The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

Holroyd was also telling the truth when he cited as a dirty trick the case of Eugene McQuaid, who was blown up while ‘doing a turn’, ferrying an IRA rocket on his motorbike. The explosion was not accidental. Having learned of the rocket’s existence in a dump south of the border, the British Army, instead of tipping off the Gardai, crossed the border secretly and doctored the explosives so that they became highly volatile. Thus, on the morning of 5 October 1974, as he drove along the busy main road to the bustling, predominantly Catholic town of Newry, McQuaid in fact constituted a serious danger to himself and to the public. The bomb went off, blowing him to pieces, after he had executed a sudden U-tum on spotting an army checkpoint, which he could just as easily have destroyed. By chance I drove past about ten minutes after the explosion. Pieces of McQuaid’s body were being covered with sheets and there were dozens of armed soldiers on the road and in the fields around, all obviously in a high state of alert. Not the place to pull up. But rounding the first corner after the scene, about two hundred yards away, I saw an RUC man and slowed to ask him what had happened. Had there been an explosion? He looked at me hard and then, speaking with a distinctly hostile air, made a response which symbolises the entire official policy towards dirty tricks. ‘Explosion, what explosion? I didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. I mind my own business…’