On March 3, 1988, in the shadow of the rock of Gibraltar, British Special Air Services (SAS) gathered behind IRA members Sean Savage, Daniel McCann, and Mairéad Farrell as they were ascending the rock. When the three victims, all unarmed, turned around, saw the soldiers, and saw their guns, they put their hands up, the universal signal of surrender and “for the love of God, don’t shoot.” The soldiers disregarded the gesture, military protocol, and international law and, without identifying themselves, proceeded with the execution.
Heavy fire rained on the three, much of it so close-up gun muzzle marks were on one victim’s face; bullets kept pumping into their bodies long after they were dead. The woman was shot twice in the face, three times in the body, and then shot three more times in the back for good measure. One bullet passed through her, grazing an onlooker standing on, ironically, Winston Churchill Avenue. The three bullet-ridden bodies were shipped home to Ireland without the police taking any forensic evidence from the scene. Mairéad Farrell was just 31.
Mairéad hardly looked the part of a badass terrorist. She presented as a kind kindergarten teacher – softspoken, attractive, convent-educated – an appearance that belied her defiant and passionate nationalism. Born into a middle-class Belfast family in 1957, she became politicized when the British Army began occupation in Northern Ireland and curfew was imposed on her Falls Road neighborhood, a situation she likened to the Warsaw Ghetto. A friend later claimed, “It was the curfew that started Mairéad on the road to Gibraltar.”
But it was PM Thatcher’s policy of Illegal Internment that led Mairéad, in the parlance of the IRA, “to go active.” She joined up at age 14, keeping it a secret from her family and friends. The 1962 British Army’s massacre of peaceful protesters, known as Bloody Sunday, radicalized many civil rights activists and forever defined Mairéad Farrell’s life.
Just a few years after Bloody Sunday, she was planting bombs, most fatefully in Belfast’s Conway Hotel, a favorite of British soldiers. The bombing attempt failed, two of her partners escaped, another was killed and Mairéad, never particularly lucky, was arrested within hours.
At her trial, she took a traditional IRA stand: She refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the court as it was an institution of Great Britain. She was sentenced to a shocking 14-year sentence in Armagh Prison for “possession of explosives” and “belonging to an illegal organization.”
On March 1, 1976, Thatcher introduced her policy of “criminalization”: IRA inmates, according to the posturing PM, were “hoods” and no longer recognized as political prisoners. Their Special Category Status was revoked. Mairéad’s bad luck struck again; she entered Armagh Prison the following month, April 1976 – she was the first woman prisoner to be denied political status and the first to be denied the rights allowed previous IRA prisoners.
Mairéad became the leader of the IRA women. As Officer Commanding, she was determined to see the women recognized as political prisoners. She ordered her band of women to ignore the authority of the prison staff, reject uniforms, and refuse to do prison work.
Retribution was fierce. The women were locked in their cells and denied bathroom facilities; Mairéad told them to empty their chamber pots on the floor. The No-Wash protest began and went
on for over a year. When the H-Block men were holding their hunger strike, Mairéad and two of her comrades started their own hunger strike. It lasted 18 days, ending when the British government agreed to broker their demands, a promise they proceeded to break.
Armagh Prison gave Mairéad an awareness of the dismissive attitude toward women in the male-dominated IRA. “We were ‘the girls in Armagh,’” she lamented. A fierce feminist, Mairéad conflated Ireland’s freedom with gender equality. “I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m also oppressed as an Irish person…we can only end our oppression as women if we can end the oppression of our nation as a whole.” In the 1981 general election in the Republic of Ireland, Mairéad was the only woman prisoner to stand as a candidate.
Released from prison after 10 ½ years, she was 30, living with her parents, yet Britain feared her. Her voice and image were banned on British airwaves, as was any documentary featuring her. Mairéad attempted a ‘normal life’ by attending University, but sitting on the sidelines of the struggle proved impossible for her.
She was soon back in the IRA and assigned a dangerous, doomed mission to the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.
The IRA gave Savage, McCann, and Farrell orders to set off a car bomb during a ceremonial gathering. But, from the beginning, their activities were monitored by M16, Spanish police, and the SAS.
The SAS were a trained killing squad with shoot-to-kill in their DNA. They were now dispatched to Gibraltar on a mission whose name, Operation Flavius, was grandly borrowed from the Roman Empire. The Gibraltar 3, as they came to be known, never had a chance.
News of the “Slaughter on the Rock” wrought a feeding frenzy in the British tabloids; WHY THE DOGS HAD TO DIE, screamed The Sun. The government coverup was immediate. The press was fed blatant lies claiming a massive shootout between the IRA and the SAS, ignoring the many eyewitnesses who saw the truth and soon revealed it. The public’s euphoria dissipated when it was revealed that the “dogs” were shot in cold blood. Northern Ireland, in turn, had erupted in outrage and protests.
To the people of Falls Road she was a patriot. To the British she was a terrorist. To her family she was a victim of Irish history.”
– The New York Times
Violence begat more violence as soon as the bodies arrived in Ireland. The police assaulted those attending the remains, even killing one for aggressive behavior. Tragedy continued. The funeral of the Gibraltar 3 was attacked by a Loyalist paramilitary armed with a gun and grenades. Three mourners were killed not far from the three fresh gravesites in Milltown Cemetery.
The funeral of one victim of the Paramilitary’s attack was three days later when a car drove into the cortege. Thinking it was another attack (it wasn’t), the crowd dragged two British Army corporals from their vehicle and summarily executed them – another senseless killing.
When Amnesty International took up the cause of Savage, McCann, and Farrell, they posited two questions: “Had the authorities planned in advance for the three to be shot dead?” and most importantly, “Since no terrorist act had yet occurred, why weren’t they simply arrested and imprisoned?” Those questions have remained unanswered. The families of the victims, in turn, brought the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Seven years after their deaths, in 1995, the court ruled that Mairéad, Danny, and Sean were illegally assassinated in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Sadly, Mairéad didn’t live to see the progress of women in Ireland but another Mairéad Farrell,
her niece and namesake, has been the Sinn Féin TD for Galway West since 2020. Her efforts continue Mairéad’s advocacy for Irish nationalism and women’s rights. In 2024, as the main speaker at the National Hunger Strike Commemoration in Derry, she spoke of her aunt’s murder and the importance of memory in the ongoing struggle for equality in Northern Ireland.
The Derry crowd loved her.
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