On January 5th, 1976, members of an active service unit of the IRA stopped a minibus at Kingsmill, near Whitecross in South Armagh. They sorted out the occupants, all textile workers, by religion on the roadside. They let the sole Catholic, Richard Hughes, walk away, and they cut down the 11 Protestants in a hail of automatic gunfire.

They administered a coup de grace by a bullet to the head of the wounded, killing 10 – all except Alan Black, who was mistakenly left for dead, having taken 18 bullet wounds.

The IRA was on ceasefire at the time so it could negotiate with the British government. It lied that it was not involved and it pretended the killings were carried out by a non-existent “reaction force”.

The massacre at Kingsmill ended temporarily a ferocious cycle of tit-for-tat violence in South Armagh, including the Miami Showband massacre and other foul civilian killings – much of which had been orchestrated by the notorious Glenanne gang, a murderous combination of British military personnel, RUC members, UDR members and loyalist paramilitaries.

The strategy of the 1975 loyalist murder campaign had been to provoke the IRA to abandon their ceasefire, which loyalists believed was intended to procure British withdrawal from the North.

That ceasefire broke down soon after. In June 1976, an IRA active service unit attempted an ambush of a British army post outside Newry, Co Down, which failed. One IRA member on this occasion was captured in possession of a rifle which was........

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