Dusk had just fallen last Thursday over Newry, a predominantly Catholic town of 19,000 in County Down. More than 20 police officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) were gathered in their station canteen on Cory Square. At precisely 6:32 p.m., mortar shells soared over nearby houses and crashed through the roof of the wood-frame dining hall, part of the cramped Newry station house. Nine 50-lb. shells were fired from a distance of about 250 yds.; one struck the canteen. The explosions were so powerful that many bodies were mutilated. The final toll: nine killed and 37 wounded, including 25 civilians. Among the dead were two young women constables and a man who had been on the force for only a month.
In phone calls to a local journalist an hour later, the outlawed Irish Republican Army called the attack "a well-planned operation" that "indicates our ability to strike when and where we decide." Indeed, after a long period of relative calm in Ulster, the I.R.A. had killed more police in this attack than in any other single episode since violence between Protestant and Catholic militants first erupted in 1969. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who escaped an I.R.A. bombing attempt on her life last October at Brighton, in the south of England, called the attack "barbaric." Echoing her sentiments, the Irish Republic's Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald, described the I.R.A. assault as "cruel and cynical" and pledged that Irish security forces would help hunt the attackers down. Police suspect that the killers may have slipped across the border into the republic, less than five miles from Newry.
The I.R.A.'s use of homemade mortars is an old tactic, but one that had met with little success in the past. The Newry station had once before been a target, in 1980, when shells missed the police post but injured 26 civilians near by.
The Newry operation--dubbed "Bloody Thursday" by the British press--began when two masked I.R.A. men hijacked a truck. Later, the makeshift mortar tubes were bolted onto the flatbed and the vehicle was then driven into town and parked in a vacant lot close to the R.U.C. station. The nine metal tubes on the truck--each 6 ft. long and 6 in. in diameter--were linked by detonating wires, suggesting to police that they had been fired by timing devices. Despite the apparent sophistication of the weapon, not all the shells found their target. Some fell in front of the station. One hit an observation tower, showering shrapnel onto nearby homes. Said Chief Superintendent Bill Stewart: "It was luck on the part of the I.R.A. rather than accuracy that gave them their direct hits."
Before the attack, officials had been convinced that the I.R.A. was on the wane. Despite the Brighton explosion, the organization had seemed to suffer one setback after another, starting with the September interception by the Irish navy of a trawler loaded with seven tons of arms and ammunition for the I.R.A. In December British soldiers ambushed and killed two I.R.A. gunmen, and last month the FitzGerald government seized more than $1.6 million in suspected I.R.A. bank assets in Dublin.