It has been depressing indeed to read the unrepentant, aggressive tone of those who have been criticising the RUC at the Patten hearings, as if whatever police violations of law there were did not occur in a context; yet that same context is consistently adduced to justify both special status conditions in the North's jails and the early release of prisoners. One could quite easily believe from the Patten hearings in South Armagh that here was a peaceful, law-abiding community that was subjected to unprovoked and ferocious assaults by the forces of law and order. For IRA apologists, it is a not displeasing image: the oppressed people of South Armagh valiantly, and largely successfully, opposing armed, imperial tyranny.
You can put the picture another way: of a police force which had to operate in simply inoperable circumstances in which it was, overwhelmingly, the victim. To be sure, the security forces did not invariably behave like Little Orphan Annie; the infamous shoot-to-kill policy of suspected terrorists, or the summary execution of Peter Cleary, the IRA commander taken from his girlfriend's house by the SAS and shot "while trying to escape", were unAnnie-ish indeed.
Catholic ex-servicemen
But such murderous events do not compare with the atrociousness of the IRA campaign waged against the security forces, the local Protestant population and Catholics who were seen to be "equivocal"; the only place in Northern Ireland in which Catholic ex-servicemen were, as a matter of policy, singled out for murder, disappearance or expulsion was in South Armagh.
Nobody conversant with the realities of the North over the past quarter-century is unaware of the particular realities of South Armagh; of the massacre of 10 blameless Protestant workmen at Whitecross; the Tullyvallen Orange Hall massacre; or the murder of Sir Norman Stronge, a survivor of the first day of the Somme, and probably the last soldier from the first World War to be shot dead, killed with his son in their isolated mansion near the Border.
And we all know the scale of the war in Armagh in which 69 police officers and 114 soldiers have been killed. How does one even begin to sift through the human tragedy involved or measure one atrocity against another? Is there a human heart which does not sink at the fate of Louis Robinson, a policeman from Newtownards who had been off work for two years through mental stress? He was known as Louis the Lip because he was an incorrigible talker. While on holiday in Dingle with a group of Northern prison officers in 1990, Louis the Lip presumably told some local hero that he was a policeman. The necessary machinery was put into action, and he was abducted from his minibus as it crossed back over the border in South Armagh.
Last hours
What did Louis the Lip tell his captors? How long did they talk to him and bleed him dry of all the information he had about police officers he knew? Did he weep and plead for his life? What were the last hours of this man's life like before that life was ended by rifle fire through the back of the skull? And what, dear God, do his killers dream of now?
Some people - such as poor Louis the Lip - have lives almost without consequence, and their deaths pass unremarked and unremembered. Other deaths trigger consequence through the decades. The killing of the Catholic Reavey brothers of South Armagh, murdered by loyalists in 1975, was followed by the Whitecross massacre, in turn prompting one local Protestant lad, who had been so apolitical that he used to play GAA, to join the UVF. His name was Billy Wright.
The killing strands reach down through the decades, and the consequences are condign, ubiquitous. The very first police officers to be murdered in South Armagh in these Troubles were Constables Donaldson and Miller, blown to pieces by a booby-trap bomb outside Crossmaglen in August 1970. Sam Donaldson's brother Alexander was killed in the massacre of nine RUC officers in Newry 15 years later. Their nephew Jeffrey is today the lightning conductor of opposition within the Ulster Unionist Party to the Good Friday Agreement, and its resulting release of 200 prisoners with not an ounce of Semtex handed in or a flintlock surrendered.
Future of RUC
Nobody who claims to have any understanding of the North would seriously maintain that the RUC must face the future unaltered. It is in part a paramilitary force which must in time be disarmed and civicised. But the RUC is now being portrayed in places such as Crossmaglen as the sole begetter of these Troubles, whose members have kicked down doors and knocked nationalists about, almost for entertainment.
Count the bodies - the Louis Robinsons, the scores of dead policemen who breathed their last amid the drumlins of South Armagh. Did these men and women behave any worse than any other police force in the world would have behaved in such circumstances? They did not. For the most part they did their thankless and horribly dangerous duty with extraordinary discipline, courage and skill. It is not fashionable, and certainly not wise to say it in places like South Armagh, but they are amongst the true heroes of the Troubles.