An SAS solider who was first on the scene after civil rights veteran and former MP Bernadette McAliskey was shot by loyalists more than 45 years ago has said he believes the ‘republican cause was just’.
The former British soldier, known as ‘Tony’, was part of a three-man SAS team that arrived at Ms McAliskey’s isolated home in east Tyrone after she and her husband Michael were shot and injured by a UDA/UFF gang in January 1981.
It has previously been reported that the three people who tried to kill Ms McAliskey and her husband, which included loyalist Ray Smallwoods, were detained by members of the Parachute Regiment who had been watching the family home near Coalisland.
The former SAS man has now branded those responsible as “scumbags” and said he has sympathy for the ‘republican cause’.
In a recent interview the SAS man said he and his colleagues were ordered to go to Ms McAliskey’s home by former RUC Special Branch boss Frank Murray.
The ex-policeman, who has since died, has been linked to numerous suspected ‘shoot-to-kill’ incidents during the Troubles.
At the time she was shot Ms McAliskey, a former civil rights campaigner, was involved in the National H-Block/Armagh Committee, which highlighted demands by republican prisoners for political status.
Several other members of the H-Block/Armagh committee were killed in loyalist attacks prior to the murder attempt on Ms McAliskey and her husband.
The attack on her family came just weeks after the end of the 1980 hunger strike in December that year.
More than a decade earlier Ms McAliskey, then known as Bernadette Devlin, was elected as an MP for Mid Ulster.
The former soldier known as Tony spoke to the ‘SAS The Shadow War’ podcast, by The Independent, which includes interviews with former SAS members and personnel attached to ‘The Det’.
Tony reveals how his unit was was told to make their way to Cookstown in Co Tyrone.
A radio operator, he said he was accompanied by two other SAS men he calls ‘Carl’ and ‘Kiwi’.
He said the unit received a “hot briefing in the car that there was going to be an assassination attempt on Bernadette Devlin”.
Tony explains how he and his colleagues were then dropped off.
“We got on the ground to be picked up later, you never leave your vehicle unattended,” he said.
“Just at first light, there’s snow on the ground…(the temperature was) zero degrees.
“Carl went forward to look for an OP (Observation Post) so we could watch the house because at that time nothing had been heard and suddenly there was a ‘pop, pop, pop’ of rounds being fired, so, I being the fastest runner out of the two dropped my radio, took my Armalite M16 rifle, went forward.”
He claims that as he approached the McAliskey house he saw a “brown, bronze Rover, sitting on the driveway, engine running”.
“As soon as I got there three men exited the bungalow, the first one being Ray Smallwoods,” he said.
Tony said he confronted Smallwoods and ordered him to drop his weapon.
“He came out and I could see the look in his eyes, ‘shall I shan’t I’, I ordered him to drop his pistol, which he did,” he explains.
“Moved the three to a wall, having unarmed all three by which time Carl and Kiwi were with me.
“At that stage there was a pregnant pause, we knew there was a shotgun in the house but we didn’t know the state of play.”
He said the SAS unit then decided to move into the house.
“So, I headed in first followed by the other two,” Tony said.
“Her husband Michael was sitting against the wall with a gunshot wound to the right arm, with an arterial coming out of his bicep.
“I went into the bedroom and found Bernadette lying on the floor….with five bullet wounds in her front and back, she obviously rolled off the bed, maybe two people fired at her, I never know.
“There was reports of nine rounds…it was five rounds, I counted them all.”
Tony tells how encountered Ms McAliskey’s children when he entered the house.
“Her three children were there, looking at me as if I was something on the bottom of their shoe,” he said.
He later said: “I covered her (Bernadette McAliskey) up with the duvet left the house while Kiwi gave first aid to Michael.”
Tony claims he then found the battery on his radio was “almost dead” and how he later phoned in a report stating his belief that Ms McAliskey would not survive.
“I managed to get the word contact out on the radio, so I knew I had passed that and then I had to go and find a phone, so I gave them a contact report,” he said.
“He asked me if I thought she would live, I said ‘unlikely’ but I was proven wrong, thankfully.
“Then I go back through the perimeter and that was that.”
By the time Ms McAliskey and her husband were shot there had been several controversial incidents involving undercover British soldiers and republicans, which included shoot-to-kill allegations.
In contrast, there were few similar incidents involving the SAS, and related units, and loyalist paramilitary groups.
When suggested those targeted and people “suspicious of the military” might say “because they were Catholic and the gunmen were Protestant paramilitaries, they got off lightly” and that this highlights other occasions it would have been possible to arrest an armed person, Tony denied taking a different approach.
“Yeah, of course, they always believed that we were Prods first, Catholics last,” he said.
“That wasn’t the case at all.
“Like I said earlier, our mission was to arrest them.”
He was also pressed on the moment when he could have shot Ray Smallwoods.
“Microsecond decision, yeah, I could see he was ready, I mean he was obviously pumped up, adrenalin flowing, having shot an unarmed woman, very bravely, he was pumped up alright, but then he just dropped the revolver cause he knew he was going to jail and he went to jail for 15 years or whatever, he’s dead now, thank God,” he said.
Tony insisted the loyalist’s Protestant background had no bearing on his decision not to shoot him.
“No, it didn’t matter what bloody creed or colour he was, I was watching the weapon, your eyes are fixed on the weapon not him,” he said.
“Your weapon is trained at his chest obviously, safety catch off, I was waiting for him to react with the weapon, or not, and he chose not to.”
Tony agrees that had Smallwoods raised his weapon “he’d have been dead, simple as that”.
He said the other two loyalists involved in the attack surrendered straight away.
“They dropped their weapons immediately, put their hands in the air, they didn’t want to play,” he said.
Tony branded those involved in the attack on the Mclliskey family “scumbags” adding that he identifies with the ‘republican cause’.
“I was quiet elated really, I mean, I didn’t have anything against Catholics, and I’d heard of Bernadette Devlin, of course, I believed their cause was just and I still do…so I was pleased we got three scumbags off the street,” he said.
The SAS man reiterated his support, not for paramilitary groups, but for Irish republicanism generally, which he appears to conflate with anti-Catholic discrimination.
“The republican cause, yeah, for sure,” he said.
“I mean, ten percent of the population....if you’d ever seen those slums, and I mean slums, that they lived in when I was on my tour in west Belfast in McCrory Park, Andersonstown in particular, you knew they were second class citizens,” he said.
“Protestants always got the best jobs, the best housing, the best working conditions, the police force, obviously, the RUC were pretty much 99 percent Protestant weren’t they.”
In the years before it was incorporated into the PSNI, the the number of Catholics in the RUC was less than ten percent.
