Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh

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The county was administered by Armagh County Council from 1899 until the abolition of county councils in Northern Ireland in 1973. [20] Andrew Nesbitt (1960), raised in Aughnagurgan, County Armagh, professional rally driver and winner of the 2000 and 2002 Irish Tarmac Rally Championship. Considered one of Irelands top 5 ever drivers. Some of the snipers were eventually caught, but during that period when they weren’t caught it was psychologically very difficult for police officers to go out and patrol,” Mains adds. People have this image of what goes on in Cross and obviously certain aspects have fed into that over the years with criminality. Alan Mains was posted to the area after patrolling the leafy suburbs of the Lisburn Road in Belfast as a young RUC sergeant in 1986.

There are also a number of uninhabited islands in the county's section of Lough Neagh: Coney Island Flat, Croaghan Flat, Padian, Phil Roe's Flat and the Shallow Flat. National identity (person based) - basic detail (classification 1)". NISRA . Retrieved 18 August 2023. John McCreesh, American politician who served in the Pennsylvania State Senate from 1935 to 1958 was born in Armagh County in 1881. [31] Mains was stationed at Forkhill but regularly went to Crossmaglen where he and his colleagues were flanked by 15 soldiers when they went out on foot patrol.But you don’t go running about Cross, going, ‘this is affecting my emotional condition’, you’d have been laughed out of the town at the time. On October 12, 2010, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released all four television films on DVD along with the Smokey and the Bandit trilogy as part of Smokey and the Bandit: The 7-Movie Outlaw Collection. [2] See also [ edit ]

Paul Muldoon (1951– ), born in County Armagh, poet, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize I suddenly got a promotion and was going to work in a helicopter. I thought, ‘will I die here?’ — Alan Mains Armagh Observatory, founded in 1790 & Armagh Planetarium, a modern working astronomical research institute with a rich heritage Outside Keenan’s Bar, an official Northern Ireland tourist information sign hangs which serves as the “centre point” for Walsh’s walking tours.As a teenager, McConville cut through a field to get into St Oliver Plunkett Park, the home ground of Crossmaglen Rangers GAC, to avoid “getting hassle” from soldiers in the town. Sniper at Work” road signs with silhouettes of gunmen are gone and an occasional police car patrols a town where soldiers and police only ever travelled by helicopter for fear of being blown up by covert bombs.

Armagh ceased to serve as an electoral constituency in 1983, but remains the core of the Newry and Armagh constituency represented at Westminster and the Newry and Armagh constituency represented in the Northern Ireland Assembly. County Armagh also remains as a district for legal and property purposes; however, its baronies no longer have any administrative use. The idea of a Tourist Information office in the troubled Crossmaglen would have been almost unthinkable before the Belfast Agreement. Today Úna Walsh is an ambassador who leads walking tours in the village. Photograph: Stephen Davison Between 1971 and 1997, there were 123 British soldiers killed in south Armagh – about a fifth of British military Trouble-related deaths in the North – along with 41 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police officers and 75 civilians. He recalls a conversation with the late Paddy Short who ran Shorts’ pub in the town: “Anytime anything went on, journalists always went in there because Paddy was brilliant for a soundbite and a great talker.Even if you take the history out of it, this area is outstanding in its beauty. But it got little coverage by the tourist board compared to other places. a b c d e f g h i "Build or find Census 2021 tables | NISRA Flexible Table Builder". build.nisra.gov.uk . Retrieved 18 July 2023. We just sort of got on with things because if you’re living under that sort of oppression, and it was oppression, it’s something that you carry with you. They treated us with disdain,” says Mc Conville, standing in the middle of Crossmaglen Rangers’ pitch.

The policing is a wee bit more normal than it was but let’s face it, it’s not normal,” McConville adds. I was down there for ‘Op Rect’. They weren’t expanding the station, they were mortar hardening it. They were making it so it could take more punishment from the IRA without collapsing.” From its highest point at Slieve Gullion, in the south of the county, Armagh's land falls away from its rugged south with Carrigatuke, Lislea and Camlough mountains, to rolling drumlin country in the middle and west of the county and finally flatlands in the north where rolling flats and small hills reach sea level at Lough Neagh. Continuity IRA claims PSNI murder". RTÉ News and Current Affairs. 10 March 2009. Archived from the original on 11 March 2009 . Retrieved 10 March 2009.The Bandit (Bloom) is on the run with Crystal "the Beauty" ( Kathy Ireland), a young woman being pursued by a mobster ( Tony Curtis), a bounty hunter ( Joseph Cortese) and the FBI.