South Armagh Sniper (1990–1997)

The South Armagh Sniper is the generic name"At first, we believed it was one unit, one weapon and one trigger man.... It developed into at least two". A former SAS warrant officer, quoted by Harnden (Harnden 2000, p. 400). given to the members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's (IRA) South Armagh Brigade who conducted a sniping campaign against the British Army from 1990 to 1997. The campaign is notable for the snipers' use of .50 BMG calibre Barrett M82 and M90 long-range rifles in some of the shootings.

Origins

One of the first leaders of the Provisional IRA, Seán Mac Stíofáin, supported the use of snipers in his book ''Memoirs of a Revolutionary'' and was attracted by the motto "one shot, one kill".Harnden 2000, p. 406. Most of the soldiers who were shot dead in 1972, the bloodiest year of the conflict in Northern Ireland, fell victim to IRA snipers. About 180 British soldiers, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers and Her Majesty's Prison Service prison staff members were killed that way between 1971 and 1991. The AR-18 Armalite rifle became the weapon of choice for the time's IRA members.

The British Army's assessment of the conflict asserted that the IRA's sniping skills often did not match those expected from a well-trained sniper. The report identifies four different patterns of small arms attacks during the IRA campaign, the last being that developed by the South Armagh sniper units.

Sniper teams in South Armagh

Rifles

During the 1980s, the IRA relied mostly on weaponry smuggled from Libya. The regular shipments from the United States, once the main source of arms for the republicans through the gunrunning operations of George Harrison, were disrupted after he was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1981. The smuggling scheme suffered a further blow when the Fenit-based trawler ''Marita Ann'', with a huge arms cache from Boston, was captured by the Irish Naval Service in 1985.

However, between the mid-1980s and the 1990ss, there was some small-scale activity, leading to the purchase of US-made Barrett M82 and M90 rifles, which became common weapons for the South Armagh snipers. According to letters seized by US federal authorities from a Dundalk IRA member, Martin Quigley, who had travelled to the US to study computing at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, the organisation managed to smuggle an M82 to the Republic of Ireland just before his arrest in 1989. He was part of a larger plot to import electronic devices to defeat British Army countermeasures against IRA remote-controlled bombs.

In August 1986, another M82 had been sent in pieces from Chicago to Dublin, where the rifle was reassembled.
At least two of the M90 rifles were bought as recently as six months after the first IRA ceasefire.Harnden 1999. It was part of a batch of two sold to Michael Suárez, a Cuban resident of Cleveland, on 27 January 1995 by a firearms dealer. Suárez later passed the weapons to an Irishman, who finally shipped the rifles, their ammunition and two telescopic sights to the Republic of Ireland. An unidentified leading figure inside the IRA sniper campaign, quoted by Toby Harnden, said:

Three of the security forces members killed in the campaign were the victims of 7.62×51mm rounds instead. Five missed shots belonged to the same kind of weapon. Harnden recalls a Belgian FN FAL rifle recovered by the Gardaí near Inniskeen in 1998 as the possible source of these bullets.Harnden 2000, p. 400. Security sources suspected a Heckler & Koch PSG1 sniper rifle might have been used in some attacks.

Shootings

Contrary to the first British Army assessment and the speculation of the press, there was not just a single sniper involved. According to Harnden, there were two different teams,
one responsible for the east part of South Armagh, around Dromintee, the other for the west, in the area surrounding Cullyhanna. The volunteer in charge of the Cullyhanna unit was Frank "One Shot" McCabe, a senior IRA member from Crossmaglen.Harnden 2000, p. 407.

Each team comprised at least four members, not counting those in charge of support activities, such as scouting for targets and driving vehicles. Military officials claim that the Dromintee-based squad deployed up to 20 volunteers in some of the sniping missions. The teams made good use of dead ground to conceal themselves from British observation posts.

The sniper attack on a checkpoint at Newry killed Constable Brian Woods and was officially reported in an IRA South Down Brigade statement, but a high-profile IRA member from Dromintee, identified by Toby Harnden as a South Armagh Brigade volunteer known as "The Surgeon", was identified by the author as the mastermind behind the shooting.

Between 1990 and 1997, 24 shots were fired at British forces. The first eight operations (1990–1992), ended in misses. On 16 March 1990, the Barrett M82 was used for the first time by the IRA. The target was a checkpoint manned by soldiers of The Light Infantry regiment on Castleblaney Road. A single .50 round pierced the helmet and skimmed the skull of Lance Corporal Hartsthorne, who survived with minor head injuries.Harnden 2000, p. 392. In August 1992, one team mortally wounded a Light Infantry soldier. By April 1997 seven soldiers and two policemen had been killed. An RUC constable almost lost one of his legs in the last sniper attack during the Troubles.

Another six rounds achieved nothing, but two of them narrowly missed the patrol boat HMS ''Cygnet'', in Carlingford Lough and another holed Borucki sangar, a British Army outpost in Crossmaglen square. On 31 July 1993 at 10:00 pm a British Army patrol which had set up a mobile checkpoint on Newry Road, near Newtownhamilton, was fired at by an IRA sniper team. The British soldiers returned fire, but there were no casualties on either side. The marksman usually fired from a distance of less than 300 m, despite the 1 km effective range of the rifles. Sixteen operations were carried out from the rear of a vehicle, with the sniper protected by an armour plate in case the patrols returned fire.Harnden 2000, p. 403. At least in one incident, after the killing of a soldier in Forkhill on 17 March 1993, had the British Army fire back at the sniper's vehicle without effect. The IRA vehicles were escorted by scout cars, to alert about the presence of security checkpoints ahead.

Two different sources include in the campaign two incidents that happened outside South Armagh; one in Belcoo, County Fermanagh, where a constable was killed, the other in West Belfast, which resulted in the death of a British soldier.Harnden 2000, p. 392. The IRA Belfast Brigade claimed that the latter incident actually involved two shooters, who fired 28 rounds from assault rifles on a British Army vehicle. An RUC investigation after the Belfast ambush led to the discovery of one Barrett M82, hidden in a derelict house. It was later determined that this rifle was the weapon responsible for the first killing in South Armagh in 1992. Another Barrett is reported to have been in possession of the IRA team in the Occupation of Cullaville in South Armagh in April 1993.

A third unrelated sniper attack, which resulted in the death of a British soldier, was carried out by the IRA in the New Lodge, North Belfast, on 3 August 1992. Two other soldiers were wounded by snipers in the New Lodge, which was suitable for sniper attacks because of the number of high-rise flats in the area, in November 1993 and January 1994. Two people were arrested and a loaded rifle recovered in the aftermath of the latter incident. On 30 December 1993 Guardsman Daniel Blinco became the last soldier killed by snipers in South Armagh before the first IRA ceasefire in 1994.Harnden 2000, pp. 409–410.

His killing, along with the reaction of the MP of his constituency, was covered by the BBC
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