Service marks 40 years since nine RUC officers killed in IRA attack
Jonathan McCambridge, Irish News, March 3rd, 2025
A MEMORIAL service to remember nine RUC officers killed in an IRA attack on a police station in Newry 40 years ago took place in the city yesterday.
Bereaved families and survivors took part in the event in Sandys Street Presbyterian Church during which PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher read a psalm and the Garda was also represented.
Lagan Valley MP Sorcha Eastwood and former Ulster Unionist Danny Kennedy were also in attendance.
The mortar attack occurred on February 28 1985, when nine shells were launched from a lorry parked in Monaghan Street in Newry, Co Down. It was the highest number of RUC officers killed in a single incident during the Troubles. Dozens were also injured.
The nine victims were Alexander Donaldson (41), Geoffrey K Campbell (24), John Thomas Dowd (31), Denis Anthony Price (22), Rosemary Elizabeth McGookin (27), Sean Brian McHenry (19), David Peter Topping (22), Paul Hillery McFerran (33), and Ivy Winifred Kelly (29).
The South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF) victims’ group helped to organise the service of remembrance.
Former RUC assistant chief constable William Stewart, divisional commander in Newry on the day of the attack, delivered an address.
He told the service: “Today in this church I am very conscious that there exists many who have been forced to face terrorism at very close quarters, whether as bereaved families, as injured survivors, as former colleagues of those murdered or injured, or indeed eyewitnesses and first responders.
“I am particularly cognisant of those present today who are intimately impacted by the events of February 28 1985.”
Bodies all over the yard
Recalling the events of the day, he told the service: “As I turned the key in my front door, I could hear the phone in the hall already ringing. No mobiles, of course, in those days.
“I picked up and immediately recognised the voice.
“It was John Henry, one of the communications officers in Corry Square.
“He told me: ‘The place is wrecked. There’s been a bomb, a mortar bomb’.
“I asked John if anybody was injured and I will never forget his response: ‘Oh sir, there’s bodies all over the yard!’ I’ll never forget how he said it – ‘bodies all over the yard’.
“I jumped into my car, turned around and drove straight back to Newry, back to the scene of carnage and to day after day of visiting bereaved families, struggling to tell them something, anything, that could make sense out of all this shock and pain.
Kenny Donaldson, left, and former RUC assistant chief constable William Stewart, divisional commander in Newry on the day of the attack
He told me: ‘The place is wrecked. There’s been a bomb, a mortar bomb’. I asked John if anybody was injured and I will never forget his response: ‘Oh sir, there’s bodies all over the yard!’ I’ll never forget how he said it – ‘bodies all over the yard’
“Those are my memories and they remain as fresh with me today as they did 40 years ago.
Courage is to be afraid but go on just the same
“Courage is to be afraid but to go on just the same because you have to. Because of an unshakeable sense of duty. Because you will defend to the very end the vulnerable in our society, those who are not able to defend themselves. Because you will put your life on the line to help prevent this society being literally blown apart.
“And that courage has also been demonstrated time and time again over the years by those who survived, often living for decades with horrific injuries, and by the families who have had to learn to live without beloved fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons.”
SEFF director Kenny Donaldson said it had been a challenging service but stated it was important that the tragedy was not forgotten.
He said: “The service was sombre but there was also a thread of hope which ran through as those gathered were reminded of lives well lived and of nine extraordinary men and women from across our community who gave their all in standing against the scourge of terrorism.
PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher during the service
Former UUP MLA Danny Kennedy and, left, Alliance MP Sorcha Eastwood
“It was encouraging for the families and so many others to have the PSNI’s leadership team present, including the chief constable, illustrating that the officers remembered continue to be viewed as an integral part of the policing family.”
RUC officers killed in 'barbaric' attack to be remembered at service 40 years on
Single largest loss of life to the RUC during the Troubles
Kurtis Reid, Belfast Telegraph, March 1st, 2025
A memorial service will take place tomorrow to mark the 40th anniversary of an IRA atrocity which killed nine RUC officers.
Dozens of others were injured in the 1985 mortar attack on Newry station.
It was the single largest loss of life to the RUC during the Troubles.
Former UUP chair Danny Kennedy, an ex-MLA for Newry and Armagh, said it marked “a very significant milestone”.
Recalling the scenes of devastation after the attack, Mr Kennedy described how some onlookers were “jeering at emergency services” as they helped the wounded.
The attack happened just after 6.30pm on February 28, 1985, when nine shells were launched from a lorry parked in Monaghan Street. One landed on the station canteen. Over 25 police civilian employees were injured as well as more than 40 others outside the base, including a four-year-old girl.
The IRA admitted the attack, and reportedly said the “incident left us open to justified criticism”.
The nine victims were Alexander Donaldson (41), Geoffrey K. Campbell (24), John Thomas Dowd (31), Denis Anthony Price (22), Rosemary Elizabeth McGookin (27), Sean Brian McHenry (19), David Peter Topping (22), Paul Hillery McFerran (33), and Ivy Winifred Kelly (29).
Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, Mr Kennedy, who was MLA for Newry and Armagh from 1998 to 2017, said the attack was “barbaric”.
“The 40th anniversary is a very significant milestone, the direct hit on the canteen in Corry Square resulting in the highest loss of life in the RUC during the entire Troubles will always be remembered,” he said. “The impact was enormous. Not only was that the worst day, but it became so every day for those impacted — the families have their burden every day, not just on the anniversary.”
Mr Kennedy said many of the officers were in the early stages of their career.
“Most of them weren't local to Newry, because of the security situation,” he said.
“They had been sent there to serve and presumably because most were young and single, because that was the rationale of service at the time, particularly in border areas — and these lives were snatched away.
“There are many elements I remember about the situation that are difficult to comprehend.
“A crowd which gathered to jeer and cheer, whilst the emergency services and the police were trying to deal with the enormity of the explosion.
“It's memories like that that still ring on, years later, and those acts were incredibly distasteful — those who thought that was a proper and normal thing to do.
“It was disgraceful, but that was the situation we were in.”
SEFF director Kenny Donaldson said Sunday's service will be a poignant occasion. “The mortar bomb attack upon Newry Police Station remains one of the lasting images of the terrorist campaign,” he said.
“The scale of loss for the policing family was hugely significant - seven men and two women from across the community fell together having served together, committed to upholding the rule of law and of disrupting the activities of committed and systemic terrorists.”
He added: “It is important that the community is reminded of the gravity of what happened in Newry on February 28, 1985, on that fateful evening.
“We call upon the community at large to come along and support this service.”
Newry solemn service marks 40 years since Troubles' deadliest attack on police
By Iain Gray, Belfast News Letter, March 2nd, 2025
On the 40th anniversary of the attack, victims and SEFF have joined RUC GC and Newry and Mourne Local Voluntary welfare group to organise today’s event at Sandy Street Presbyterian Church in Newry.
A solemn service marked the 40th anniversary of the deadliest attack on the police during the Troubles.
On February 28, 1985, the IRA launched a lethal mortar attack on a Newry RUC station, murdering nine officers and wounding 37 others.
Shelling the base nine times, including its outbuilding canteen where many officers were having their evening tea break, the attack was the deadliest incident the RUC suffered.
The nine dead officers ranged in age from 19 to 41; both Protestants and Catholics were murdered in the attack, seven of them men and two women.
Of the wounded, 25 were civilian staff, while 12 were serving police.
The day was dubbed “Bloody Thursday” by the British press, and the attack was condemned by the prime ministers of both the UK and Ireland.
Today, Newry came together to remember the dead and mark the horror of the day.
The RUC George Cross Foundation joined forces with victim and survivor support group the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF) and the Newry and Mourne Local Voluntary Welfare Group to organise an event designed to honour and commemorate officers cruelly cut down in the attack.
The scene of 1985 Newry mortar attack that killed nine police officers.
Attended by high-ranking police officers including PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, this afternoon’s service in First Newry Presbyterian Church proved a solemn marker of the bloody anniversary.
SEFF director Kenny Donaldson told the News Letter the event was "very challenging” as it brought together the bereaved, injured survivors and first responders.
"The service was sombre in tone, but there was also a thread of hope which ran through,” he said. “Those gathered were reminded of lives well lived, and of nine extraordinary men and women from across our community who gave their all in standing against the scourge of terrorism.
“All were reminded today that within a single 12-month period, 15 RUC officers who were connected to Newry command were brutally slaughtered by Provisional IRA terrorists.
Kenny Donaldson, director of victims group SEFF, holds a memorial to the murdered RUC officers.
"[In total] 302 RUC officers and 2 PSNI officers have paid the supreme sacrifice. I ask the question - have we always done right by them, or have we failed? Whether that’s in delivering justice and accountability, to sufficiently supporting their families or, importantly, defending their legacy and their good name.”
Mr Donaldson went on to call for a memorial to the dead at the former site of the police station on Newry’s Corry Square, to act as a focal point for remembrance.
“This is necessary so that the wider public, visitors near and far might understand the gravity of what occurred, and that families and injured survivors might also have have somewhere to come to in order to reflect,” he said.
“We issue a challenge that focus must come on the need for Troubles education and for the RUC George Cross family to proactively pursue this, accessing schools and other institutions of learning, engaging with young people around the realities of policing and what the role entailed over the years of the terrorist campaign.”
PSNI Chef Constable Jon Boutcher gives a reading at this afternoon’s service. Photo: Andrew McCarroll/ Pacemaker Press
He added that the presence of senior police officers at the memorial service was a boon for bereaved families, as it “illustrates that the officers remembered continue to be viewed as an integral part of the policing family”.
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American historian on 'heart-pounding' link between US and NI civil rights movements
Mark Bain, Belfast Telegraph, March 3rd, 2025
NEW BOOK EXPLORES HOW MARCH FROM SELMA TO MONTGOMERY IN DEEP SOUTH IN 1965 INFLUENCED THE LONG MARCH TO DERRY FOUR YEARS LATER
Bloody Sunday. The violent end to a day of peaceful civil rights protest, and an event that would change a country for decades to come.
But this wasn't the Northern Ireland of January 30, 1972.
This was Sunday, March 7, 1965. The end of a civil rights march between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama in America's Deep South.
Sixty years ago this week, 25-year-old activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and faced brutal attacks by oncoming state troopers.
Footage of the violence collectively shocked the US nation and galvanised the fight against injustice.
In the weeks that followed there were killings of civil rights activists.
It was, in the end, a turning point in modern American history.
Almost 50 years later, in 2014, that same John Lewis joined with John Hume in walking arm in arm across the Peace Bridge in Londonderry. The end of part of a journey on both sides of the Atlantic.
‘Good Trouble’
'Good trouble,' as US historian Forest Isaac Jones has documented in a new book, which looks at the way those US marches influenced the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, culminating in our own Bloody Sunday seven years later, and the 'bad Troubles' that followed until the Good Friday Agreement almost three decades later.
It is, very much, a historical tale of the good, the bad and the ugly, and ultimately, the good again.
“I first visited Northern Ireland in 2001,” said Jones. “By then I was already fascinated at the similarities between the two civil rights movements, particularly how much of an influence those civil rights marches in the US had across the world.”
It was as a student of history that Jones first stumbled on the connections that linked the US civil rights movement to similar events which followed around the world — and to Northern Ireland in particular.
The more he found his feet in the territory, the firmer those connections became.
“I guess I first got interested in the civil rights campaign through my parents,” he said. “In many ways this is a personal story for me because my mother took part in the 1963 march on Washington. She saw first hand the impact that marching for democracy can have on a nation's society.
“My mother was born in Hickory, North Carolina, and my father in Walkertown, North Carolina, both in 1943. Their parents were born and raised in the early 20th century. Both of their parents took their first steps in the shadows of cotton and tobacco plantations in Georgia and North Carolina respectively.
“My grandparents came of age in the shadows of post-Reconstruction in the United States, when opportunities were promised for all people, regardless of colour. This never came to fruition.”
Life for his ancestors was lived in the shadows.
“My grandparents, like many other black Americans at that time, were only provided the opportunity to work in the fields and other menial jobs. Because of their circumstances, only one of my grandparents graduated from high school.
“Both of my parents grew up with legal segregation and voter disenfranchisement being the norm for their teenage and college years.
“My mother met my father while at the historically black college, Livingstone College. Livingstone was located in Salisbury, North Carolina. This region was home to the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. My parents were dedicated to the non-violent social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968, the year of the death of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.”
The non-violent intentions, he said, were met with violent resistance, something he later discovered was mirrored in Northern Ireland.
“I've been fortunate enough to visit Belfast several times since 2001. I was able to visit Derry for the first time during the summer of 2022 and again during spring 2024. I love the vibrancy of both.
“The backdrop of my Twitter page is a photograph of Civil Rights icon John Lewis walking across the Peace Bridge with John Hume. That image still makes my heart proud because of the connection between the two movements.”
Having been in education and a historian for more than three decades, Jones holds a doctorate degree from Virginia Tech in education and a master's degree from Hollins University, Virginia in history (focusing on Northern Ireland history and South African history).
“Given my family background, I was always interested in civil rights,” he added.
“I had watched Northern Ireland on TV, but it was only when I began looking for a topic at university in the early 1990s that I really began to discover the links between the movements.
“Where we had young black disenfranchised communities in the US, there were young Catholic disenfranchised communities in Northern Ireland.”
Much of Jones' work centres on the Long March from Belfast to Derry. The feet may have walked along different roads, several years apart, but the destination was the same.
“I tell people back home how much influence the marches from Selma to Montgomery had on Northern Ireland and they really had no idea of the impact,” he said. “Those visits to Northern Ireland blew my mind.
“My goal is to show how the US movement influenced the one in Northern Ireland as a poignant reminder of the emotional toll on those who stood on the front lines of social change in both countries.
“You may have never heard of Salisbury, North Carolina. People in the US may never have heard of Burntollet Bridge. But what happened in both locations will forever change how I viewed the Black Civil Rights movement in the United States and the Catholic Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland.
“I chose to focus on the attack on Burntollet Bridge which was eerily similar to the attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. The ambush of the Catholic civil rights group that day in 1969 became a defining moment of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Before Bloody Sunday
“Most books about the Catholic Civil Rights movement focus on Bloody Sunday, The story started long before that day.
“Both movements still have a huge impact on life today. And there's a real message of optimism there. The US of the 1960s set a precedent for non-violent protest in the face of violent opposition as a mechanism for change.”
It was students from Queen's University who picked up the baton in Belfast of the late 1960s.
They embarked on the Long March, a four-day walk from Belfast to Derry, their calls for one man, one vote, houses on need, jobs on merit, free speech and repeal of the Special Powers Act — which gave the government here the right to deal with what they saw as public disorder by whatever means they deemed appropriate — echoing those of the US seven years beforehand.
Somewhere between 25 and 40 members of what was known as the 'People's Democracy' set out from Belfast. At the forefront of the campaign was a young student from Derry, Eamonn McCann, who told Jones: “We absolutely looked at what was going on in the States and said we want to copy that template. The Selma to Montgomery march was the model for Belfast to Derry. In our own naïve way, we wanted to be associated with them.”
They met inevitable resistance — as a civil rights march in Derry had the previous October. Numbers swelled on both sides, many joining the students, many lining the route in their own counter-protest, notably on the final day when the walkers were ambushed at Burntollet Bridge a few miles from their end point.
“Looking back now I take a great deal of pride in those who stood up peacefully in the face of violent opposition to demand what they should rightfully have had, whether in the US or Northern Ireland,” said Jones.
But after spending three decades working in education, his eyes also turn to the future.
“We can learn so much by coming together through sports, sitting side by side. It's much harder to hate someone when they're sat next to you, shoulder to shoulder. Separation only breeds contempt and difference,” he said. “There should be a powerful message there.”
He is looking forward to coming back to Northern Ireland
“It's a beautiful country with beautiful people,” he added.
“I'll be around in late spring or early summer to help launch the book and meet up with some wonderful friends and continue to spread the message that peaceful and powerful protest can change the world for the better.
“Visit after visit I have seen many people born after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 who have no memory of those days before.
“Yes, my friends in Derry still complain about the lack of opportunity and jobs there compared to Belfast. And yes, many students still attend segregated schools. Looking from afar, both of those are still issues.
“However, the climate has improved so much with just how people get along with each other. And the role those civil rights campaigns played, and the inspiration from their US counterparts, should never be underestimated, nor forgotten.”
‘Good Trouble’ by Forest Isaac Jones is released by Anthem Press on April 1
