Eamon Collins was in Newry on the morning of Sunday the ninth of May, 1987. What he learned confirmed what he had already begun to suspect. Eight men had been killed the previous evening in the village of Loughgall, County Armagh. British soldiers. An RUC station. A bomb. The scale of the loss — the largest single loss the Provisional IRA would suffer between 1921 and the Good Friday Agreement — was enough to stop most people where they stood.
Collins wasn’t most people. He had worked with these men. He had moved in the same intelligence circles, handled the same networks, watched the same targets. He was an IRA intelligence officer based in Newry, and by the time the BBC’s lunchtime bulletin had confirmed the names, he had understood three things he had not understood the previous morning: the British had known, the British had known for months, and the British had watched his people travel all the way to the station gates before they opened fire. He sat and worked through what that implied about the penetration of the organisation he served. He worked through what it implied about his own position.
He was right about most of it.
Collins would later set down his account of these years in Killing Rage, published by Granta Books in 1997. The book described, in prose that resists sentimentality throughout, the mechanics of IRA intelligence work in South Armagh and across the border areas — the targeting, the surveillance, the authorisations, the faces of the men he helped to direct. He wasn’t at Loughgall. That distinction matters and will be maintained throughout this account. His knowledge of the eight men who died there, and his later understanding of what their deaths proved about British capability, gave him an analytical clarity about the ambush that few people on either side ever achieved.
Credit to : Historical Notes