Patterns of Evidence I - The Business of Murder

Thomas Niedermayer, general manager of Grundig in Northern Ireland and IRA murder victim.

When it comes to looking at any period there are two things which will determine many of the conclusions you come to. One is what evidence you choose to look at. The other is what questions you ask when examining that evidence.

Those familiar with Northern Ireland politics will remember the Haass talks back in 2013. While the talks didn’t result in an agreement the document which emerged has shaped much of the discussion about how Northern Ireland should deal with what politicians describe as the past.

I felt then and I feel more strongly now that if the themes proposed in the Haass document (listed on page 33 here) form the basis of how events in Northern Ireland are examined the IRA will get off the hook in relation to a plethora of important issues.

Sometimes I read responses to my tweets saying that what the IRA did was pointless  or didn’t achieve anything. I don’t think that a serious look at their campaign could lead one to those conclusions. The IRA’s campaign of murder wasn’t mindless. It was targeted. It was purposeful. There certainly are themes. The question is - what are they?

Of course there are the obvious such as the targeting of security forces when off duty, the sectarian murderers and involvement of the Republic of Ireland in their campaign. But there are some other aspects which are largely forgotten - such as the targeting of business people.

The example which generated the biggest response on the twitter feed was that of the German industrialist Thomas Niedermayer 

 - and understandably so given the devastating impact of the murder on his family. (PS If you haven’t yet listened to the RTE documentary linked to in the tweets you really should. It is very powerful and details the quite brilliant detective work of the RUC which led to the recovery of the body).

The motivation for Niedermayer’s kidnapping was to exert pressure to get the Price sisters moved from an English jail to one in Northern Ireland. But there were others which had a purely economic motive.

Consider James Nicholson, shot the same year because businessmen "stabilise the North’s economy to serve British interests”.

Paddy Devlin of the SDLP noted after the murder:
“The clear intention of the organisation behind the killing is to sabotage the efforts of those who have been striving to bring industry to west Belfast.”

Far from fighting to improve the lot of the poor in the Republican heartland of West Belfast the IRA actively worked to discourage investment. Remember too that it was in West Belfast that the Niedermayers chose to set up home.

It was a similar story in Martin McGuinness’s home patch of Londonderry that year.

In February 1977 Jeffrey Agate, the managing director of the Du Pont plant, one of Northern Ireland’s largest industrial establishments, was shot.

The reason? He played a role in stabilising the economy. The IRA statement went on to say:

“The war is not merely a conflict between Republican and British forces. It is a conflict between the interests which those forces represent. Those involved in the management of the economy serve British interests. They represent and maintain economic interests which make the war necessary”.

Later in the same month you have the case of Peter Hill, a businessman in one of Londonderry’s biggest furniture and drapery firms. Although he was a former member of the UDR it is hard to divorce his murder from the pattern of attacks on members of the business community at the time.

One of several shortcomings of my twitter feed is that it does not detail any of the many thousands of PIRA attacks in which no one was murdered. There were numerous bombings, for example which caused enormous economic damage. Liam Clarke details the impact of the PIRA bombing campaign in the Maiden City in his biography of Martin McGuinness, noting that almost every business in the city was damaged.

The same was true of Strabane, a strongly Nationalist town on the border with the Republic. In 1974 Peter Taylor produced a shot documentary detailing what he described as “the blitz of Strabane”. Strabane suffered 200 bombs in five years. And it wasn’t Loyalist terrorists who planted them.

All this is, of course, quite separate from the IRA bombing campaign aimed at towns with a predominately Protestant population - bombs such as the one which resulted in the murder of 11 year old school boy Alan McCrum in 1982.

It’s also separate from the IRA bombs in London which had a primarily economic motivation but still took innocent lives like that of photographer Edward Henty, Inan Ul-Haq Bashir or 15 year old Danielle Carter.

While the IRA may have used this tactic for economic reasons I’ve always used my twitter account to think of the human cost rather than the financial one and with that in mind let’s take a moment to reflect on that last victim and what her father had to say some years ago:

“The memory is with me all the time. It is videoed in my mind step by step.

''The shock wave from the blast blew me backwards. I ran up the ramp and saw the loading bay was blown to bits. I ran through the dust and rubble, choking, hysterical, glass under my feet, debris still falling around me, a terrible smell of smoke, of burning.

''It was deadly quiet for a split second then I started hearing the sirens, the screaming, people shouting 'help, help', me shouting 'Danielle, Danielle', police officers calling 'over here', more sirens,

others shouting 'get people out'.''

''All I could think of was the kids and then I saw Christiane and the others smothered in blood. 

''I shouted 'Danielle, Danielle' and ran round the car and found her, lying half out of the car, face down in a pool of blood.''

The Sunday Herald goes on to note:

“At the time, he thought she was unconscious. In the chaos that followed, it was six hours before he learned his daughter was dead.”