Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

by David McKittrick

Gaddafi had provided guns and money to the IRA in the early 1970s but his interest appeared to have cooled until 1984, when his relations with Britain sharply deteriorated. As a result he renewed the relationship, giving the IRA large stocks of modern military hardware. Four separate shipments of arms made their way from Libya to Ireland in the mid-1980s, bringing the IRA around a thousand rifles together with fearsome weapons such as Semtex plastic explosives, heavy machine guns firing armour-piercing rounds which could cut through even protected police vehicles, SAM-7 missiles and anti-aircraft guns capable of downing helicopters and planes, and even flame-throwers. The authorities knew nothing of the Libyan link, which amounted to the worst British intelligence lapse for decades. Both the IRA and Libya itself were under surveillance from a battery of security agencies, yet all the resources of the RUC, military intelligence, MI5 and MI6 had failed to uncover the Libyan connection.