Madness reaching into the judiciary of Europe is the only explanation for the £10,000 awarded to the family of James Lynagh, the serial killer who was shot dead by the SAS at Loughgall 14 years ago. Yet even worse than this madness was the diseased culture of legal pedantry in this state which allowed Lynagh free to murder, though his identity and his murderous deeds were known to the security forces on both sides of the Border. Nor was he alone the beneficiary and victim of this system, which on minuscule points of law freed so many terrorists who then went on to kill again, before themselves being killed.
The horrible truth about the killings in Fermanagh, Tyrone and parts of Armagh through the 1980s is that they were the work of a very few ruthless men who had the demonic qualities which enabled them to get close to their victims and shoot them. Seamus McElwaine and James Lynagh, both from Monaghan, were two such men. Perhaps because they were from Monaghan, they do not appear to have been limited by the localism which generally caused IRA men to operate in the area they grew up in.
Cross-border slaughter
They embarked upon a trail of cross-Border murder, specialising in slaughtering off-duty part time members of the security forces about their daily business. For several years, they switched their attentions from Fermanagh, to the Clogher Valley, and parts of Armagh, culminating in the atrocious murder of 86-year-old Norman Stronge and his son at Tynan Abbey. And then there was a merciful pause in the assassinations in the killing grounds. Why? Because they were in custody. Killings in the region resumed only after another IRA man, Peter Ryan from Ardboe, was released from Portlaoise and went back into action.
Seamus McElwaine was charged in the North with the murders of Ernie Johstone and Alexander Abercrombie, and James Lynagh and Lawrence McNally, of Ardboe, Co Tyrone, in the Republic, with the murder of Henry Livingstone. McElwaine was convicted, but later escaped. Lynagh and McNally were found not guilty. All three resumed their killing careers, and once again, with their prison buddy Peter Ryan also lending a hand, they returned to their old stomping grounds and their old ways. Once again, part-time UDR men and RUC reservists were butchered as they delivered bread or ploughed their fields.
Would it not have been better for the terrorists involved, for their families, their victims, and their victims' families, if the Government had closed down their operational base in Monaghan simply by putting them into preventive custody - that is, interned them? For whatever legal compromises were involved in such a process, they hardly compare with the more evil civic compromise of allowing murder run rampant.
Civil liberties
To be sure, "civil liberties" groups which remain silent about the loss of civil liberties of butchered police officers and soldiers in the North would have complained and campaigned; but in times of civil unrest, states must sometimes have to take stern action to protect not merely targets of terrorism, but terrorists themselves, both from their own deeds, and from the deeds of others.
Once these men returned to the fray, legal expedients having been tried and having failed, other methods were going to be used to deal with them. I do not say I approve; I merely recognise that the more they are tested, the more ruthless military organisations become. This is their nature.
The first to be killed by British undercover units was Seamus McElwaine, shot dead by the SAS in Fermanagh. The SAS alleged that its unit called on two suspected terrorists to halt, and when they "appeared to be preparing to shoot at" the SAS men, the latter opened fire. And if you believe that, you also believe that the SAS gave out soup during the Famine.
Quite clearly, a military policy of assassination was now under way, as events at Loughgall the following May indicated, when an entire IRA unit was massacred by the SAS, including James Lynagh. All but one of the IRA attackers that evening were known to the security forces, and most had been in custody and had been released. If there had been a way of taking the orderly surrender of such a unit of dedicated and ruthless terrorists, I don't think at that stage that the SAS would have been interested in trying it. They wanted bodies, and they got them, including that of the innocent Anthony Hughes, for whose death the British army has, inexcusably, never offered apologies or regrets.
Law had failed
Nemesis was approaching Lawrence McNally and Peter Ryan too. Ten years ago they were ambushed by the SAS and killed, along with Tony Doris from Coalisland. Weapons found in their car had been used in four recent murders; they had almost certainly been involved in the lorry-bomb attack on in Markethill which had killed three UDR soldiers.
Using the adversarial law against terrorists had simply failed. It resulted in dozens of dead - and ultimately, in the failure of law itself, when soldiers simply took matters into their own hands and killed their enemies out of hand. We are driving ourselves demented over the ifs and buts of the Arms Trial; yet there are no ifs and buts about what followed, when our courts repeatedly used pettifogging points of law to allow terrorists return to their fray. That is the true scandal of the past 30 years. It is one which our legal profession still studiously - if understandably - ignores.