February 12, 1997. Bessbrook, County Armagh.
A 23-year-old lance bombardier from the Royal Horse Artillery is standing at a permanent vehicle checkpoint near the edge of town. His name is Stephen Restorick. A woman named Lorraine McElroy has just pulled up — she and her husband are heading home, ice cream for their children on the back seat. Restorick checks her driving licence. He hands it back. He smiles.
McElroy described what happened next two days later, speaking to the Los Angeles Times. “He checked my license, handed it back to me and smiled and thanked me. And just straight away there was… a crack and a flash.”
A single.50-calibre round struck Restorick in the back. It went through his flak jacket clean. He died from his wounds that afternoon.
Stephen Restorick was 23 years old. He was, as the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland later confirmed, the last serving soldier killed by the IRA in Northern Ireland. Not the last of a difficult winter. Not the last of a bad year. The last. No British soldier would die at the hands of the Provisional IRA between that February checkpoint and the Good Friday Agreement fourteen months later.
For years after his death, press coverage named the wrong man as the person who fired that shot. When the man most commonly blamed died in Monaghan Town in December 2013, mainstream outlets across Ireland described him as the sniper, the triggerman, the man who shot Restorick. That attribution was wrong. The military had known it was wrong since the evening of April 10, 1997, when a unit of SAS soldiers drove a van at speed into a farm complex near Crossmaglen and arrested a man named Michael Caraher.
This is the story of what actually happened.
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South Armagh sits in the southern corner of County Armagh — approximately 192 square miles of drumlin country, rough grazing land, and narrow rural roads that push hard against the border with the Republic of Ireland. Merlyn Rees, the Northern Ireland Secretary, stood in the House of Commons in January 1976 and called it “bandit country.” He meant it as a warning. Republicans in South Armagh heard it as a fair description.
A TIME Magazine correspondent visited Armagh in January 1976 and filed a report that reads almost like a military assessment. “British law begins somewhere above treetop level,” he wrote. “Road travel by the 550 British troops in the area is so risky that it has been abandoned: the army either moves about by chopper or does not move at all.” That was 1976. The picture barely improved over the following two decades.
The Provisional IRA’s South Armagh Brigade had, between 1970 and 1997, killed at least 123 British soldiers and 42 Royal Ulster Constabulary officers. In a ten-mile radius around the geographic centre of the region, the RUC recorded 1,255 bombings and 1,158 shootings over that same period. These weren’t isolated incidents produced by small, disorganised cells. They were the sustained output of a brigade that had retained its full battalion structure — unique in the PIRA — precisely because the closeness of the community and its republican character made infiltration genuinely difficult. The security forces recorded fewer arrests relative to operational activity in South Armagh than in any other IRA brigade area in Northern Ireland.
Credit to : Historical Notes