By Robin Horsfall

Nov 30, 2024

Blood of the innocents.

By 1974 the government had decided to make us wait until we were eighteen to go on active service. After the IRA had murdered three off duty soldiers in North Belfast and dumped their mutilated bodies next to the road, those in high office thought it better to be eighteen before the IRA murdered us.

I was fortunate, I passed out of Parachute Regiment Depot in Aldershot just a few days before I was eighteen. A man, a soldier, Utrinque Paratus, ready for anything. I was certainly ready to walk the streets of Northern Ireland, rifle in hand as a member of a patrol. My patrol commanders were probably three to five years older than me. They had been here before and knew the ground, knew the people, and knew the job. Walk the streets day and night, keep the peace, support the police, protect the public and shoot back if someone shot at you. Don’t stand still!

They had been in the Ballymurphy in 73, when the IRA came out and took them on ‘man to man’ and got their arses kicked. They still whine about losing that battle fifty years later. Having lost they resorted to snipers and improvised explosive devices. There was a tower in Crossmaglen named the ‘Baroucki Sangar’ where Bob Baroucki had been killed by a bicycle bomb.

In reality we were walking targets. The IRA always chose the time and place. Their snipers got shots off and ran to a waiting car before we could follow up. Bombs were worse. Every wall, gap in a fence, dustbin, lost torch on the street could kill. Despite all that we were cheerful, this was our job come rain or shine, and in Belfast it was mostly rain.

The IRA’s greatest success was when they killed twenty-two men in a double bomb ambush at Warren point. Most of them were from my battalion. They murdered the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten the same day with two teenagers on a boat. Of course they didn’t confine themselves to murdering soldiers. They murdered military wives and children in the UK, civilians in bars, in the streets of London, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham and blew up Margaret Thatcher’s government in Brighton.

They weren’t shy of killing their own. Shooting at soldiers and policemen from behind protestors was a classic method of getting their own people killed and blaming the security forces. Executions for blabbing, young catholic women beaten, tarred, and feathered then tied to lamp posts for dating soldiers. Their ‘courage’ as freedom fighters knew no bounds.

We worked, we died, or we came home wounded and retired, proud that we had prevented a civil war from consuming the province.

Now, representatives of the IRA want to claim that we breached their human rights, supported by politicians too young to remember, who think we didn’t fight their filthy wars nicely enough! They want to spread the lie that we occupied the country and carried out atrocities when in truth we were only able to respond. The IRA were and still are an atrocity, paid enormous sums of ‘peace money’ not to go back to their murderous path.

When I was eighteen in 1975 my Battalion Commander had said ‘There is only one solution to the Irish problem, a united Ireland’. That might be true, but the greatest tragedy is the only people who benefited from the past fifty years are living it rich on the corpses of those they claimed to represent.

Who Dares Shares.

Robin Horsfall

IJLB/2 Para/22SAS