1983 escape IRIS
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IRIS
The ‘rare character’ and the thinker THE GREATEST ESCAPE
A TRIBUTE TO THE TWO BRENDANS
T
HE DEATH on active service of Volunteers Brendan Moley and Brendan Burns on 29 February 1988, in a premature explosion outside Crossmaglen, deprived the IRA of two of its most experienced and committed soldiers.
Both aged 30 when they died, Moley was from Dorsey, Cullyhanna, while Burns was from Crossmaglen. Both Volunteers had attended the same school, had each joined the Fianna at the age of 16, and had then graduated to full-time active service with the IRA in South Armagh during 1976. Described by a comrade as “a rare character”, Brendan Burns had a happy-go-lucky personality and was impatient when indoors, preferring all the time to be on the go. Brendan Moley, as his central role in the HBlock escape plan indicated, was known among his comrades as a thinker and a meticulous organiser. Both men were courageous to an extreme degree. Among the scores of operations in which they took part, many of which even now cannot be detailed for fear of compromising their comrades who remain active, two are singled out as illustrating their determination and coolness in the face of the enemy. On 17 April 1979, two RUC landrovers were travelling along the Newry-Camlough Road in the direction of Newry. A massive van bomb was parked at the side of the road, with a command wire leading back several hundred yards in the Camlough direction. Brendan Burns, positioned a short distance from the road, was the Volunteer at the firing point. As the first landrover passed the van bomb, Burns detonated it, killing the four RUC occupants instantly. However, as Burns stepped on to the road to make his escape, the second landrover reversed at speed up alongside him and its occupants got out. To his astonishment, the RUC officers merely asked him had he seen anything suspicious prior to the explosion! Explaining that he hadn’t and pausing for a few moments to express his shock at the blast, Burns walked 40
• Up to 2,000 RUC and British Army personnel swamped the villages of Cullyhanna and Crossmaglen during the funerals of Volunteers Moley and Burns
away, to be picked up in a car nearby which was driven by Brendan Moley. On 9 July 1986, at around 8.45pm, Brendan Burns drove a lorry loaded with a bomb along the Glassdrummond Road near Crossmaglen and parked it adjacent to the recently constructed British Army observation post. Because reconstruction work was taking place at the post, a number of British soldiers were positioned close to the road in a billet, designed to prevent attacks on the sappers carrying out this work. Although at this stage Burns was on the run and well known to enemy personnel, he got out of the lorry and called out to the soldiers in the billet to come down to the road, as he wanted to talk to them. Four soldiers came running down. At the last moment Brendan Moley drove by, travelling in the opposite direction, and picked Burns up seconds before the bomb was detonated. Two British soldiers were killed in this attack and two others were injured. Between that time and the death of Burns and Moley less than two years later, the same post was attacked by IRA mortars on four separate occasions. Shortly after Burns’ participation in the HBlock escape operation at Scarva, he was arrested by 26 County authorities in Dundalk, on the basis of a British extradition warrant in connection with the killing of five British soldiers in a landmine attack near Camlough in 1981. He spent two years in Portlaoise prison before, in 1985, the warrant was ruled to be invalid on a technicality. Evading Garda Special Branch attempts to re-arrest him or
keep him under surveillance until a new warrant was served, Burns stayed on the run both in the Six Counties and in the 26 Counties until his death, but remained active in South Armagh. On 29 February 1988, while moving a 300-lb bomb closer to Crossmaglen in preparation for an attack on British forces, Brendan Moley and Brendan Burns were killed in an accidental explosion. Even in death the two men remained an object of fear to the British forces. Despite the RUC having claimed to have taken both bodies to the mortuary, Brendan Moley’s body remained for four days at the spot where he had died until friends and relatives searching the area on 3 March discovered it. At the funerals on 5 March up to 2000 British soldiers and RUC swamped Crossmaglen and Cullyhanna, harassing mourners and launching a series of baton charges against those attending the funeral of Brendan Burns. The final tribute to both Volunteers from their comrades in the South Armagh Brigade was fittingly paid at the spot adjacent to the Glassdrummond observation post where they had been such a thorn in the side of the enemy. As the bodies were being brought back into South Armagh on the evening of 3 March from the mortuary in Armagh city, the cortege paused at the spot. IRA Volunteers emerged from nearby fields and fired a volley of shots over each coffin, before pausing for a minute’s silent respect for each of their fallen comrades.