Michael O’Farrell
Investigative Correspondent
THEIRS was supposed to be the generation that enjoyed peace in Northern Ireland. She was just eight years old when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. He was 11. The fact that neither 18-year-old Emma Murphy nor her boyfriend Paul Quinn, 21, had any particular interest in politics as they grew up bore testimony to that hopeful new era.
Nowadays, children in border areas are no longer familiar with the frequent thump of army helicopter blades overhead or the sight of heavily armed troops on patrol.
But for previous generations, it was next to impossible to avoid support or sentiment for one side or the other. And the brutal reality of violence or death was never far away.
Now though, the war is supposed to be over. People like Emma and Paul are supposed to be able to enjoy their lives as any other young couple would – going out to Switch nightclub in Castleblayney at weekends and sitting in watching DVDs during the week.
Until a month ago, that’s just what they did. The pair – he from Cully-hanna in south Armagh and she from Oram just across the border in Monaghan – had known each other for five years.
The very best of friends, they would sit together in the evenings to watch Home And Away and other soaps. More recently, they had begun a closer relationship.
‘This past year, we would be texting each other all the time. But it’s only the past seven months that we were always with each other. It was just on Friday – the day before it happened – that he actually asked me to go steady,’ an emotion-choked Emma told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
‘We were in his house all day and he asked me and I stayed the night there and then Saturday morning I went to work.’ The next time Emma saw her new boyfriend, his life was draining away onto the cold, concrete floor of a nearby hay barn.
He died shortly afterwards, his body battered almost beyond recognition in a chilling and premeditated attack that was given the nod by some of the Provisional IRA’s best-known figures.
Emma, a child of peacetime, now knows what it’s like to hold a dying man; to watch as he flails about helplessly in agony, both of his arms and legs broken, his head and face a mass of bruises.
‘It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed in my life. It was the hardest thing I ever witnessed in my life,’ she said.
The war may be over but those who fought it still consider themselves the law around here. The men – at least nine of them – who were their subordinates, made sure Paul Quinn knew just that in the early evening of Saturday, October 20.
‘You know who polices this place,’ they repeated as they intensified their beating – a punishment ordered because Paul, too tough for his own good, had confronted associates and family members of a local IRA leader.
Dressed in boiler suits and facemasks, each attacker wore latex gloves to guard against leaving clues. Meticulously planned, the gang had thought of every last detail, from lookouts, getaway transport to disposal of weapons and clothes. Even the floor of the barn was sprayed with disinfectant to erase any traces of biological evidence.
At home, just a couple of miles away from the isolated farmyard where Paul had been lured to his death, Emma had no idea her life would never be the same.
That changed with a phone call from Brendan Nugent, a friend of Paul. ‘Call an ambulance,’ his tense voice said. ‘There’s been a row.’ Neither the emergency operator nor Emma were quite sure whether the call was a joke or not so she went to see for herself.
‘When I got down there, Paul’s friend came up the yard and started trying to hold me and wouldn’t let me go down the yard.
‘But I ran past him and went down the yard and I saw Paul lying in there and I rang the ambulance and told them to get out as soon as they could.’ DRESSED in his county jersey and tracksuit bottoms, Paul was lying in a pool of blood to the right hand side of a red corrugated iron shed. He was trying to move, to turn himself over but with every limb broken, couldn’t make his legs or arms work.
‘He didn’t really open his eyes much. He was just more or less moaning and screaming with the pain. He was in a bad way. I thought first that he had got bullet shots in his legs but it wasn’t bullet shots, it was actually the bone sticking out of his knee.
‘I just kept trying to keep him calm. He kept trying to turn himself over but he couldn’t so I kept my hand on him to stop him trying to turn around.
‘Then he kept telling me to take him home and I kept telling him I couldn’t take him home, that there was an ambulance coming. He kept asking when was the ambulance coming but he couldn’t even say the sentences right. He just kept muttering.’ Although she knew her boyfriend was seriously injured, Emma never expected him to die as she accompanied him in the ambulance to hospital in Drogheda.
‘I thought he was going to be all right. I thought he was just going to have broken arms, broken legs. I knew looking at him that his two legs were broken and his two arms were broken. He was just battered.
‘He had bruises all over his face and his head and there was blood coming out of his arms and legs.’ In the ambulance Paul wanted to speak but was unable.
‘He kept trying to say something but the ambulance man couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. Soon all he could say was his name.
‘All he could say when the ambulance man asked him anything was Paul Quinn. No matter what he asked him he could just say Paul Quinn. All he kept saying was Paul Quinn.’ Those words that will haunt her for the rest of her life but they also give her strength to stand up and speak for her friend.
In the hospital, it was only a matter of minutes before Paul passed away. ‘We were all taken into a room and the doctor came in and started hugging everybody – then we knew.’ Like the Quinn family, Emma never thought she would become the focus of any media attention nor did she want it.
But now the death of Paul Quinn has featured in newspapers and broadcasts across the world as the potential political implications of the murder become clear.
THE matter has also been raised in Stormont, Dáil Eireann, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. This week UUP peer Lord Laird went as far as using parliamentary privilege to name those he understood were responsible.
His intervention was partly flawed and did not name the IRA south Armagh OC who is considered to have been the main figure behind the Quinn murder following a row between his son and Paul.
Instead, he inaccurately pinned most of the blame on another Cullyhanna IRA associate – Vincent Treanor – whose name is now plastered on the village walls before the letters RIP.
Mr Treanor has since issued a statement denying any involvement in the death of Paul Quinn and is understood to be under police protection.
He is thought to be a likely scapegoat for the IRA as more senior figures in the provisional movement attempt to sidestep responsibility.
The others named by Lord Laird have said nothing publicly. Despite the fact that he has been accused of sanctioning murder, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy – currently facing tax charges – has not sought to go public to counter Lord Laird’s claim that he was among those consulted before permission for the attack was granted.
Similarly, Seán Gerard Hughes – also implicated by Lord Laird – has not moved to protest his innocence. Hughes, known as the Surgeon, is alleged to have been the IRA Army Council’s most hard-line member and has been linked to the infamous 1996 Canary Wharf bombing, the murder of 12 soldiers at Warrenpoint and the killing of Justice Gibson and his wife.
The Surgeon’s involvement in these atrocities was alleged under parliamentary privilege in 2002 by Belfast East MP Peter Robinson, who said: ‘If a dove was anywhere near Seán Gerard Hughes, he would kill it, but not until he had tortured it – that is what he has done to many of the victims of his organisation, and he was directly linked to those murders.’ Others named by Lord Laird include IRA bomber James McArdle and Michael Carragher, a member of the IRA south Armagh sniper team which killed 12 members of the security forces.
The sniper unit murdered the last soldier to be killed in the Troubles and enjoyed hero status with signs warning of a ‘sniper at work’.
No one has been arrested or charged in connection with Paul Quinn’s murder. Time and time again in the North, those who have lost loved ones have shown strength they never would have otherwise dreamed of in order to seek justice. And so it is that Emma Murphy and the Quinn family are determined to stand up to the IRA thugs.
With Paul’s gold necklace wrapped three times around her wrist, Emma, an ordinary girl without a care in the world three weeks ago, is openly challenging the IRA.
‘If you were to be afraid of somebody, it would be somebody who would come up to you and not be afraid of showing who they are. But going up and hitting someone with a mask on and with steel bars just goes to show that they are nothing but cowards,’ she said.
SHE has a message for Gerry Adams, who denied republican involvement in the killing, blaming fuel smugglers. ‘I’d ask him how does he know it’s nothing to do with the IRA and it’s only smuggling criminals? How does he know? That’s just his own cover-up story just to keep the peace process going. The Provos did it because someone went crying to them over a f***ing thump.’ The Quinns, too, are breaking their silence to hit out at IRA leaders – who live within miles of their home.
Paul’s tearful mother, Briege, said: ‘I want to say to them if they have a conscience at all, go straight to gardaà and give yourselves up. We don’t want any retaliation in any other way, just give yourselves up.’ His father, Stephen, added: ‘I don’t know about the sanctioning but it has to be IRA or ex-IRA.’ ‘It had to be well planned and organised. No one else would be fit to do that around here, only them. I know well it was them.’ However, Paul’s death need not necessarily be entirely in vain. Some even believe it might provide the final push needed to tip a community traditionally loyal to the IRA against those clinging to the violent methods of the redundant movement. The Quinn support group will hold its first public meeting next week and has already held private meetings with other silent victims of IRA beatings and intimidation.
Police are reporting unprecedented assistance from locals – they would have been shunned, if not shot at, not so long ago. But there have been no arrests and no one has been taken in for questioning.
Such are the nuances of Northern politics that there is a genuine fear that the authorities will fudge the circumstances of Paul Quinn’s death to safeguard the continuation of power sharing.
‘I have a fear that it is all going to be brushed under the carpet,’ Emma said. ‘I just hope that justice is done for him.’
THIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN IRELAND ON SUNDAY (NOW THE IRISH MAIL ON SUNDAY) ON 18/11/2007. Author, Michael O’Farrell, Investigative Correspondent.
