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

Backing up this initial bluff, the pilots, technicians and armourers still training in Sweden had their courses extended to cover the full range of air to air, air to ground and anti shipping missions. This capability, once it existed would provide the ability to engage targets within Ireland without the political twisting and turning required to get a third party nation to do it. It also meant that a realistic and accurate counter to cross border rocket attacks now existed, should they reoccur. Firing a counter battery of artillery at an unseen target in Northern Ireland carried huge political risks in terms of hitting civilians or civilian housing and infrastruture. A jet firing a single missile from within Irish airspace at a target they could see and record with their targeting pod was an entirely different scenario. It would preclude the use of such attacks altogether or at very least push the launch sites so deep into Northern Ireland as to blunt their effectiveness.

The writing by now was very clearly on the wall for semi conventional cross border attacks into Ireland. A combination of combat losses and indigenous air power meant that they would simply not be an option that any non state organisation like the Carsonites or Dissidents could survive. Unfortunately, in the world of asymmetric warfare, there is always a way to achieve your aim. The darkest day for Irelands Defence Forces was just around the corner, and the consequences of forgetting that you had rushed training would be brought into stark relief.

This is hell. All Cpl Lukasz McGrath could come up with was ‘This is hell’. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t original. But it pretty much summed it all up. Pinned down in dead ground with tracers flying over their heads, his section was spread out so that one burst of machine gun fire couldn’t kill all of them. Looking across to his right, he could see Jan Nowaks section doing the same. Looking the other way, all he could see of the section on his left was two soldiers crawling towards his position. The remaining seven, lacking the slight dip in the ground that was giving his troops a bit of respite from the incoming fire, they’d just been chewed up completely. One of the crawling soldiers slid like a worm into the comparative safety beside Lukasz.. His comrade, about a metre behind him jerked once and lay still as a burst of rounds found his head and back. The new arrival looked at Lukasz with eyes wide with shock at the sudden reversal of fortune they had suffered. He wondered how useful the boy would be when they had to move, because they sure as hell couldn’t stay here.

Daring to raise his head an inch off the ground to look over his shoulder, he could see the convoy still getting lit up with machine gun and RPG fire. One Mowag and several soft skin vehicles were burning. Others were just stopped, occasionally rocking as a rocket frgagment or bullet hit some part solid enough to sway the trucks back and forth. The ground around them was littered with dead and wounded, civilians and soldiers, who’d tried to escape the barrage of fire. Literally, there were piles of them at the back of each tailgate.

He had no idea where his platoon commander was, he’d seen the platoon sergeant go down in the first volley of fire, so it was a safe assumption the Lieutenant was dead too. His dip in the ground was the whole world now, though a fairly fragile one. His brain was somewhat getting over the shock of the ambush and starting to evaluate things. One mortar in here and all of them were done. After what had seemed like an eternity, he finally heard the turreted wepons on the remaining Mowags open up. It didn’t seem to do much to quieten the incoming fire but, if they stayed here a bit longer, then maybe… He didn’t know where it came from but up and down the line of soldiers he heard something even worse than the screams. ‘Ar aghaidh’ – ‘Forward’. They were attacking into the ambush. What was left of his company was attacking into the ambush. Oh Fuck. This is hell.

An Sráid Gan Áthas

When the remains of the escaping Carsonite force withdrew into Northern Ireland, it was clear to them and to all other observers that the game had changed dramatically. In a matter of days, they had been transformed from being the dominant paramilitary force, one that had leveraged the split between the IRA and the Dissidents to devastating effect; and which had felt sure enough of itself to launch a large scale raid across the border; into something quite different. In terms of pure numbers, they were now more or less equal with the Dissidents. They had however expended a lot of materiel as well as personnel in attacking Donegal. How much? No one knew outside of themselves, but there was definitely blood in the water.

The Carsonite commanders were now obliged to assert themselves somewhere. Really, they had no option. To melt away in small groups was to invite attack by Dissidents, and piecemeal destruction. To fail to act was to allow the battered morale of their fighters to worsen, which again invited destruction of a different kind – demoralised troops are prime hunting ground for intelligence agencies seeking an ‘in’. To quietly reorganise was to risk being cut off from resupply by Russia – a quiet terrorist is not a relavent one when political and media distraction is your goal and they could easily feed those arms to other more active groups. Again, this was to invite destruction.

So an attack was necessary – an aggressive action showing they were still to be feared and would not be picked off by the circling sharks. But who and where? It had to be an undeniable victory or it would just worsen their situation. The answer was only days in coming.

Located just twenty kilometres across the border and only thirty kilometres from Finner, was the IDP camp known as Camp Erne,named for Lough Erne which was just to the North. Positioned at a crossroads between the A46 and Binmore road, the camp had become a clearing ground for IDPs who wanted to cross into Ireland and the EU. Although it housed all comers, with a split close to fifty/fifty in terms of background, the fact that they were trying to get across the border made it a politically ‘safe’ target for the Carsonites, in their own minds at least. In the shocked state of their fighters however, operational security – the control of information relevant to an upcoming mission – had broken down just enough to allow intelligence agencies on both sides of the border to put together details of the attack from social media. The PSNI personnel guarding the camp insisted that they needed to be reinforced with troops or the camp had to be evacuated, that they could not successfully defend the people there against a full scale attack.

Here once more, the political situation muddied the response. Unknown to the EU, the USA was once more offering personnel to assist with security in Northern Ireland and specifically with the defence of IDP camps. This time backroom, unofficial, pressure was being applied to allow in Private Military Contractors, or mercenaries in plain language. These contractors had a long and storied past in the War on Terror, one that the UK had no intention of reinvigorating so close to home. Equally, a troop deployment so close to the border would be considered provacative, regardless of the genuine reasoning.

So it was that, with many conditions, the UK gave permission for an EU humanitarian force to evacaute Camp Erne into Ireland. This came as a surprise in Dublin, Brussels and Paris. There was little doubt that the Irish troops, being so close to the scene would be the ones to respond. However, under the existing Triple Lock, any foreign deployment of more than twelve Irish military personnel required approval from both the Dail and the Seanad, and the UN security council. Since the Good Friday Agreement had removed the constitutional claim on Northern Ireland, crossing twenty kilometres over the border counted as a foreign deployment. Even with a non-permanent seat on the Security Council, the diplomatic work to gain approval was as frenetic as the military planning. It was all impossible to keep out of the media. Both the Dissidents and the Carsonites adjusted their plans accordingly.