Special Patrol Group (RUC)

"Note: the RUC unit should not be confused with the Special Patrol Group of the London Metropolitan Police".

The Special Patrol Group (SPG) in the Royal Ulster Constabulary was a police unit tasked with counter terrorism. Each SPG had 30 members. Many of the SPG units have been accused of collusion with the illegal paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force. Particularly notorious are the actions of a unit based in Armagh.

A partisan force

According to John Weir, a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer who colluded with the UVF, the Armagh based RUC Special Patrol Group regarded the loyalist paramilitaries as allies and passed personal information about Catholics and weapons to them [RUC men's secret war with the IRA, Liam Clarke, Sunday Times, March 7th 1999] and mounted sectarian killings of their own. [ [http://www.seeingred.com/Copy/2.1_CODE_weiraff.html SeeingRed [John Weir's Affadavit ] ]

Another Special Patrol Group officer, Billy McCaughey, told the journalist Toby Harnden that, "Our colour code was Orange and it was Orange by nature and several of us were paramilitaries. Our proud boast was that we would never have a Catholic in it. We did actually have a Catholic once, a guy called Danny from Dungivin. The day after he joined we had him dangling out from the back of a Land Rover with his chin inches from the road. He lasted a week". [Bandit Country, by Toby Harnden, Cononet Books, p.139]

The Special Patrol Group was temporarily restricted from patrolling republican areas such as Crossmaglen and Silverbridge However, some of the restrictions were lifted after Weir and another RUC officer met Harold McCusker, the local Unionist MP. [RUC men's secret war with the IRA, Liam Clarke, Sunday Times, March 7th 1999.] [ [http://www.burnsmoley.com/pages/collusion/barron.php The Barron Report and South Armagh] ]

ectarian attacks

McCaughey stated that "24 or 25" RUC officers were working with the UVF in the Armagh area, and that SPG members had been involved in many of the loyalist killings in South Armagh in the lead up to the republican Kingsmill massacre of ten Protestants in January 1976. In particular, he claimed that his unit had been behind the bombing of two pubs (McCardles and Donnelly's) in nationalist Crossmaglen in November and December 1975 respectively, leading to five deaths [Harnden p.139] . A report into collusion in 2006 also found that SPG weapons had been used in the killing of six Catholics on the day prior to the Kingsmill attack [ [http://www.nd.edu/~cchr/publications/IIP_final_11_06_06.pdf Center for Civil & Human Rights // Law School // University of Notre Dame ] ] .

McCaughey reported that he provided RUC cars as escorts to the UVF. He also alleged that a member of the Ulster Defence Regiment in the area, Robert McConnell "was very senior UVF and deeply involved in military intelligence". [Harnden, p. 138-140. See also, [http://www.patfinucanecentre.org/sarmagh/collusion.pdf Report of the Independent International Panel on alleged Collusion in Sectarian Killings in Northern Ireland] , Center for Civil and Human Rights, Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame, October 2006. See graphic linking weapons to security force involvement in sectarian killings. For detailed information see [http://www.oireachtas.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/Committees29thDail/JustEquDefWomRgts.htm Irish parliament interim (more detail) and final reports into the Dublin & Monaghan bombings of 1974, the Dublin bombings of 1972 and 1973, into the murder of Seamus Ludlow, and into the bombing at Kay’s Tavern] .] According to McCaughey, the senior officers of the RUC and British Army turned a blind eye to the SPG's activities, because, "they didn't mind a wee bit of terror being spread" [Harnden p.138 ] .

In June 1978, McCaughey reports that he and three other SPG members, constables David Wilson, Laurence McClure and Ian Mitchell, heard from the RUC Special Branch that Provisional IRA member Dessie O'Hare was in the Rock Bar in Keady. They planned to attack the bar, during their lunch hour, using an unmarked police car for transport and a 10lb gelignite bomb and machine guns. However, they failed to kill O'Hare. McCaughey was prevented from entering the pub by a customer, whom he shot twice in the chest. The bomb they planted also failed to detonate. According to McCaughey, "some of the others were back in the police station in time to get the emergency call" [ Harnden, p.139] . The man McCaughey shot in the attack survived.

Arrest of Weir and McCaughey, disbandment of SPG

John Weir and Billy McCaughey were arrested in 1980 and confessed to their activities in the preceding years. They were both convicted of the murder of Catholic William Strathearn in 1977. The Special Patrol Group was stood down.

Weir accused his colleagues of participation in 11 murders. An independent inquiry in 2006 found that in 7 out of 8 cases, ballistics tests corroborated his claims, linking the murders to weapons carried by RUC officers [ [http://www.nd.edu/~cchr/publications/IIP_final_11_06_06.pdf Center for Civil & Human Rights // Law School // University of Notre Dame ] ] .

According to Toby Harnden, "the years when McCaughey and the RUC Special Patrol Group were at large represented the only period when loyalist paramilitaries made forays deep into South Armagh [a republican stronghold] ". [Harnden, p.139]

John Weir claimed in 1999: "Some day it will come out that there were people high up, either Special Branch or army intelligence, who were using us." [ibid]

References