IRA’s early hours attack on Altnaveigh in June 1922 a ‘holocaust of unfortunate Protestants’

On June 17 1922, Altnaveigh, a small and close-knit Ulster-Scots community in south Armagh, a little over a mile from Newry and approximately five miles from the border, was the scene of what the News Letter of June 19 described as ‘a series of atrocious murders’.

While the attack is usually regarded as a reprisal for USC activity in the county, perhaps it really ought to be regarded as one of Michael Collins’ ‘covert operations’ to destabilise and overthrow the Northern Ireland state.

The attack was planned and executed by the 4th Northern Division of the IRA. James McElhaw from Camlough claimed: ‘All the inhabitants of this district were Orangemen and were members of the B-Specials’. Actually, none of those murdered were members of the security forces. Only three were members of the Orange institution.

According to Patrick Casey, speaking to the Bureau of Military History in 1957, the attack was authorised by Frank Aiken, the commander of the 4th Northern Division (and future long-serving Fianna Fáil cabinet minister and tánaiste), but it seems more likely that Michael Fearon rather than Aiken personally led the attack.

Upwards of 30 IRA men made their way from Dundalk across the border, some dressed in police uniforms. They arrived in Altnaveigh in the early hours of that Saturday morning. According to James Marron, a local IRA Volunteer, their orders were ‘to burn every house and shoot every male we could get’.

Before daylight, at least seven (and possibly as many as 12) Protestant homes were attacked and burned and six members of the small rural community brutally murdered.

The first victims of the terrorists were Thomas Crozier and his wife Eliza. Thomas, 61, was shot in the chest as he answered the door. Thomas told his slayer: ‘Don’t do a thing like that, Mick.’ Eliza, 56, told another member of the gang: ‘I didn’t expect that of you, Willie.’ She was then shot in the face and died 45 minutes later.

Gunmen proceeded to the home of John Heslip (rather than Heaslip as it usually appears). John, 51, and his son Robert, 19, were caught running out the back of the house, taken a short distance away and shot dead.

James Lockhart, 25, was murdered in front of his mother and three sisters as their home was burned to the ground and Joseph Gray, 19, was dragged from his bed and shot. He died the next day.

When Gray’s mother asked why, she was told by one of the attackers: ‘In reprisal for the murder of Catholics in Belfast.’

As the mortally wounded Gray lay on the ground, he repudiated the suggestion that the killers were ‘brutes’, by saying: ‘Don’t call them brutes. Perhaps they had to do it. Don’t send the Specials after them. And I hope God will forgive them too. I am going to Jesus.’

The Little family was subjected to the IRA’s macabre humour.

An account of the attack said: ‘On the roadside with the father and mother and eight children – the eldest 15 – stood wide-eyed with horror.

‘There was a ninth – an infant of a few months, the survivor of twins – who had been left sleeping in the cradle.

‘When it became apparent that the cottage was to be fired, the agonised father made for the door, crying to the murderers that they would burn the child.

‘He was held back, and one of the fellows said with a laugh: “Aren’t there enough for you standing there?” pointing to the eight mites shivering in their night clothes.

‘With the strength of a desperate mother, Mrs Little broke from her captors and rushed for her babe.

‘The murderers allowed that tender life to be spared before they applied torches to the cottage.’

The IRA gang burned all the homes of those whom they killed and then moved on to neighbouring townlands where incendiary bombs (or burning torches) were thrown into houses and devices rigged to doors to prevent escape. These failed to explode.

Though there were only six fatalities, the IRA had clearly sought to achieve a higher body count. A police report calculated that if all the attacks – the woundings, the acts of arson, the petrol bombs thrown through windows or devices rigged to doors – had succeeded, the death toll could have risen to 30.

Frederick Russell, president of the Newry Chamber of Commerce, speaking two days after the attacks, observed that the shootings were ‘very carefully planned and deliberately carried out, the object being to obliterate this little colony of Presbyterians in the district’. Russell described them as people ‘living a simple Christian life’, ‘without in any way interfering with anyone’.

At a funeral service in Downshire Road Presbyterian Church, of which four of the victims were members, the Rev Phineas McKee, the minister (and a future moderator), spoke of how the peace of Altnaveigh had been shattered and how ‘a beautiful quiet road’ had been converted into ‘a bloody mile of roofless houses’. He observed that ‘even in war there is a certain limit to atrocity, a certain code of honour is practised by all but the vilest savage’. Evidently, that code had been breached at Altnaveigh.

James Marron was traumatised by his participation in the massacre, admitting ‘for a long time I could not sleep thinking of the woman and the others we shot’. He sought medical help.

Fearing retribution, many of the perpetrators left the area. Some fled to England, the US and Canada. Actually, there was no desire for revenge on the part of the survivors of the atrocity as it would have been at variance with the deep-seated values of their Christian lives.

Patrick Casey speaking 35 years after the event remembered the sense of shame over what had happened. He told the Bureau of Military History: ‘Nothing could justify this holocaust of unfortunate Protestants.’

The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ gained currency during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The use of the term with respect to the events of the early 1920s may be considered anachronistic but many unionists believe what occurred at Altnaveigh merits the description and view it in exactly that light.