the line of men and as soon
as I got up I did recognize a face. I just couldn't. I didn't even go to the end
of the line and I turned and went back and I looked
again, and I was I thought I was going to faint. I made to get out and the
policeman stopped me and said to me ‘Did you recognize anybody?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’
but I was in a state. So
they let me through the door into the hallway and they told me to ‘compose
myself’. I was told to ‘compose’ myself, ‘go back in and put your hand on him’.
I went back in, but I could not touch him.
I couldn't put my hand on him and I told him I
couldn’t. I know I didn't put my hand on
him, I wanted out and away from where I was, and I didn't go back in again. But
I told them yes, where he was.
00:25.19-00:26.23
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
The man that Margaret found
it impossible to touch, the man she witnessed shooting her husband at
point-blank range, was Robin Jackson. Jackson was a Portadown loyalist who became
one of the conflict’s most prolific killers.
He was also an RUC agent nicknamed ‘The Jackal’. Five days before Pat
Campbell's murder, a man in whose home police had found 64 kilograms of
explosives, two grenades and over five thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, had
named Jackson as his accomplice. However, police failed to arrest Jackson, meanwhile
he was at liberty to murder Pat Campbell. Jackson had been a member of the
Ulster Defence Regiment, then the largest regiment in the British Army. He was
later involved in the massacre of the Miami Show Band in July 1975 when three
band members were killed by members of the Glenanne
gang as they attempted to plant a bomb in the musicians’ bus.
00:26.25-00:26.31
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Loyalist paramilitaries
Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville were killed instantly as the bomb exploded
prematurely.
00:26.37-00:27.40
Paul O’Connor
Well, the Ulster Defence Regiment
was the largest regiment in the British Army. It was geographically recruited
here in the North of Ireland and had only served here in the North of Ireland.
It was essentially a counterinsurgency unit that was set up at the beginning of
the troubles. It, itself took over from the discredited ‘B Specials’ which was
a special police unit that existed since the 1920s and it was clear from the
outset that the UDR was set up to recruit from within the loyalists and the
unionist community. They were almost entirely drawn from within that community. Declassified documents from British sources,
from the Prime Minister's office from the Ministry of Defence, the Secretary of
State's office make it quite shockingly clear, that from the perspective of the
British government it was acceptable to recruit someone into the regiment who
was an active Loyalist Paramilitary, who was a member of a Loyalist
Paramilitary group.
00:27.40-00:28.28
Hew Bennett
There's no doubt that the
creation of the Ulster Defence Regiment was influence for the British Army by
the experience in the Empire. These kinds of locally raised regiments that were
controlled and commanded by British officers, as an intrinsic part of the chain
of command of the British Army, were common through all of
the counterinsurgency campaigns. There was a real and genuine hope at the instigation
of the regiment that it would be truly cross community and would be
non-sectarian in character, but it became apparent very quickly that that was
not going to be the case, and the British Army was willing to live with the
consequences which were that this would be in many ways a sectarian regiment.
00:28.30-00:28.47
Paul O’Connor
Many people from the Loyalist
community joined the regiment to get weapons’ training and to steal weapons,
and according to the official documents that we found, the UDR was the largest,
single source of modern weapons flowing to the Loyalist Paramilitary Groups. Tt was a recipe for disaster.
00:28.48-00:29.10
Paul O’Connor
One of the things we
noticed whenever we started to do the research was the large numbers of guns
that were disappearing from both RUC and UDR armouries. Places like Glennanne UDR base, places like the Territorial Army Reserve
Volunteer Force based in Lurgan and Ballykelly, Ballykinlar, to name but a few.
00:29.02-00:29.59
Alan Brecknell
Here we have a pictorial of
just the devastating effect that one of these guns could have. This is a nine millimetre
sterling submachine gun stolen from Glennanne UDR
base on the 20th/ 21st of May 1971 and subsequently used to kill 11
people and seriously injure numerous other people in the attacks where these 11
people died. I suppose with the chart
also shows us is who was using these guns and here we can see that some of the
people who were involved in using these guns were also members of the RUC and
the UDR. And we can also see, as I said who all was killed and one of those
people who was killed in one of the first attacks with this gun, was my own
father who was killed in Donnelly’s Bar in Silver Bridge on the 19th of
December 1975.
00:30:02 – 00:30.12
British Army
General
We do not, as a matter of
course, as a matter of course our brief about patrols
looking for Protestant terrorist that is the domain of the RUC.
00:30.13 – 00:30.30
Paul O’Connor
The RUC, the police, was
created in the early 1920s at the same time as the state of Northern Ireland
was created and it reflected the contested nature of the state, as it was
almost 93% drawn from the one community and it had both a part-time element on
a full-time element.
00:30.30 – 00:30.42
Paul O’Connor
It was a militarized force
from the outset, it was framed on the colonial model of British policing and it
had a very fraught and fractious relationship with the Catholic and nationalist
community.
00:30.47- 00:31.04
Paul O’Connor
As a non-violent Civil Rights
movement grew in force during the late 1960s, it was the reaction of the RUC to
that movement and the attacks on the first Civil Rights marches by the police
that actually energized the movement, mobilized people, and lit the fuse for the
conflict at that time.
00:31.06- 00:31.35
Paul O’Connor
Then in the 1960s - and
1969 in particular - we had a situation where there was coordinated loyalist
attacks, particularly on the Catholic population in Belfast. Tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes,
the Irish army settled refugee camps along the border which put up the refugees
fleeing the north, and what was striking about these attacks was that the RUC -
the police - actually took part in the attacks on the Catholic community in
Belfast at that time.
00:31.36 - 00:31.43
Paul O’Connor
So instead of preventing
them they were active participants in the burning of whole streets in Belfast
at that time.
00:31.50-00:31.58
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
On the 5th of June 1976 the
gang attacked a small rural pub called the Rock Bar near Keady, County Armagh.
00:31.59-00:32.04
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
On approaching the pub they shot a local man called Mick McGrath as he left the
building.
00:32.06-00:32.09
Stephen Rea (Voiceover)
They then detonated a nail bomb,
which failed to explode.
00:32.15-00:32.24
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
What was striking about
this particular attack was that all those involved
were members of the local police force - the RUC - with some on duty as the
attack took place.
00:32.32-00:32.46
Paul O’Connor
In summing up and sentencing
these police officers the Lord Chief Justice went so far as to claim, and I
quote that “they were trying to rid the land of pestilence”, now that's the
kind of language that Nazis used about Jews.
00:32.52-00:33.46
Margaret Urwin
A very important landmark
for the campaign in 1999 was the fact that we acquired the affidavit of John
Weir who was a former sergeant in the RUC, and he had been convicted of the
murder of a man called William Strathearn and he had served several years in
prison, and he prepared an affidavit outlining the
activities of the Glenanne gang, and it became available to us in the spring
of 1999 through Tim Pat Coogan. For the first
time really we realized that the Dublin / Monaghan bombings was linked to so
many other attacks north of the border and that it was also linked to the Miami
show band, and that it was linked to the Dundalk and the Castleblaney
bombings as well and the murder of John Francis Greene all of which took place
in the Republic.
00:33.49-00:34.13
Margaret Urwin
In February 2001 Judge
Barron - who was conducting the inquiries into the Dublin / Monaghan bombings -
met with John Weir in Paris. The two
lawyers and myself also met with John Weir in Paris at the same time, that was
a separate meeting and I know also that we arranged for the Pat Finucane Centre
to meet with him at that time as well.
00:34.14-00:34.40
Paul O’Connor
I think that the
significance of the meeting with Weir was that we were able to test his affidavit,
we were able to test the evidence that have been put out there had to put
detailed questions to him. We spent
several days with him and put different parts of the jigsaw together and began to
understand what it was we were looking at, thanks to him, and thanks to other
evidence that was becoming available. But
of course he was central to the gang, so it was an
absolutely vital meeting.
00:35.00-00:35.39
John Weir
I was a member of Armagh
Special Patrol Group. Special Patrol Group
was a section of the RUC, they would have been the anti-terrorist squad that
dealt with riots and civil disturbance.
We did not deal with ordinary police duties, it would have attracted men
who liked that type of action, so it would have attracted officers who tended
to be more militant than the ordinary policeman.
00:35.40-00:37.10
John Weir
I was approached by Garry
Armstrong and Ian Mitchell, they explained to me that we should take the war to
the IRA instead of sitting back and it was- I think - a lot of people's belief
that the IRA was being allowed to operate without much opposition, much
hindrance, they explained to me they had already started this by doing a gun and
bomb attack on the Rock Bar outside Keady.
They asked me if I would be interested in joining what they were doing,
I told them I would need to know more about it but yes of course I would be
interested, but they did explain to me that there were quite a number of people
involved. After that a meeting was arranged, Lawrence McClure was there. Lawrence explained to me that it was only
right he should tell me that a lot of jobs had been done up until that, such as
Dublin Monaghan bombings, Reavey’s, Silverbridge bar
bombing and shooting.
00:37.12-00:37.21
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Some of the RUC men Weir
names were involved, over many years, in a number of fatal
bombings and shootings alongside paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force.
00:37.22-00:37.44
Stephen Rea (Voiceover)
They include RUC man
William McCaughey - a self-confessed killer- also RUC reserve constable
Lawrence McClure, believed to be one of the gang’s most experienced bomb makers,
who was convicted of causing an explosion and possession of firearms at The Rock
bar. For which, however, he only
received a suspended sentence.
00:37.45-00:37.56
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
RUC constable Ian Mitchell
was also convicted of causing an explosion at The Rock bar and possession of
firearms, but similarly, only received a suspended sentence.
00:37.57-00:38.24
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Gary Armstrong - who Weir also
names - escaped any conviction in the Rock bar attack, although the Historical Enquiries
Team- a police unit set up to investigate historical murders- says he was
clearly a principal offender. In a later
book penned by Armstrong after his release from prison, he clearly details his
role in the Rock bar attack in a chapter called ‘Unfulfilled Potential’.
00:38.25-00:38.36
Anne Cadwallader
Between the middle of 1972
when the gang really started its work, until the end of 1975, that's less than
three years, the gang had killed 89 people.
00:38.38-00:39.27
Anne Cadwallader
In one month alone in April
1975 the first person they killed was Dorothy Traynor, a Protestant woman
walking home with a Catholic husband through Portadown. Within three days they'd killed Martin
McVeigh, who was murdered as he cycled home from work in the same town - Portadown. A couple of weeks later they blew up a little
cottage that was being renovated, killing two brothers and a sister and the
sister’s unborn baby girl, and by the end of the month they'd also killed a man
called Owen Boyle who had been sitting at his kitchen table looking at
photographs of his newborn baby girl. So there in just one
month, in one small geographical area, you had four separate attacks in which
seven people were killed.
00:39.27-00:39.47
Anne Cadwallader
These attacks were remorseless and they ratcheted up the pressure until the end
of 1975 when a completely new development took place.
00:39:39-00:39.54
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
As with previous attacks,
the modus operandi of the gang was to strike two targets almost simultaneously. In Whitecross, County Armagh, the Reavey family sat down to watch a popular TV show when gunmen
entered the family home.
00:39.55-00:40.11
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
24 year-old John Martin was hit as he sat in his
chair, while 22 year old Brian was shot in the back trying to escape into a nearby
bedroom. Anthony, the youngest brother,
dived underneath the bed for cover before the gunmen sprayed the bed with
bullets.
00:40.12-00:40.38
Eugene Reavey
A little while later Anthony
heard them going out through the front door and getting into the car, and speeding off.
So then he ventured out from under the bed, and as he was passing Brian
who was in the fireplace, he felt his pulse and he knew that he was dead, and
he came on up into the kitchen then and John Martin, he was lying in a pool of
blood, and he felt his pulse and he knew he was also dead.
00:40:39-00:41.01
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
At around the same time
gunmen burst into the home of the O'Dowd family, only 17 miles away in Ballydougan, County Down. Again, the intention was to wipe
out an entire family. As they rushed
their way into the house, they opened fire on Barney O'Dowd who was hit a number of times. His
brother Joe, who attempted to charge the gunman, was killed instantly.
00:41.03-00:42.10
Barney O’Dowd
Well I was shot first in my
arm, I was spun around, and by that time I knew that Barry was dead, because he
was in the room, that they were in. But
I crawled out into the hallway and Declan’s body was lying there too. you he
was in the intensive care of course and was there for a week and they the
doctor came around that morning and he says ‘You should be… really had things
went according to logic,, he says you shouldn't be here, because those are
bullets going straight for your heart. For
no apparent reason in the world,’ he says’ there was neither bone nor gristle
nor muscle to stop it.’ But it took a
90% turn and took my kidney with it.
00:42.12-00:42.21
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
As the smoke settled, three
members of the O’Dowd family and two Reavey brothers
lay dead. 17 year-old Anthony Reavey
died later in hospital.
00:42.22-00:42.37
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Retaliation for the men’s
killings was swift and brutal. The
following evening a minibus of textile workers was stopped by members of the
IRA in King's Mills not far from the Reavey home
where the killings had taken place the night before.
00:42.38-00:43.01
Newsreader
These pictures tell the
story of the horror that followed. Up to 20 gunmen surrounded the minibus, its
Catholic driver taken to safety, the Protestants on board mown down
mercilessly. Policemen who arrived shortly
afterwards told of bodies piled on top of one another, the gore and the
personal effects give a hint of the carnage.
0043.03-00:43.49
Paul O’Connor
When we met John Weir in
Paris, one of the burning questions we had is why he and the others and the
gang had not retaliated for the Kingsmill Massacre. His answer was chilling. He told us there was a plan and the plan was to attack a primary school, to kill all the children in
the school, to kill the teachers. We asked
him why it didn't go ahead and he told us because the UVF leadership in Belfast
believed that the plan came from Army headquarters, came from military
intelligence, and had been planted, that military intelligence had wanted the
whole situation to spiral out of control and this was too much for the UVF and
they refused to go ahead. Even for them
it was a step too far.
00:43.59-00:45.38
John Weir
The plan that was decided
on was to shoot up a school in Belleeks, just on the
outskirts of Belleeks. So
when you say shoot up the school, do you mean kill the primary school children
in the school? Teachers? Children, teachers yes, yes. And you believe British
Military Intelligence was behind this? Yes I do indeed,
yes I do indeed. What was their motivations for this? If that had happened I
think there is little doubt there would have been a shocking retaliation from
the Republican side, a similar retaliation from the Republican side but it
would have eventually, in a very short time I should say, it would have put the
country into a proper Civil War situation. I think the country was almost already in a
civil war situation but if that happened, even the moderates on both sides they
were going to have to take sides and there was going to be, there was going to
be a serious, serious civil war.
00:45.40-00:46.51
Paul O’Connor
We had a meeting with the Chief
Constable, the most senior police officer in the PSNI, accompanied by an
assistant Chief Constable at their headquarters, and we asked them what did
they intend to do about the fact that a former police sergeant - William
McCaughey - had admitted publicly that he was also party to the plan to kill 30
children at a school and their teachers.
There was a pause, they looked at each other and they told us that
nothing had been done and there was no intention of doing anything, he wasn’t
to be rearrested, it wasn't to be reinvestigated, nothing would happen. And I think at that moment and after when we
left the building, we talked about it and we realized that where else in Europe
would a former police officer admit to a plan to kill a large number of children
in a school, and his former employer would say that he had no plans to
re-interview him as a result?
00:46.41-00:46.55
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
At Downing Street, in
London, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was faced with what he called
himself an ‘apocalyptic crisis’. Northern Ireland was spinning out of control
and civil war could not be ruled out.
00:46.56-00:47.07
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Amongst the options he considered
were outright withdrawal and self-government, if the people of the North were ungovernable he could not govern them in.
00:47.07-00:47.30
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
In an atmosphere of near
panic, Wilson called a council of war at his official country retreat,
Chequers, in the peaceful Buckinghamshire countryside. Also present was the
Secretary of State for Defence Roy Mason and the Secretary of State for Northern
Ireland Merlin Reese. On the security
side the team was headed by Sir David House the General Officer commanding
Northern Ireland.
00:47.31-00:47.50
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
While Wilson attempted to control
the worsening situation, the hawks within British military intelligence hoped
for a different outcome. One where all-out war could be waged on the IRA. In the meantime the Glennanne gang were slaughtering anyone but Republican targets.
00:47.51-00:49.03
Anne Cadwallader
So we asked ourselves why? Why these people? And we drew up two lists - one was of people
who were unlucky enough to be caught up in indiscriminate pub and car bombs and
the other list was of people who were targeted, who were watched, chased,
hunted at their work or at their home.
And we discovered to our surprise that every single one of those bar one were self-starters, people who were making something
of their lives. They were ordinary people. And then we asked ourselves why? Why these people? And the theory we came to was that Frank Kitson, in his classic manual of counterinsurgency
operations, wrote that ‘if you can't catch the fish either by rod or by net
then poison the water’ and our theory is that these ordinary people were
targeted to persuade other ordinary people to repudiate the IRA, to withdraw support
from the IRA. Of
course it didn't work it had the opposite effect. Violence begets violence, if people can't
trust the law they will take the law into their own
hands. It was completely
counterproductive as well as illegal and immoral.
00:49.03-00:49.25
Paul O’Connor
I think the stage we've
reached is an understanding of what collusion was, what it meant. Illegal cooperation with, toleration of, cooperation
between members of the security forces and loyalist paramilitary groups. Sometimes this happened on an individual
level, and sometimes this happened on a more structural level particularly in
the 1980s and 90s.
00:49.27-00:50.04
Paul O’Connor
There was no actual crime
of collusion in this jurisdiction, but clearly it involved a number of criminal
acts by police officers and / or soldiers, and it's been a phenomenon
throughout the troubles and we find collusion in many countries, we find
governments using pseudo gangs, they use deniable third forces in order to carry
out counterinsurgency, but in a deniable way.
I think the role of loyalist paramilitaries here was very similar, they
did what the security forces felt that they couldn't do, because in theory they
were bound by the rule of law and so they could use deniable third forces to do
it for them.
00:50.05-00:50.37
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
In Dublin, the campaign
group Justice for the Forgotten, had for years been demanding a public inquiry
into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. It still took seven years for the Irish government,
six years after the IRAs 1994 ceasefire, to agree to a restricted form of
inquiry. Under Justice Henry Barron the inquiry found in his own careful words,
and despite London refusing to cooperate with the inquiry, that the case for
collusion was ‘neither fanciful nor absurd’.
00:50.39-00:50.50
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Crucially, however, for the
families bereaved by other Glennanne murders north of
the border, Barron published a full appendix listing the ballistic links
between other key attacks.
00:50.51-00:51.44
Paul O’Connor
After publication of the
Barron report, it became obvious to us that there was still no response from
the state. That very serious allegations
of criminality were not going to be investigated, that there was going to be no
response, and so we decided that we should respond. We should bring people in - international
figures - so we approached a number of people, UN investigators, who’d worked
in El Salvador, people who'd worked on the South African Truth Commission and
others, academics, lawyers people with experience and we invited them to
Ireland, and asked them to look at the evidence, to meet with whistle-blowers, to
meet with families, to meet with PSNI, which they did, and many others, and to
draw their own conclusions, to draw up their own report, the International
Panel Report. Which is what they did,
and for us that was a very valuable experience.
To have people from outside the jurisdiction come here, look at the
evidence, and come to their own conclusions.
00:51.51-00:53.00
Doug Cassells
Ten years ago from 2004 to 2006 I had the privilege of chairing an Independent
International Enquiry into potential collusion by British security forces in paramilitary
killings of Catholics in Northern Ireland. They certainly were not a few bad apples,
there were a significant number of British intelligence agents from within the
RUC and the UDR who were involved directly in these killings or in collusion
with them, and their activities - their illegal activities- according to the
evidence we received, were known to their immediate superiors, including a
number of chief inspectors and inspectors.
But we were not able to ascertain at the time as to how far up the chain
of command this went. We do know that
senior authorities in London were on notice of information that should have
caused them to conduct further investigations of this collusion in Northern
Ireland. We found no indication that
they took that obligation seriously.
00:53.01-00:53.32
Anne Cadwallader
The next big step change
came when the Historical Enquiries Team was set up to investigate all the
unsolved murders of the conflict, which quickly was broadened to all murders
during the conflict and within that organization - the HET - there was a special
team set up to investigate claims of collusion or where the state was allegedly
involved in the murders. It was headed
up by a particularly intelligent, determined detective called Steve Morris.
00:53.36-00:54.06
Steve Morris
My expectations were that I
would conduct a full and thorough review of a number of
murders that were believed to have involved certain degrees of collusion. It was already evident there had been some degrees
of collusion at a lower level, and by those members of the security forces that
were directly involved, but as the review continued and we found out more, I
was surprised about the extent - and the degree - to which the collusion was
involved in some of those cases.
00:54.08-00:54.46
Steve Morris
The one case that totally surprised
me was the fatal bombing of the Step-in in August 1976 where two people were
killed where there was obviously involvement of police officers- that really
flabbergasted me by the lack of response from the RUC. It was quite evident from the outset of
looking at certain intelligence material and documents, that elements of the
RUC knew that some of their officers were planning and eventually carried out
the fatal attack at the Step-in.
00:54.47-00:55.03
Newsreader
So many others which have
happened in towns and villages throughout the north in the past seven years of
violence. The car was packed with explosives
and left outside the bar where the unsuspecting customers were inside enjoying
a drink. Without any warning the car
bomb exploded and within seconds the pub was demolished.
00:55.04-00:55.51
Steve Morris
What is incomprehensible to
me, is that that the RUC - to a quite senior-level - were aware that a bombing was
being carried out and in fact that a bombing had occurred, knowing who was responsible
and knowing who they were, they still did nothing about it. None of those officers were arrested until
1978, and even then they weren't arrested specifically
for the Step-in, they were arrested for other matters, so from August 1976
until December 1978 the RUC did nothing.
00:55.53 -00:56.40
Anne Cadwallader
For us, the Step-Inn bombing
was the smoking gun, because although we believed that it was very similar to a
lot of other attacks in the Glennanne series, the
difference with the Step-Inn was the Historical Enquiries Team under Steve
Morris managed to find all the paperwork, which showed that what the
authorities had known about the plan, leading up to the Step-in the carrying
out of the bombing itself, and the fact that although they knew every single
person who'd been involved in the planning, the all coordination, the determining
of the target, the making of the bomb, the storing of the bomb, everything, they
knew everybody and everything about this bomb, despite that and despite the
fact that two people were killed and, and a huge number of other people were
very seriously injured not one single person was ever charged or convicted with
that bombing despite the RUC knowing virtually everything about it.
00:56.41-00:56.45
Seán Murray (Interviewer)
What was your reaction all
those years later to the HET report?
00:56.50-00:57.37
Malachi McDonald
Devastated, and at the same
time a wee bit of relief that I had done all I could. Because I knew the army was there and checked
the whole thing that night. They checked
us coming up from Armagh and they told us that the army and the police was
within a couple yards of where the bomb was, and none of the RUC was ever questioned
at the inquest, and the HET told us one thing that they went through the
surveillance around mid afternoon and they knew that
bomb was there for days. So the state committed the murder
of Betty and that’s it, murdered - and while she was putting her kids to bed.
00:57.40-00:57.50
Malachi McDonald
The only part we can do now
is get the inquest put forward, and no more telling lies, they own up to what
they done.
00:57.57-00:58.53
Paul O’Connor
It was clear to us from
seeing the individual reports that were coming out from the Historical Enquiries
Team, that what we were looking at here was coordinated attacks, that some of
the same people using the same weapons, same farm houses, same hides, same
modus operandi were working together and that to truly understand what was
happening it needed to be looked at as a whole, that to do anything else would
be to atomise each individual attack, to individualize it which didn't tell the
bigger story. The story that was understood
at police headquarters, that was understood at Army Headquarters at the time,
that these were coordinated actions and indeed that some members of the
security forces were taking part in these attacks, and so we said to the HET that
the only way to properly understand this was to produce an overarching report. They agreed, they began to work on it, but it
was never completed and it was never delivered.
00:58.54-00:59.39
Kevin Winters
Well we think the prospect
of an overarching, wide-ranging, thematic report was pulled at a senior level
within the PSNI, because the conclusions would have been just too catastrophic,
it would have essentially made the case and in fact it would have amounted to a
state recognition and confirmation that collusion existed within the security
forces in this particular sector in the conflict, and I suppose politically and
for many, many other reasons that was just too uncomfortable for many people
and for the British government. That meant
pulling out of the overarching report and that, really, was just unacceptable
for the families.
00:59.40-01:00.18
Steve Morris
One of the fundamental
elements of my overarching report would have been for this question to be asked: ‘How is it, that a group of police officers
know that they can go back to a farm where there is a bomb in a car, having
been under surveillance, and yet they know they can go back the following day and
plant it and the bomb goes off? What gave them the confidence that they were
not going to be apprehended there and then, or at some later stage?’ For me,
that is the biggest question that needs to be answered.
01:00.23- 01:01.16
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Desperate to get to the
truth, before some of the elderly bereaved relatives died, Steve Morris’
unanswered questions were put before the courts in Belfast. Their lawyers
challenged the HET’s failure to provide the thematic report
that they were promised. Amongst the legal exhibits provided to the High Court
was a copy of Anne Cadwallader’s’ Lethal Allies’. The first time any such book was
accepted as a legal exhibit in the northern courts. In July 2017 the court delivered
a stunning victory for the families, ordering the Chief Constable to come up - within
weeks - with an acceptable, independent, fully resourced report to fulfil the
HET's promise. Humiliated, the Chief Constable appealed despite objections from
the bereaved families, 11 of whom had passed away since the court case began.
01:01.25-01:01.37
Alan Brecknell
It's been a long , hard road for, for the families to date, and I
suppose it has been very disappointing that the overarching report that would
have pulled everything together and made all the connections hasn't been
completed to date.
01:01.44- 01:01.47
Callum Janes
(interviewer)
Anne, how important is
today for the families?
01:01.48- 01:02.14
Anne Cadwallader
Important, frustrating,
yesterday was disappointing, we have the ups and downs legally in this story but
I know that however frustrating and upsetting it is for me, there are people all
over Northern Ireland who have lost families, who are getting up this morning wondering
if this is going to be the day when they finally get some justice.
01:02.016-01:03.21
Anne Cadwallader
So these days you never
know what the courts are going to decide but, there's no doubt about it in the
three months since our ground breaking victory in the courts on the 28th of
July 2017, although the PSNI and the state were ordered by the judge to
negotiate with us and come forward with agreed root to an inquiry and a report,
we have just discovered that they have done nothing in those three months -absolutely
nothing. So if you're an individual or a citizen and you're ordered to do
something by a court, you have to do it, but somehow if you're a police force
and you're ordered by a court to do something you can get away with doing
nothing for at least three months, and if they decide to appeal today, which is
possible, it could delay everything by a year.
Some of our family members are old and ill, they might not be here in a
year to see the report that they've waited and fought for so long come into
existence.
01:03.35- 01:04.30
Darragh Mackin
Is it a hugely pivotal day
for the Glennanne families and their fight for
justice for two reasons: the first one is that the court has- in the rare move-
ordered that the police should now take action and complete the report that was
promised to all of these families. The second issue, it is an unprecedented
move the court has asked for the police to provide affidavit evidence
compelling and setting out why they have not given any notes or records as to
why this decision was taken, the reality is this decision has been made clear
by the court is irrational and unlawful and it’s about time that justice was no
longer delayed to the families of Glennanne and that
justice was done and the police completed this report without any endless
litigation.
01:04.31-01:05.08
Eddie Barnard
It’s almost four years
since we started this case and I have watched family members from Dungannon pass away, and
there's other family members throughout the Glennanne
series who’ve passed away. For the families this had been an emotional torture,
a psychological torture and it's near time that George
Hamilton realized that enough is enough and the day of the dinosaur RUC days
are over. To have proper policing there has to be a fairness and justice. Thank you.
01:05.09- 01:06.00
Anne Cadwallader
So far
we've identified 38 people who are involved in the murders of a hundred and
twenty plus people who were members of the so-called security forces, we've
named most of them there may be others we don't know of, very few spent a day
in jail. Now that's too many people over a short a few years involved in 120
murders in one geographical small geographical area to be explainable by the
bad apple theory. As far as the victims
were concerned they were just collateral damage in
what was a state systemic policy of collusion, now as far as the families are
concerned they have the right to truth and justice. Some want apology and
acknowledgement others want their day in court.
We’ll support whatever road they choose.
01:06.01-01:06.46
Fr Raymond Murray
Well, it's amazing how the
truth comes out, as George Bernard Shaw, it was he that said it ‘comes like blood
under the door’. And it has happened from time to time, that some people, their
conscience has taken them and they have revealed different material and as the
years have gone by of course the families have been interested of trying to
find out the truth of what happened and who was responsible, but at the same
time a lot of these killings haven't been solved. When it suited the authorities
then they did give information about the UDA, UVF or collusion but in
comparison to the huge amount of collusion and the unsolved, it's not all, it's
not very great, yeah.
01:06.48-01:06.59
Margaret Campbell
I thought I was going to
get answers and maybe justice at long last, but I still have got nothing, I
still have got nothing.
01:07.00-01:07.15
Barney O’Dowd
Expose them, expose them
for what they did. Jackson went on ahead to, to kill lots more and they still
got the police protection.
01:07.20-01:07.53
John Weir
I think it went to the very,
very top. I think it even crossed the water, where politicians knew what was
going on and gave the go-ahead, and basically the attitude would have been,
you’re doing a great job boys but, don't be getting
caught and dropping us into problems.
01:07.55-01:08.15
Alan Brecknell
I suppose what still needs
to be done is they get an acknowledgement of what actually happened, the
British state through the period of the troubles, through the period of the
conflict tried to portray themselves as a neutral arbiter, at this stage that
story doesn't stack up anymore, the British state were involved in numerous
killings, they were involved with loyalist paramilitaries.
01:08.20-01:08.29
Alan Brecknell
I suppose my abiding hope
would be that we can tell that story, that we can honour those who lost their
lives to the collusive acts of members of the security forces.
01:08.42-01:11.49
Stephen Rea
(Voiceover)
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills toward Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars--
Along the road, a high, bare pilgrim's track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs' eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren't known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island's spire, its soft treeline of
yew.
There you used hear guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought the shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of ours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over
your shroud.