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

The second thing that occured to him was ‘Triage’. He had to prioritise who to treat, who could be treated, before attending to anyone. Isn’t that what they were thought on the Major Incident Medical Management course? Get organised or more will die than the one you’re working on. The man in front of him slumped first to his knees and then bounced off a seat and onto the floor.

The last thing that occured to him as he looked down at his shaking hands, pulling on a pair of blue gloves and holding the small plastic face shield that he had pulled out of his bag at some point was that he didn’t have enough of his kit with him to make any kind of difference. Not nearly enough.

“Brendan” Red Team Member

‘The Transport Bombings? Oh, there was a lot to unpack there wasn’t there and from so many angles?To answer the first set of questions that always come up, yes; the plan was one of ours, almost a carbon copy of a risk assessment we had submitted over a year earlier. That’s why the blast curtains had been fitted but that was about the only recomendation that was taken up. The second question that gets asked, no – of course we didn’t fucking do it! At some point along the line, and it’s still uncertain where, our information was compromised. You can’t expect to go for this long in a war without someone on the other side having a success. Of proof, we have none, but all bets are that the securing of the risk assesment – basically that one was, how do you cripple Dublin in a day with maximum political and public effect? Well everyone knows that it that happened in a certain embassy in South Dublin who were probably a bit pissed off that they’d recently suffered some casualties.

Because that’s what this was, right? Everyone wondered why the Carsonites laid off on the rocket attacks across the border, it’s not like they decided to turn over a new leaf and turn to religion was it? No, as has been suspected from time to time, well somone took them out and I’m not saying outright it was us, but you know… What I said before, about work group targeting not being effective on the IRA, that was right, but that was for them. The same was largely true for the Carsonites, but the rocket teams were different. They needed more training, more supervision to be effective. That meant advisors from Russia on the ground.

We, well there’s a whole other story in this but the Red Team is actually organised on the bones of a reactivated, old, FCA Battalion, the 16th Infantry. You have A Coy which does the opposition forces stuff for the staff course, all the low end stuff like that. B Coy, they do the risk assesments, all the looking around at our own country and asking themselves ‘How would I kill that?’ Then D Coy, who work in the cyberwarfare end of things, hacking, kompromat that kind of thing. Now, I’m not saying that there is a C Coy, but if there is, maybe they’d be the operational arm of the Red Team. The deniable ones doing things other people can’t, right? If they exist at all…

So anyway, ‘someone’ targetted the rocket teams in their entirety. That included the advisors. That was deliberate, a bit of a definite fuck you right back kind of thing. And it worked, we didn’t get all of them, but it stopped launches into Ireland. But Russia plays this game well, don’t they?

The scheme of the transport bombings was to funnel people into a killzone unknown to themselves, while making the political and military forces look like they’d failed. It had a few stages. Step one, shut down the M50, the big ring road going all around Dublin. This was easy enough. One or two small, real, bombs go off without warning. This gives you the traffic jam. After that, you call in a mix of real and fake warnings for every bridge and junction along the way – they then all have to be treated as real.

You let that develop, get the EOD and Gardai out to deal with that, which is a shit show all on its’ own, right? Then you hit the trains. Doesn’t have to be an actual train itself, it’s pretty easy to disrupt a train line, but they got best bang for their buck by doing it near Heuston and Connolly Stations. That way they cut both the East West and North South lines right there.

Then you top it off with hitting the ports in Dun Laoghaire and the airport itself – that was just a hacked drone dropping screws on the runways. Now, this is the genius bit, the really awful bit. Think of where people consume most of their media now, think of the graphics typically used by traditional and online news outlets when they have a bomb go off but can’t get people to the scene for a photo? Look at all this on a screen the size of your typical smartphone.

Almost universally, there was a largescale map of Dublin with what was basically an explosion emoji over each of the modes of tranpost affected. A ring of them around the M50, no way out by air, by land or by sea. It looked for all the world – because almost no one zoomed in enough to see that there was still plenty of ways out, you could walk for a start- it looked like the city was being hemmed in and put under seige. No way out – except for the Luas. So the trams were crowded. This made it easier to get bombs on board and harder to spot them once they were there. That was the target all along, and the goal. Fifty two dead civilians on the trams themselves and another six out on the streets alongside them. All just normal people in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it had the planned effect didn’t it? The government came under severe pressure, that came down on the security forces and when they found out it was one of our plans? We were almost disbanded and a big review then came on to ‘regularise’ our actions.

The Carsonites claimed it, why wouldn’t they? If they could pull that off it would be a massive sign of their capability, and the media and politicians largely went with that. Proof is one thing, but I’d say the guys who planted those bombs strolled on back to their diplomatic immunity in South Dublin’

Most non state armed actors will, at some point, over reach beyond their inherent capabilities. Sometimes this is an over estimation of their abilities, sometimes it is a calculated risk in order to attain a political goal, sometimes it is a move of desperation to try to force a solution to their fight. This over reach usually takes the form of fighting as a conventional force when they don’t have all the logistics, operational structures and training to go with it. Classic examples can are DeValeras’ push to attack Dublin Castle that left seventy dead and captured, the outright expenditure of the NLF, or Viet Cong, by the North Vietnamese during the Tet offensive and more recently Isis presenting itself as a statelike construct and thereby making itself vulnerable to attacks on the supporting infrastructure of that pseudo state. It seems likely that the Carsonite push into Donegal in July 2022 will in the future be counted amongst the ranks of these strategic errors.

A quick summary of the military and political disposition of the key units involved is perhaps necessary at this point as the picture had already changed rapidly in the weeks preceeding the attacks and counterattacks described below.

During May, the fighting between Dissident and Carsonite groups escalalated sharply. This escalation occured on the back of a vague and wavering indication from Westminister that a second Scottish independence referendum might be held in a hazy but not to distant future after all. Far from sating the appetites of Scottish nationalists, they seized on this to make direct appeals to the UN to recognise Scottish independence as soon as it arose. Similar appeals were made to the EU for a strong statement that would guarantee membership on the day of Scottish independence, should that be the outcome of the ballot.