This edition of An Phoblacht/Republican News joins others in the Archive, but is of particular interest since it reports on the death of the Active Service Unit led by Jim Lynagh at Loughgall in May 1987. At twenty-four pages it is these events which dominate the content.
The Loughgall ambush took place on 8 May 1987 in the village of Loughgall, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. An eight-man unit of the Provisional Irish Republican Army(IRA) launched an attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) base in the village. An IRA member drove a digger with a bomb in its bucket through the perimeter fence, while the rest of the unit arrived in a van and fired on the building. The bomb exploded and destroyed almost half of the base. Soldiers from the British Army‘s Special Air Service(SAS) then returned fire both from within the base and from hidden positions around it in a pre-planned ambush, killing all of the attackers. Two of them were subsequently found to have been unarmed when they were killed.
A civilian was also killed and another wounded by the SAS after unwittingly driving into the ambush zone and being mistaken for IRA attackers.
The joint British Army/RUC operation was codenamed Operation Judy.[6][7] It was the IRA’s biggest loss of life in a single incident during the Troubles.
There is a broader context in which the ambush took place where Lynagh and others sought to press home a strategy of the destruction of British army and RUC bases and obstructing their rebuilding in order to ultimately prise away the grip of the security forces on more extensive areas.
Various articles offer individual portraits of the dead Volunteers and there are photographs from their funerals.
The headline is notable – entitled Loughgall Martyrs, with a subheading ‘Fuair siad bás ar son mhuintir na Éireann’.