BROTHER-IN-ARMS

TO SUGGEST THAT Ireland doesn t belong to the Irish is just a fucking ludicrous statement. Yes, the IRA have done bad things in the name of their cause, but so have the British. Bad things happen in wars you re talking about killing people.

The words sound like those of a republican hardliner. In fact, they issue from the lips of a former British soldier, Bernard O Mahoney. His newly published book about his time in Northern Ireland, Soldier Of the Queen, pulls no punches. The army of which O Mahoney writes bears scant resemblance to the heroic body of men depicted in the writings of Andy McNab and other Boys Own-style adventurers. Instead, the antics of the author and his brothers-in-arms are described unblinkingly, with habitual violence and harassment of the civilian population apparently central to military life.
However, once the author s background is taken into account, it is less surprising that O Mahoney has written such an unconventional account. He was, from the start, an unlikely Brit . Born in Dunstable in 1960, the son of a Sligo woman and her Dungarvan-born husband, O Mahoney was brought up in the English Midlands, where he recalls that even before he had any mature political views, my gut instincts were certainly pro-republican . His father was allegedly physically and verbally abusive to the family (O Mahoney describes him as a vicious bastard in the book), and from these unhappy beginnings he drifted into a life of petty, and occasionally violent, crime around Wolverhampton. He subsequently decided to join the army in order to avoid a six month prison sentence.
At that point a grim confluence of factors changed his life. O Mahoney opted to join the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, who were among the regiments nicknamed war-dodgers due to the army s policy of not sending Irish regiments to serve in Northern Ireland. However, not long after O Mahoney joined up, that policy was abruptly abandoned, and he learnt that he was to be among the first group of soldiers dispatched. Not only that: the regiment were to return to their historical base of Enniskillen, the centre of the Fermanagh-South Tyrone constituency for which, a week before they arrived, Bobby Sands had been elected MP. A four and a half month tour of duty in a powder-keg atmosphere followed.
O Mahoney evocatively documents this foray into the northern conflict. From the nervous turmoil of colleagues to the macho barracks joking about Bobby Sands as Slimmer of the Year to moments of acute anger, the whole spectrum of emotions is explored. Soldier Of the Queen is often revealing. Take, for example, this description of a briefing given by a sergeant to O Mahoney and his colleagues before they went out on their first patrol:
He said that if, for whatever reason, we had to open fire on anyone, and we wounded him, we had to ensure he didn t live; we had to kill him outright. He said that surviving victims might be able to dispute the army s version of events and the last thing any of us needed was a messy court case in which we had to go back and forward to Ireland to be examined by cunts in wigs .
In case we had not grasped what he was saying he summarised things in words I have never forgotten: Just shoot the fucker dead and we ll make it up from there . No-one raised any objections, but I could see a few people looking uncomfortable... Perhaps to lighten the atmosphere he finished by saying that there would be a crate of beer for the first one of us to kill a paddy.
O Mahoney does not sanitise his own response to this sort of mentality to curry favour with liberal thinking.
I thought the sergeant s advice extremely astute and I intended following it in the event of a firefight with suspected terrorists, he writes.
The same stark approach is in evidence when he describes a disturbance during which the army fired plastic bullets. This was later officially denied. The denial made us laugh, O Mahony states. The army . . . had accounted for all the rounds that had been officially issued, so none could therefore have been fired. However, outgoing regiments pass on extra rounds to incoming regiments, which means that after such incidents soldiers can usually produce all the rounds they were issued with and so can prove they didn t open fire.

Details such as this are commonplace in Soldier Of The Queen. Didn t O Mahoney have difficulty in being so candid given the provisions of The Official Secrets Act, and the pressure the British military establishment has brought to bear on other servicemen-turned-authors?
I wouldn t leave anything out, he replies. Someone else said to me about The Official Secrets Act, but I just don t buy into that. If they [the military] can t deal with the truth, then that s a matter for them.
There are no military secrets in there, he goes on. It s not really an army book as such it s just about my experiences. I hadn t really seen anything about what normal soldiers lives are like. The general British squaddie joins the army cos he wants a job, not for any great, heroic reason.
One of the most insightful aspects of O Mahoney s book is his descriptions of the way normal soldiers try to deal with the abnormal pressures of the situation. A major element within their training, for example, was being taught to regard everything as potentially threatening. This, in turn, brought its own problems. During his first patrol in the north, a car approached O Mahoney at speed.
Why was it going so fast? he writes. I pushed the butt of my SLR more tightly into my shoulder, ready to swing the muzzle round and blast the Provo bastard. The car passed us, a middle-aged woman with glasses in the driver s seat.
Situations like this were, presumably, symptomatic of ever-present mental strain. But don t they also point up the perils of deploying an army in a civilian environment?
O Mahoney nods in agreement. You are in a normal environment, but you ve had it drummed into you that innocent objects are dangerous, he says. When you are walking down the street and you see a car with no-one in it, you think it s a bomb. When you are walking through the countryside and you see a milk churn, you think that s a bomb. So everything that s normal, decent and good becomes evil, dangerous and a death trap. You re operating in normal circumstances, but in your head they re far from normal that s what s so dangerous about it. You re in an almost paranoid schizophrenic state.
Potentially fatal danger ensues when such tensions boil over. In Soldier Of The Queen, O Mahoney describes coming under rifle fire in open countryside. When he spots the snipers through the sights of his gun, though, he also sees a collie dog running alongside them proof that these are not hardened IRA men but instead a couple of foolish teenagers. O Mahoney writes that, I had known instinctively as soon as I had seen them properly that they were not terrorists. Yet I had wanted to kill them. I had wanted to pull that trigger and blow them away not because they were Irish but because I knew I could have got away with it.
He expands on this in conversation:
When you first see what you think is trying to kill you, your first instinct is to kill it. So when I saw that dog, it was almost a feeling of disappointment. Your mind s racing very quickly, thinking, I can get away with this. They ve fired at us, we ve shouted a warning, they ve not stopped . If it wasn t for the corporal that day shouting don t shoot, don t shoot , I m quite certain that I would have done.
Does he think that similar circumstances have led to some of the infamous injustices in the north?
Well, I can understand why incidents like the Clegg thing happen, he says. [Psychologically] it s an extremely volatile, bad situation to be in. In a way, when people are under that much pressure, the last thing you should give them is a rifle. Because when the self-discipline does go, all that pent-up tension is released and people get hurt.
O Mahoney does refer to times when he boiled over himself, albeit with less-than-fatal results. It would just be a punch here, a kick there, the odd headbutt or dig in the ribs with a rifle, he comments. And, as far as I was concerned, I never hit anyone who didn t ask for it.
Elsewhere, time has made him regret certain episodes, like the gratuitous ill-treatment he and his cohorts meted out to a frail elderly man at a checkpoint.
I had real trouble putting that in the book, he says. but if I had written what soldiers normally write all niceties and tales of heroics the people in the north who were unfortunate enough to come across us would have known it was bollocks. I had to put the distasteful stuff in. But the boys who got a hiding? I don t regret that. I m quite sure that if I d fallen, they d have put their boot on my head too.

O Mahoney, though, also had ambivalent feelings about the conflict itself. As a Catholic of Irish descent, he was often repulsed by the open admiration many of his fellow soldiers had for the loyalist paramilitaries.
It was a real rollercoaster of emotions for me, he says. Sometimes I felt that if I had been born in Fermanagh rather than England, it would have been me who would have been running around in a fucking balaclava. Then there would be an outrage, like where five soldiers would have been blown to bits, and I would know that none of those soldiers wanted to even be there. Then you d be very angry. It was a mixed bag all the time.
There was one event which O Mahoney found particularly powerful:
I admired the courage of the hunger strikers, he admits. Neither I, nor anyone I was with, would have chosen to die for anything we believed in. What I found even more frightening was that once those young men became unconscious their mothers then had the power to end the hunger strike. And they walked away from their own children. To me, that was fucking frightening, because it showed such sheer determination. I knew then that if there was only a thousand of the fuckers we were never going to beat them.
How would he rate the IRA in terms of their effectiveness as a guerilla army?
Probably the best in the world, comes the characteristically blunt response. I think it was their successes which brought about the peace process. Look at it in terms of development they went from throwing petrol bombs to blowing up Canary Wharf. They knew what they were doing.
So he doesn t go along with the standard political platitude that force will never work ?
No, no. Force does work, of course it does. It worked in South Africa, Zimbabwe. The Israelis have just pulled out of Lebanon and they don t pull out of anywhere without good reason.
Closer to home, what does O Mahoney make of Martin McGuinness elevation to government?
Out of all the politicians I ve heard, McGuinness is the only one I really admire, he replies. I think he s sincere in his views and in the way he wants to go forward. I think he s a good man, McGuinness, regardless of what he did. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist at one point
Coming from Bernard O Mahoney it s a predictably unpredictable response. Because of the same combination of bluntness and open-mindedness Soldier Of The Queen is recommended reading. As our interview ends, though, I am reminded that not all of O Mahoney s old foes may be quite so willing to forgive and forget. Even if, since leaving the North he has been first a nightclub bouncer and now an author, there are those to whom he will always be just another Brit .
I m going to the airport this afternoon, he smiles. I have to be out of Ireland before my picture appears in the papers.
Soldier Of The Queen by Bernard O Mahoney with Mick McGovern, Brandon Books, #14.99.