Charlie One. Seán Hartnett
Machine Gun
PROLOGUE
HOW THE HELL DID I END UP HERE?
It was approaching 2100 hours on Sunday, 17 February 2002, and darkness had settled in completely over Northern Ireland. Three Tyrone men – Donald Mullan from Dungannon, and Seán Dillon and Kevin Murphy, both from Coalisland – moved blindly through a field in Coalisland, carrying what we suspected was an RPG 22 rocket launcher complete with warhead, something they were later acquitted of in court. A fourth – Brendan O’Connor from Pomeroy – sat in a grey Peugeot car in a nearby car park. They had target designations of ‘Charlie One’ through to ‘Charlie Four’ and were suspected members of an East Tyrone Real IRA active service unit.
Though they didn’t know it at the time, they were not alone that night and had not been for quite some time. JCU-NI operators, combined with SAS (Special Air Service) and SBS (Special Boat Service) troopers, had had the four men and the location under intense surveillance for over a week before this. And the darkness made no difference to them now: they had night-vision capabilities as part of their kits. So too did the two video-surveillance cameras positioned in the surrounding ditches, beaming images forty miles away to the operations room in Shackleton Barracks, Ballykelly, where the operations officer sat in front of his bank of monitors, ready to give the order.
As for me, I was four miles from the action, watching it all on my own personal ‘feed’ from the surveillance cameras and closely monitoring the radio network for signs of trouble. I was a nervous wreck and wondering to myself how the hell I had ended up in this situation, me, an innocent fella from Cork caught between sympathising with the nationalist community in the North and helping the British army outsmart its enemy.
1 UP THE ’RA
The Sinn Féin office in Cork city at that time was located on Barrack Street, just across from a pub called Nancy Spain’s, which was a favourite drinking haunt for us UCC students. In spite of my naivety, I wasn’t daft enough to just walk in there and ask to join the IRA. I actually did a bit of digging first and got the name and phone number of a local Sinn Féin figure whom I was told would be able to help. We arranged to meet on a Sunday morning in April 1995.
I got up that morning having spent the whole night going over in my head what I was about to do. I had never been in trouble with the law, hadn’t even had so much as a bad report home from school, and yet here I was with a half-baked plan to join one of the most notorious terrorist organisations in the world.
The closer the time came to leave for the meeting, the more insane the idea seemed.
*
There weren’t many clues in my past that I would end up where I did.
I was born in 1975 in a small village in Co. Cork, into a family of six girls and three boys, a good Irish Catholic family. In the old days, as the youngest son, I might have been sent off to join the priesthood.
Back in November 1968, my parents had returned to Cork from London, where they had met and married two years previously. They were both from families whose roots were firmly in Cork and it was practically inevitable that they would end up there themselves. My oldest brother was the only one of us to be born outside Ireland, the rest of us were Cork-born and bred.
My father got a job in the booming textile industry that had sprung up all over the county, and seemed set for life. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t last, and in 1981 he was made redundant. That was the last proper job I remember him having: he spent the rest of his days on the dole, occasionally picking up some work on the fishing boats, either with his brother or another crew, but it was never steady work. In these circumstances, like so many other men of that era, he took to drinking, and the responsibility of providing for the family fell to my mother. She worked a variety of cooking, cleaning and secretarial jobs over the next thirty years, and it was all down to her that we got by and that my siblings and I all managed to get decent educations.
Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Ireland was tough; money was tight and with so many mouths to feed my mother often struggled to make ends meet. As it continued, my father’s drinking sapped the family finances – a fact that never seemed to bother him much, and we were often left hungry. Each of my older brothers and sisters had a part-time job from an early age and their wages were used to supplement my mother’s meagre income. My turn came too; I took my first job at twelve years old, working two hours a day after school and a half-day on Saturdays in a fish co-op, where my two older brothers had also worked. It was tough going but I loved it; the craic was always good and my wages of £20 a week, stuffed into a brown envelope, I handed over to my mother with pride. Many of the families on our small housing estate, one of the many built as part of the government social housing initiative, were in the same boat, so we didn’t stand out. We had the advantage of having great neighbours, with everyone pitching in to help each other out; and forty years on, they remain just the same.
My home life, however, was not so happy or supportive; my father was argumentative with drink on him. He was the classic street angel, house devil, and as a result many of my early years were spent outdoors with others of my age, escaping his influence. This was before the days of Xbox and PlayStation, and we made your own fun out in the fields and woodlands that surrounded the village. On free days, we would head off at first light, only returning for meals and sometimes not even then. I loved the outdoors and in fact was just as happy out wandering about on my own as I was surrounded by friends. There may have been a soldiering seed planted in those days; but of course a seed needs more than planting.
Things came to a head with my father one night when he came home