• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

On vacation at home, Collins came back to the farm late at night after having drinks with schoolfriends. As he wandered down the lane, British paratroops emerged from the bushes, shouting ‘Get your fucking hands up, don’t you fucking move. Don’t you fucking move.’ This was followed with ‘Get your arms out. Spread your fucking legs, you cunt.’ They then proceeded to beat him with rifle butts, while kicking him with heavy combat boots: ‘Get your fucking hands on your head, you Irish cunt.’ The soldiers dragged him into the house, pinning him down with the aid of a self-loading rifle shoved into his mouth, which broke some teeth. His guard remarked: ‘I’d blow your brains out for tuppence, you rotten Irish cunt.’ While his mother screamed hysterically, Collins, his father and brother were arrested, and beaten with rifle butts as they lay on the floor of the Land Rovers that drove them away. Collins was forced to sing ‘The Sash’ with soldiers marking time by hitting him on the back. After a frightening spell in the army’s Bessborough barracks, the three were turned over to the RUC. They were eventually released when forensic scientists determined that the ‘explosives’ a sniffer dog had detected in the father’s car came from spilled creosote used to stain a fence. Collins explained the psychological effects of this mistreatment: ‘I would feel a surge of rage whose power unbalanced me: I would sit alone in my room and think with pleasure of blowing off the heads of those para scum.’ He became more and more involved in activities designed to support the H-Block prisoners in the Maze. After a lengthy induction period, he joined the PIRA, attending lectures in Dundalk and receiving the organisation’s Green Book. This gave the history of the organisation, its military rules and advice on how to resist deep interrogation—the army euphemism for a rough time.

Collins worked as a PIRA intelligence officer under the guise of his day job of Customs and Excise officer in Newry, where he inspected the papers of lorry drivers coming across the border. In his spare time, he was first tenor in the Cloughmore Male Voice Choir. His own colleagues were among the early victims of terrorist attacks he facilitated. He coldly set up major Ivan Toombs of the neighbouring customs house at Warrenpoint, even though Toombs had introduced him to his charming eight-year-old daughter and the two men had got drunk together while inspecting a Russian ship. The forty-seven-year-old Toombs’s part-time membership of the UDR was sufficient grounds for him to be shot in his office in January 1981 after Collins had supplied the killer (known as ‘Iceman’) and his accomplice with details of the building’s layout. An obviously intelligent man, although that did not prevent him being beaten to death in 1999 by the PIRA after he had dropped out and narrowly avoided becoming a police supergrass, Collins captured something else about being a terrorist that does not figure as much as it should. This is the desire to bring chaos to the lives of others. After the PIRA had virtually obliterated Newry in a bombing campaign, it looked for a fresher target. It alighted upon Warrenpoint, about ten minutes’ drive away. It is worth looking at why Collins made this decision:

The people there seemed to be cocooned and relatively prosperous. Middle-class Catholics and Protestants lived in harmony, united—as I would have put it from my Marxist perspective—by their class interests in maintaining their high standard of living … I loathed the tranquillity of this little seaside town: Warrenpoint was to me a little sugar-plum fairy on the top of a rotten unionist cake … Its plump citizens enjoyed a good nightlife with pleasant pubs, coffee-houses and restaurants … I was going to enjoy bringing Warrenpoint’s fairy tale existence to an end.

Shortly afterwards, the Crown hotel in Warrenpoint’s main square was demolished when the PIRA deposited keg bombs in which ANFO (a mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, the