Declan Daly - Borderline - An Oral History of the Brexit Wars 2020-2022

Minutes passed like decades. The radio clicked once and then a voice, slightly higher and tenser than normal…. ‘Seminar’. That was that. Unburned adrenaline, left him wondering if this was a good or a bad result, but at least they had gotten airborne. They dropped height and waited for the other aircraft. Once they arrived at the designated rendezvous, they would return to Baldonnel as a loose formation. There was really little to do now.

OP 4A:

Heartbeat 52. The man they came to see continued looking to the South for a good minute after the noise of the aircraft had faded. By the look on his face, he had been waiting for them to come closer, to approach, to land. Maybe he had been waiting for the people in the intercepted car which had been stopped well out of sight, but he couldn’t have been expecting them, the passengers in the car with their own lethal intent. Maybe it was a legacy of a violent life that you half expected it always? He went inside through the back door, closing it behind him. The Corporal couldn’t see him but felt sure he was on the phone to someone. Knowing what that was about would be another units job. The codeword that had come through indicated that the three armed personnel in the car had been stopped and detained without shots fired. The drama was over for the overt units for now, but for them it would be several more days of waiting and watching. He rolled his shoulders down and to the front.

Comdt Brian Raferty, AC – Retired (Wolf 3 – Left Seat)

‘It was later, not long before he died actually, that the bastard told me he was doing that lip smacking thing on purpose. He could see that everyone was wound up and knew annoying me would at least make the others feel a bit more experienced and ready to go. I suppose fresh co-pilots make an easy foil that way. He was telling me this when I was on my command upgrade course, which by that stage was as much on the job training as a formal course of instruction. We were short enough of bodies at that stage that you just got the training done when you could which wasn’t really ideal, not the way we used to do it.

Anyway, we were doing the usual sitting by the campfire thing in the mess in Finner Base one weekend on duty and got chatting about when we each thought it had all really started, you know? Some said the Brexit Referendum, some said when the journalist, Lyra McKee was killed, that the eh, the various groups wouldn’t have had the political confidence to do that before. But the consensus was that em, that for us in the Air Corps, or in No 3 Ops Wing anyway, we only found out about the other stuff going on later, that for us it all started that day. That was when things went from the occasional real job to routine internal security ops and on and on from there.’

Pauses (approx 10 seconds)

‘You know I still miss that fecker. After everything and every other death that came after, you know the way some people just stand out when they go? It was as much about eh, you know, he was senior to me at the time, obviously, but he was always the first guy I’d go looking for to go for coffee. Always good for a chat and keen to pass on what he knew rather than guarding it. Funny fucker and a good pilot with it. SAMS don’t care about that though.’

Sgt Dan Morris (Corporal on OP 4A, RIP)

‘We’d been give a pretty good brief on what to expect, I mean, if those lads had driven through the interception point or anything like that, we were going to be the last point that they couldn’t get past but things would’ve been fairly gone to shit at that stage. We were told that it was basically a house cleaning exercise by dissidents prior to a new campaign and that they were out to take out a number of old Provos who would still have held some sway in the area before they could operate there freely. It was considered bad for the peace process if they succeeded. Stopping them with weapons on them, but before they got there was the name of the game but we were there I suppose number one, as a last gasp effort to stop them and number two to watch what happened afterwards, who came to visit that kind of thing. Jesus, if I’d known how long I’d spend crawling around those hills I’d probably have been a lot less precious about my heartrate!’

The opportunity to observe history as it happens is rarely afforded historians. The chance to record the lived experience of those involved, to chart their own views as they change with time and as a result of what they see and do is rarer still. The conflict over the last few years in Ireland, which has become known as the Brexit Wars, offered one such experience. The current cessation in violence may or may not be permanent, but with a sense of optimisim that could equally just be a weariness of hurt, now feels like it is a good time to give the viewpoint of some of the personnel of the Irish Defence Forces who served during this time. Their voices add colour to the official histories and in some cases, their continuity from the start of military operations joins the dots on what can otherwise become seperate major events that reach the public eye against a background noise of lower intensity operations.

This account comes at a time when tensions have reached a crescendo, where an internal security operation for Ireland developed into external operations involving the EU as a political bloc and France and the UK as individual countries, along with the, as ever alleged, support from Russia; who armed both sides in the sectarian fighting in Northern Ireland. These tensions have begun to ebb as everyone realises how close to a conventional shooting war they really came. Hopefully, they will fade to nothing, or very close to it and the internally and externally displaced people can begin to go home. It is also important to recognise that this is an account from one perspective only, that of the members of the different military branches of the Defence Forces. It is freely acknowledged that this perpsective cannot represent a whole war nor does it attempt to. The majority of this book consists of material drawn from interviews conducted by the author and others as part of the DF Oral History project, the aim of which is to record the experiences of DF members on an ongoing basis. As the events of recent years are so fresh and so close to home, some contributors have asked not to be identified by name, nor even to have their complete interviews used in an anonymous manner. In some cases, the contributors cannot be named because of the work they conducted during their service (it is unlikely that members of the Army Ranger Wing (ARW), Explosives Ordnance Disposal (EOD) or the unit known as The Red Team will be openly putting pen to paper any time soon). Where this is relevant, the author has used their accounts, or combined several accounts to form a narrative that gives a deeper context to events.

Senator (Formerly Brig Gen) Ian Davis, Minister for Defence, Retired

‘The lead up to the war had begun sometime before we ourselves realised it had actually commenced. It of course originated from the manner in which the Brexit negotiations were progressing, I suppose one could say it had already commenced from about summer of 2020 against the backdrop of ongoing Covid-19 related issues which, eh, the distraction of which, provided cover for an expansion of IRA activity along the border area.

As we later discovered, arms shipments from Russia to the IRA had already commenced at that time. Whether they had chosen the IRA as a prototype for their future actions later on, or whether they actually considered that this was the vehicle through which they were going to exercise their policy is still unknown. What is known, is that during this time the IRA had begun to actively recruit again – they had received substantial weapons shipments from Russia, some training was provided, but they did not have the bodies to use that information or equipment effectively.