the darkened room, we were shown the crystal-clear images taken by the specialist camera of an East Det surveillance helicopter that had been covering the funeral of IRA volunteer Kevin Brady on Saturday, 19 March 1988. The funeral cortège was shown moving down the Andersonstown Road in West Belfast towards Milltown cemetery. Sinn Féin stewards were marshalling traffic and providing security in anticipation of another Loyalist attack. Armed PIRA volunteers were mingling with the mourners. The security forces were noticeably absent, giving the area, as it were, a wide birth in an effort to reduce tensions. Three days previously, during the funerals of three IRA volunteers shot dead by British Special forces in Gibraltar, Loyalist gunman Michael Stone had launched a gun and grenade attack at the funerals in Milltown cemetery. Three people had been killed, including Kevin Brady. The events of those two previous weeks had produced some of the tensest moments of the Troubles. Northern Ireland at the time was a powder keg just waiting to explode.
A silver VW Passat was shown approaching the cortège and being stopped by the Sinn Féin stewards and directed to turn around and move away. The vehicle reversed at speed and mounted the pavement. Panic set in among those in the cortège. Was this another Loyalist attack, they must have wondered.
In fact, in the vehicle were Corporal Derek Wood and Corporal David Howes, both members of the British army’s Royal Corps of Signals and attached to 2 SCT of JCU-NI. Nonetheless, the vehicle was quickly surrounded, with black taxis either end boxing it in from the front and rear.
As the crowd surrounded the vehicle, Wood drew his pistol and for a few moments the crowd withdrew a little. Wood used this time to try to get out through the window on the driver’s side of the car, which had already been smashed in, but the crowd moved in again and began to drag him out of the vehicle.
On the passenger side, the window was smashed and Howes was set upon, though he didn’t produce a weapon at any stage. A warning shot was fired into the air by Wood, it was the first and only shot to be fired by either soldier that day. (I had always wondered why they hadn’t fired more.)
The crowd forced TV camera crews to stop filming and in some cases confiscated or smashed equipment, although East Det’s helicopter kept filming. Both men were eventually dragged to the rear of nearby Casement Park where they were strip-searched and beaten further. A man could now be seen trying to hold back the attackers from the two men as they lay prone, side by side on the ground. He was escorted away though he remained close by. That was Father Alec Reid, a Catholic priest who would go on to be instrumental in the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
The men were then thrown over a wall, bundled into taxis and taken a couple of hundred metres away to waste ground near Penny Lane. The beatings and then stabbings continued until both men were eventually shot multiple times at point-blank range. From their arrival on the scene of the funeral, Corporals Wood and Howes were dead in just over twelve minutes.
The television screen went blank and the lights in the room came up. There was a lump in my throat and I swallowed hard to keep down whatever it was. I was sitting in the front row, the only Irishman in the room, – and I could feel the eyes burning into the back of my head. I understood how they must be feeling. It was a deeply uncomfortable moment and for the first time in my British army career I felt ashamed to be Irish.
Thankfully, no one said anything, and the lecture continued.
How this happened from a procedural point of view was the question we needed answered. In the immediate aftermath and for many years thereafter, there was considerable speculation about the two men and why they were in that particular location that day. As always, the MOD had refused to comment and had never clarified what they knew. I only learned the truth that afternoon.
Our second training officer, a huge Welsh man who had spent the previous twenty years as a special duties operator in Northern Ireland, stood at the top of the room and gave us the full story.
‘Wood was the “pronto” for 2 SCT. A pronto is the head communications Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) in a Det. Wood was coming to the end of his current tour in Northern Ireland and was due to rotate back to a normal Royal Corps of Signals unit. Howes was the incoming pronto, just arrived in Northern Ireland and as green as grass as far as working with JCU-NI was concerned.
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