Hight Court rules killing of four IRA members was not justified

parmoboy said:
It is possible that they'd been sent there to carry out surveillance on the funeral. There's also a theory that the passenger had just started his tour and the driver was giving him a handover tour and showing him around the area.

If they were sent there to carry out surveillance it would have been difficult for them to get their timing right and drive up that road at the exact same time the funeral procession was making its way up it, if you think about it logically. Also, surely they'd have been more heavily armed and a back-up plan would have been in place?

I do think the mourners initial reaction was understandable. Michael Stone had attacked an IRA funeral days before the incident, so the mourners believed the two soldiers were loyalist gunmen who were there to launch an attack. I think that's probably why the soldiers didn't shoot anyone. They will have known they'd messed up and could probably understand why the mourners were angry, but I don't think it would have washed if they'd said "Sorry about this, we're not actually here to attack anyone, we're soldiers and I'm driving us back to our base".

It was just a very unfortunate incident and the soliders paid a very heavy price for their mistake.
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Parmo

Didn't Michael Stone actually kill some of the mourners the previous week? The media in the UK never explained why the two solders were driving through a funeral procession. The solders were wearing civilian clothing but were carrying pistols. My guess is that they were off duty, but as an act of silly bravado illegally took the pistols and tried to get close to the mourners, hoping to get a kick out of been in a dangerous situation. This was explain why there were no back up protection. They certainly would have appeared as lone Loyalist terrorists to those at the funeral and feelings were very high. They were effectively executed in revenge for the Stone killings. Of course that is not how it was portrayed in the media in the UK. I agree the solders paid a heavy price for their mistake.
 
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Redwurzel said:
Parmo

Didn't Michael Stone actually kill some of the mourners the previous week? The media in the UK never explained why the two solders were driving through a funeral procession. The solders were wearing civilian clothing but were carrying pistols. My guess is that they were off duty, but as an act of silly bravado illegally took the pistols and tried to get close to the mourners, hoping to get a kick out of been in a dangerous situation. This was explain why there were no back up protection. They certainly would have appeared as lone Loyalist terrorists to those at the funeral and feelings were very high. They were effectively executed in revenge for the Stone killings. Of course that is not how it was portrayed in the media in the UK. I agree the solders paid a heavy price for their mistake.
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It was an operation that we will never know the truth about. At the time there were two or three different stories released.
 
NC - by who?

In the 70s and 80s - I used to believe everything, say the BBC put out on Northern Ireland, but now I can see how so much of it had a twist.

The Troubles in NI could have been avoided if the Catholic communities were treated as equals. They were not in Northern Ireland right from its creation (1922) , they were treated as the enemy within and as such heavily discriminated against. This created a very fertile breeding ground for the Repulican extremists like the Provisional IRA.

Many British solders were used as canon fodder by the UK Government. For example the Paras were trained to fight behind the lines as per Arnham/DDay. In the 1970s and 80s they were sent to patrol the streets of Derry and Belfast totally different environment. Often later in the Conflict used to entice the IRA out so the SAS could pick them off. Of course the paratrooper could be totally unaware of how they were been used, particualrly the young ones. Using Paratroopers say to control a Civil Right March in March 1972 was asking for trouble its like using a Rottweiler to protect your garden from kids coming for their footballs. Bloody Sunday was the IRA's greatest recruitment event ever. The causes of the Troubles were never really addressed until the mid 1990s.
 
Brian Marwood said:
Are you sure you’re not confusing this with the death of Pat Finucane?
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No I’m not confusing those two events.

(Edited) I will say is that neither men should have been there at all. Their job would never have placed them out on the street doing surveillance.

One of them was replacing the other, in a specific role (edit Communications Officer, a desk job mostly just maintaining comms equipment), and was being shown around the area.

They definitely were not special forces. They were far too lightly armed for that and their training would have been far too good to for them to have made the error, of driving into a cul de sac, the way they did.

There were suggestions that the outgoing soldier was involved with supporting Military Intelligence officers, which could have meant access to details of informers and agents. This could be complete nonsense, but is part of what I had read and heard previously.

(Added)
The roads around the area were all sealed off, well in advance. Who let them through and why?
Republican press, who were in the crowd reported hearing cries of “we’ve got a couple of Brits” before the car had even stopped. How did they already know the nationality of the men? (Part of what I had read previously).
Why was the armed sniper on the helicopter denied permission to shoot?
Why was the unit who were, initially instructed to roll out (from Lisburn barracks?), to stage a rescue attempt, stood down?
Why were units already in the area prevented from acting? (The suggestion is they might have became cut off).

I can’t find the specific report I read previously so won’t elaborate more on them being set up when I can’t substantiate it.

Looking now the consensus seems to be that they were warned. Derek Wood was probably showboating to impress his replacement and having ignored warnings not to go into the area, got completely out of his depth.
 
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Priv said:
FFS what utter drivel.
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No, what RW has said is quite close to what a number, including some who knew Derek Wood and who were there on the day, seem to think.
 
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Hap said:
No, what RW has said is quite close to what a number, including some who knew Derek Wood and who were there on the day, seem to think.
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It’s a load of cr6p, plenty believe lizard men rule a flat earth but it doesn’t mean they are right.
 
Priv said:
It’s a load of cr6p, plenty believe lizard men rule a flat earth but it doesn’t mean they are right.
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It’s not what I was suggesting myself upthread. But it is what some people who knew Derek personally and where there on the day have said publicly. No lizards required.

Obviously if you have specific info proving different I’d be all ears.
 
If people chose to not believe the serious discrimination against the Catholic community in the period from 1922 to the Good Friday Agreement that is their right, but they will be in a minority across the World.

Do people really believe the two solders at the funeral were both out for a relaxing drive on their day off and just happened to drive through a major funeral procession by accident and by accident had army pistols in the car on their day off? They were probably not looking for trouble, but not initially driving away from it.

Attitudes were so hardened in NI in the past that a common incident would have two different conflicting sets of descriptions. Both sides would totally believe their own descriptions. There was an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum last year which actually played two descriptions of the same event in 1971. The descriptions were provided by tour guides in NI in 2022! i.e ,many years after the Troubles. One tour guide was from the Protestant commnity and one from the Catholic community.
 
Nero said:
I don’t know enough about the troubles but this point is worth remembering. It wasn’t some invasion or occupation like the British Empire in the 19th century.
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There was a border poll in 1973 and the vast majority voted for Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.

By waging a war against the security forces the IRA were going against the democratic will of the people. It was a senseless conflict as they were never going to force the British government's hand through violence.
 
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Hap said:
There’s a lot more to that story. They weren’t there by accident.
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As I said, there are many different theories as to why they were there that day. I'd recommend the book 'Charlie One' by Sean Hartnett, a former British soldier. In it he claims that the two of them were attached to The Det, an undercover surveillance unit.

I've got to say, after reading up on it this theory does seem plausible. But I guess we'll never know the truth for sure.

14 Intelligence Company | The Det

Unit Profile of 14 intelligence company, or the Det - its operations, selection and training.
www.eliteukforces.info
 
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parmoboy said:
There was a border poll in 1973 and the vast majority voted for Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.

By waging a war against the security forces the IRA were going against the democratic will of the people. It was a senseless conflict as they were never going to force the British government's hand through violence.
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I guess they’d say the vote should include the population of the whole island of Ireland, not just an artificial enclave.
 
Redwurzel said:
Parmo

The solders were wearing civilian clothing but were carrying pistols. My guess is that they were off duty, but as an act of silly bravado illegally took the pistols and tried to get close to the mourners, hoping to get a kick out of been in a dangerous situation. This was explain why there were no back up protection.
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You clearly know sweet FA about ops in Northern Ireland

Outside of the green army units, all SAS and 14th Det units operated in plain clothes and didn’t leave the barracks without a pistol and two extra mags as a minimum.

Civilian cars were used and changed every couple of weeks and usually had a sten or later an MP5 hidden in them.
 
Redwurzel said:
Parmo

Didn't Michael Stone actually kill some of the mourners the previous week? The media in the UK never explained why the two solders were driving through a funeral procession. The solders were wearing civilian clothing but were carrying pistols. My guess is that they were off duty, but as an act of silly bravado illegally took the pistols and tried to get close to the mourners, hoping to get a kick out of been in a dangerous situation. This was explain why there were no back up protection. They certainly would have appeared as lone Loyalist terrorists to those at the funeral and feelings were very high. They were effectively executed in revenge for the Stone killings. Of course that is not how it was portrayed in the media in the UK. I agree the solders paid a heavy price for their mistake.
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It was one of a sequence of events which occurred within a 14 day period, starting with the SAS killing of the 3 in Gibraltar. Michael Stone then attacked the funeral and killed 3. One of those he killed was IRA man Kevin Brady. The two corporals turned up at his funeral and initially the crowd had assumed they were two loyalists looking to carry out a repeat attack. The IRA claimed that they'd searched them and had found ID on one of the soliders which mentioned Herford, and they'd misread is as Hereford and believed that they were SAS. If that's true then I'd imagine they were killed in revenge for the 3 in Gibraltar.

I developed a morbid fascination with this after watching the BBC Funeral Murders documentary. I spoke to Harry Maguire years ago, one of the men jailed for the killings. Incredibly he's now director of a restorative justice organisation in Belfast. I did ask him about the incident but unsurprisingly he told me not to get into it. He was fairly amicable despite me being honest about my own feelings on what happened and he said he believes in reconciliation wholeheartedly and invited me to travel across to Belfast. When I asked him whether he had any regrets over spending time in prison his respsonse was "No, who wouldn't stand up against invaders?". It was then that I cut off contact with him.
 
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