A Force Like No Other 2: The Next Shift: More real stories from the RUC men and women who policed the Troubles

By Colin Breen

In this follow-up to his bestselling A Force Like No Other, Colin Breen brings together more compelling insider stories from RUC officers who served during the Troubles. Includes stories about the IRA border campaign (1958–62), the Shankill Butchers murders and the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
• Release date: Oct 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780732510

Colin Breen

Colin Breen is a freelance journalist, screenwriter and broadcaster. He has written extensively for many newspapers, including the Belfast Telegraph, Sunday Life and Herald Dublin, and is a regular commentator on local and national radio, television and the BBC World Service. He served as an officer in the RUC for over fourteen years at the height of the Troubles.

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Earlies

07:00–15:00 hours

07:00 – Carryduff Police Station, County Down

It is often said in the police that the best weapon you have when dealing with awkward situations is your tongue. But sometimes you’re not as clever as you think.

There was a time in the RUC when the village sergeant ranked in importance with the clergy, the bank manager and the local doctor; was respected and even looked up to. But that didn’t mean we were infallible!

One time, when I was stationed in Carryduff just outside Belfast, an early-morning road traffic accident was causing a young probationer constable some consternation. It was not a serious accident – in fact there was only one car involved, there were no injuries, the only damage caused was to the car concerned and we knew the driver – but, believe it or not, back in the day such accidents were fully investigated.

The dilemma was that the driver, a well-known local farmer, couldn’t – or said he couldn’t – remember what had happened to cause the accident. He came to the station the next evening to be interviewed. He produced the necessary documents, but talking the matter over, it was obvious that the young constable was no match for this worldly-wise gentleman. He asked for my help so I intimated that he should leave the room and let me have a word with the farmer.

I was left alone with the driver, who was well known to me. I suggested that, as he couldn’t remember what happened, I would paint a scenario of what I thought might have happened to see if that jogged his memory. He thought this was an excellent idea, so I began: ‘John, I think you were driving along the road and you hit the curb, causing the car to mount the left-hand bank. The car turned over completely, rolled back down the bank and landed on its wheels back on the main road.’

‘Aye, Sergeant, that does sound familiar.’

‘And then, John, you decided to keep driving to try and get away but ended up crossing the road, where you then went up the right-hand bank, rolled the car over again, and landed back down on the roadway.’

‘Sergeant, do you know, I think that is exactly what happened.’

I thought to myself, I have him: he is about to confess everything. Time to play my trump card. ‘So, tell me, John, would there have been a wee drop of drink involved on the job?’

His reply is burnt into my memory to this day.

‘Of course there was, Sergeant. Do you think I’m a fuckin’ stunt driver?’

07:01 – Uniform Patrol, Tennent Street, North Belfast

I had just completed sixteen weeks of intensive training at the Police Training Centre, or Depot as we called it, in Enniskillen. I was eighteen years of age and excited to be on the way to my first shift in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. I was full of nervous anticipation – in a good way – and I couldn’t wait to get at it. My first posting was to Tennent Street Station, which lay between the Shankill Road and the Crumlin Road in north Belfast.

I was living on the Lisburn Road at the time and couldn’t drive so I had to get a bus into town, then another one to the station. I also had to make the journey in mufti (my police shirt and trousers hidden beneath a civvie jacket), and carry the rest of my uniform in a grip bag. I naively didn’t realise just how dangerous things could be up there.

I arrived at the station at 6.30 a.m. in good time for my first day. I had been assigned to B section (one of four that cover the day), starting the early shift at 7 a.m. I reported to the night sergeant and he brought me to the locker room where I was fortunate enough to find an empty one. I got changed into my pristine full uniform and went down to the parade room. My entrance was reminiscent of Charlie Sheen arriving in Vietnam in the film Platoon.

The guys all looked battle weary. Sergeant Tom Craig was the B section sergeant. He introduced me to the boys, and they responded with various grunts and groans. He then sent one of them to relieve the night section duty officer at the front desk. Sergeant Craig then began reading through the occurrence book for anything of interest that might have happened during the night that he felt we should know about before we went out on the streets.

Suddenly the door burst open and big Dickie ran in shouting that there had been a shooting in Cambrai Street. This ran parallel to Tennent Street, so the incident was only 100 yards from the back of the station, but I didn’t know that then. One of the old hands grabbed me and I followed him into the yard, where we jumped into a Land Rover and sped off.

On arrival at the scene, just thirty seconds later, I was confronted by a terrible sight. There was a JP Corry timber lorry parked in the street. A couple of people were lying in the road beside the lorry and another couple were in the cab. I was told to check on the people in the cab. One of the men, Raymond Carlisle, was quite clearly dead – there was a bullethole right in the middle of his forehead. The other person in the cab, Archie Hanna, was badly injured and losing a lot of blood, which was spurting from a leg wound. I put my finger into the hole and waited for the ambulance. I then kept my finger there until a paramedic took over. Hanna died a short time later. Turned out he was an old school mate of my dad’s.

The two men had pulled the lorry over so the passengers could use the local newsagents – they regularly got the paper there on their way to work. A group of Catholic workmen had only just stopped getting a lift in the lorry, having noticed a black taxi following them in the days before the attack.

They were murdered by the two top men in the Shankill Butchers gang, Lenny Murphy and Basher Bates. Ironically Murphy and Bates would both be shot dead themselves some years later – Bates only a few hundred yards from where these murders were carried out. They had carried out the attack based on their mistaken information that everyone in the lorry was a Catholic when in fact, they killed two Protestants. Archie was from the Lower Shankhill. Two dead and two badly injured. That was within the first five minutes of my first shift on my first day.

07:11 – Uniform Patrol, Donegall Pass, South Belfast

Early one beautiful morning in September I was partnered with Constable S on foot patrol and was looking forward to an uncomplicated, steady kind of shift.

We left Donegall Pass Station and walked on to Bradbury Place. Nothing untoward. The roads were quiet. The main commute was only starting. There were no car alarms ringing and no smashed windows in the shop fronts. We turned right on to the Lisburn Road, then right again, into Sandy Row. I was settling into a rhythm, walking parallel to my colleague who was on the other side of the road. It was always best not to walk together – too easily shot if distracted by conversation. Nevertheless, that kind of walking brought freedom to a police officer. Freedom of movement, freedom of thought and freedom to chat to the public, if they sought it. Also, freedom to act like the police would in ‘normal’ law enforcement environments, which Northern Ireland was not. Even my body armour felt like a second skin that morning, reassuring in its tight fit.

Then, just as we reached the junction of Sandy Row and Donegall Road, my radio crackled into life. It was the controller from Belfast Regional Headquarters: ‘Any Alpha Papa call-sign in the immediate vicinity of Donegall Road, acknowledge. Urgent please.’

I looked across the road at S. but we both waited, anticipating an immediate response from one of the two mobile call signs operating in the sub-division. But the response did not come.

‘I say again, any Alpha Papa call sign in the immediate vicinity of Donegall Road, come in please. Report of shots fired in the vicinity of Belfast City halt.’

It is perhaps a two-hundred-metre sprint from where we were to the train station at the Belfast City halt, which is immediately adjacent to Belfast City Hospital. I pressed the button on my radio microphone, paused briefly, and began my transmission, ‘Uniform from Alpha Papa 31, we are a beat [foot] call sign, but we are very close to that location.’

‘Roger, 31. Make your way there immediately. Let me know when you arrive.’

S had been monitoring the transmissions on his own radio earpiece so we both broke into a run. The body armour had a slowing effect, but I was conscious that we needed to get there as quickly as possible. S was a short way behind me, and was shouting ‘Push on, push on’. Through my earpiece I heard the mobile call signs acknowledging the controller’s request for backup. Now they were also en route. However, we kept running.

As we neared the entrance to the train station, I felt rivulets of sweat trickling down the side of my face. I was holding my cap in my right hand as I was afraid it would fall off if I didn’t carry it. I almost fell as I ran down the slipway on to the platform but I could see a stationary train at the halt. Pointing to the open railway carriage, an ashen-faced member of the railway staff shouted, ‘In there, in there, he’s been shot.’

I jammed my thumb into the microphone switch on my radio, ‘Uniform from Alpha Papa 31, arrival Belfast City halt.’

My body armour had become an encumbrance, but I was glad of its presence, particularly after the report of shots fired. S and I ran on to the train. Neither of us drew our firearm – foolish in the extreme – but it was carnage. Pools of blood had already begun to congeal in large quantities on the floor of the train and I slipped in it as I made my way towards the victim. I knew instinctively that he was dying, perhaps already dead, but I could not simply give up.

Stunned passengers were either frozen in their seats or standing motionless, crying, shouting, and imploring me and S to do something. S moved amongst them, calming, reassuring. A nurse was at one end of the carriage in her uniform. She had witnessed the attack on her commute to the hospital. She sobbed and apologised because she was unable to do anything. Why should she apologise?

The victim was slumped in his seat, head bowed forward. Smoke seeped from a massive gunshot wound at the back of his head and from his mouth and nostrils. It was macabre. His eyes were rolled completely backward, perhaps in percussive shock from the gunshot. The firearm must have been discharged very close to the back of his head. Noises came from somewhere deep in his body. Visceral groans. His life was seeping away.

I lifted his head gently and pulled out a field dressing. I wrapped it around his head so the gunshot wound was at least covered. I knew it was futile, but I felt duty bound to do something: for those civilians to see that some attempt had been made, no matter how trivial, to aid this stranger.

The paramedics, accompanied by a doctor, arrived in an ambulance. We lifted the victim on to a trolley and sprinted the short distance to Belfast City Hospital’s A & E. The victim was pronounced dead several minutes after our arrival.

Numerous police arrived at A & E and a veteran detective approached us. ‘You the first police on the scene?’ he asked. We nodded. Casually resigned perhaps to another Troubles death, the detective requested that we ‘draw up a couple of statements, back at the station, soonest’.

Two hours later, statement written, and following a change of police-issue shirt, I was dropped off to perform duty at Belfast Magistrates Court.

07:15 – Carryduff Police Station, County Down

It is well known within the ranks of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that local knowledge is one of the most important weapons an officer has at his disposal, and when linked with patience and good humour, it can overcome most things.

It was 1974 and I was a sergeant in Carryduff on the outskirts of Belfast. A power-sharing government had been formed to run Northern Ireland and was the subject of widespread protests. As usual, the RUC ended up in the middle of the unrest.

The tactics employed at Carryduff included blocking the main Belfast/Saintfield/Ballynahinch Road at the roundabout. This was timed to cause maximum disruption to the morning rush-hour traffic going into Belfast. When the protest started, I spoke with the organisers. Most of them were decent, respectable people and were known to me. I asked if they would change the timing of their blockade to facilitate motorists travelling to work in Belfast. To my surprise, they agreed and for the next few mornings disruption was kept to a minimum. This would confirm that, for the most part, the people involved in the protests weren’t natural law breakers, just decent people who were concerned about what was happening politically in the country.

After about three days of this, I was contacted at home at 7.15 a.m. and informed that the local farmers had taken over the protest and the road was completely blocked. On my arrival I discovered that the road was indeed impassable, due to tractors and other farm machinery having been abandoned. A large crowd had also gathered to watch how police would react. It was a very tense situation.

At the front of the blockade I found that a well-known and very respected farmer and member of the community had chained himself to the steering wheel of his tractor. He was, of course, very apprehensive and it was obvious that such behaviour was totally foreign to his nature. I hastened to reassure him that I understood his position and that no force would be used against him. I had established a working relationship with those involved in the protest and I was satisfied that the matter could be resolved peacefully in a reasonably short time.

The onlookers, unfortunately, were a different matter. Their mood was tense, with a few troublemakers voicing their views. Although I knew, and was known to, most of those present, I was concerned that they might not be so easily dealt with. One character who was well known to me for a number of reasons, a man who had never worked a day in his life, started to shout at and taunt the police. I turned to face him and in a loud voice, addressed him by name then said, ‘I understood this was a workers’ protest, I hardly think you qualify.’

Fortunately for me, the crowd immediately caught my meaning and one by one they burst into laughter, cheering and bantering the unfortunate man. With attention diverted from the protest to him, the whole situation changed and within the hour the farmers had formed a cavalcade and made their way to Stormont.

A few days later I received a letter from the farmer who had chained himself to his tractor thanking me for my patience and understanding and assuring me of his future support.

07:32 – Headquarters Mobile Support Unit, County Tyrone

The HMSU were SAS-trained snipers who would also deal with hostage situations.

In June 1991, I was involved in an operation in Coagh, a village in County Tyrone, with some members of the SAS [Special Air Service]. We had got the heads up that three IRA men from the East Tyrone Brigade were planning to murder a UDR soldier [the Ulster Defence Regiment was an army infantry regiment] and we were there to throw up a cordon to try and save the man’s life if they showed up.

Police and army were in place in good time and a member of the SAS was undercover, posing as the intended victim. The three terrorists concerned – Tony Doris, Michael ‘Pete’ Ryan and Lawrence McNally – arrived in the village at about 7.30 in the morning, intending to move in to murder their target. However, they were intercepted by members of the SAS, who opened fire on the heavily armed men. A firefight ensued and I believe the terrorist car – they had hijacked a red Vauxhall Cavalier the night before in Moneymore – was hit some two hundred times before it burst into flames.

The thing that always struck me about this operation was that it showed the level of commitment and the dedication of the terrorists to their cause. One of the gunmen was shot and wounded by the SAS and was on fire, but he managed to get out of the stolen vehicle and crawl up the street. Whatever was driving him, he obviously still felt that, despite being shot and being on fire, he could get away. There was nothing that could be done to save him, though, and eventually he just lay down and died. All three terrorists died in the incident.

The weapons recovered from the terrorists’ car were found to have been used in several other murders in the greater area over quite a number of years, including one killing that had taken place in a garage only two hundred yards from where they had been intercepted.

07:45 – Glengormley Police Station, County Antrim

Sunday morning was always a quiet time to be out on patrol, even in the busiest place: it took a while for everything to spring into life. The different vehicle crews, many of whom might have been nursing a bit of a hangover, would take it in turns to get breakfast. One crew would have something to eat while another patrolled and answered calls, then they would swap.

I was out in the vehicle one Sunday morning waiting for the others to call us to let us know they had finished their breakfast, when I overheard a report on the radio. It had been phoned in from around the Highfield area of east Belfast – a taxi driver had answered a call but, when he got there, he had apparently been bundled off.

Sure that this was nothing to do with us, we had decided to take a drive up to the Hightown Road, which takes you from north Belfast over to Glengormley – a sort of country area with a number of disused quarries, but was actually quite nice. We often went and parked there because it was quiet – a sort of no-man’s-land where we would bring the Sunday papers and see what was going on the world while we waited to go for breakfast.

We drove on up the road and turned into one of the old quarries where we saw a man with his back to us. He was down on both knees with his head slightly down as if he was watching or waiting for something to happen. We stopped and got out of the vehicle some distance back from him. As we were walking towards him, I noticed that we had all spread out from each other. No one had said anything, I suppose it was just instinct, but it wasn’t a good sign that we had all done it independently. I called out, ‘Are you all right, mate?’, walked on another bit and shouted again, ‘Are you okay?’

We got no answer so we shouted once more, but sadly as I got closer to him, I could just make out the blood and the hole at the base of his neck where he had been shot. He was just kneeling there as if he was praying or something, which he might well have been – it was a weird scene and the last thing we’d been expecting when we’d nipped up there to read the papers.

We taped off the area and sealed the scene then waited for the various agencies to turn up and do their thing. I remember that a very clever scenes of crime officer turned up. I watched him when he arrived as he stood looking at the body, taking in every minute detail. He then reached into a bag, took out a tiny shovel and started digging around in front of the body. He had loosened up some of the mud then began to go through it all, until he found the bullet that he guessed had gone right through the body.

The victim was just an ordinary family guy out driving a taxi to try and make ends meet. Unfortunately for him, he was the wrong religion at the wrong time and in the wrong place. He had even volunteered to the dispatcher, ‘I’ll take that call’. Just a quiet Sunday morning. He didn’t know it would cost him his life.

08:05 – RUC Training Centre, Enniskillen

The Training Centre in Enniskillen (or the ‘Depot’ as it was more commonly known) was where the new RUC recruits received their initial training, which lasted three months. This training concentrated on the law, including an officer’s powers of arrest coupled with the workings of the court system. After training and exams, recruits went to Belfast for firearm training and driving school courses, and to cover