In a dingy waiting-room in Sinn Fein’s Falls Road headquarters in Belfast there is a mural of the Maze Prison – Long Kesh, as Republicans call it. Above it are painted the faces of IRA martyrs, and these verses:

I think how they Suffer in Prison Alone
Their Friends Unavenged and their Country Unfreed:
Oh Bitter I said is the Patriot’s Mead.

When the news of the killing of eight IRA men and one civilian at Loughgall came through to the H-blocks at the Maze, there were more than a few who counted themselves lucky to be suffering in prison, rather than tasting the bitter mead served up by the SAS in a wipe-out operation on that sunny spring evening in Armagh.

Loughgall has brought a temporary halt to IRA attacks on RUC and British Army bases. Before it, the IRA had carried out more than twenty attacks this year. The deaths of eight volunteers, their largest single loss since the War of Independence from 1919-21, is a serious blow which has removed their East Tyrone commander, along with a leading border operator. Despite reports of a high-level informer who tipped off the RUC six weeks before the attack, it now seems more likely that the ambush was the result of surveillance by the security forces of known IRA figures and of the movement of weapons and explosives. The IRA commanders also appear to have become over-confident. The killing of Lord Justice Gibson, number two in the Northern Ireland judiciary, and his wife, and the almost daily grenade, mortar and rifle attacks on RUC/British Army bases, had given the IRA their most successful four months since the late Seventies, when they killed Lord Mountbatten and 18 soldiers on one day. Tom King, the Northern Ireland Secretary, said that 500 new members of the RUC would be recruited, but he didn’t mention bringing in fresh troops. It is clear now that the SAS and possibly other undercover units were staking out police stations in anticipation of attacks. The IRA are having trouble piecing together what happened at Loughgall because the ‘godfathers of terrorism’ beloved of the tabloids were on the operation; and IRA talk to the effect that one of their men survived the Loughgall ambush is being treated with a large dose of scepticism. Had the intercepted IRA operation been a success, supporters would have praised it for its daring. Now questions are being asked about how the units expected to trundle a noisy JCB digger several miles, with at least one large bomb in its bucket, without alerting anyone, and about why there was no pre-ambush reconnaissance.