A red Ford Transit speeds along a rural road outside Bessbrook, South Armagh. Its was half five and the men inside are tired, cold, and ready for home after a shift at Glenanne Mill. Within minutes, ten of them would be dead. The Kingsmill killings stand among the most nakedly sectarian atrocities of the Troubles. They were not an accident or case of mistaken identity. It was cold blooded anti-Protestant murder. The bus was flagged down by a man in combat clothing flashing a torch, the gesture mimicking a British Army checkpoint, a familiar sight in South Armagh at the time. As the vehicle stopped, eleven armed men with blackened faces emerged from the hedgerows. The passengers were ordered out. The gunmen chillingly asked each man his religion. One worker, Richard Hughes, identified himself as Catholic. He was told to run. He later described hearing the first shots as he fled across the fields. The remaining men, all Protestant, were lined up against the side of the bus. In less than a minute, approximately 136 rounds were fired at close range. Ten men died where they stood. An eleventh, Alan Black, was shot eighteen times and left for dead. Against all odds, Black survived. Black later recalled hearing his colleagues moaning and groaning after the first volley. Then he heard a voice, clear and callous, say, “Finish them off.” Moments later, a bullet struck him in the head. He would spend months in Daisy Hill Hospital in Newry recovering from catastrophic injuries, and years more grappling with survivor’s guilt. The killings took place against a backdrop of escalating sectarian violence. 24 hours earlier, loyalist paramilitaries associated with the Glenanne Gang had murdered six Catholic civilians in coordinated attacks on the Reavey and O’Dowd families. The Kingsmill massacre was widely understood at the time, and later formally acknowledged, as a retaliatory strike. There is absolutely never justification for the evil of murdering civilians in “retaliation”. Adding to the complications surrounding motives, a 2024 inquest concluded that the Kingsmills attack had been planned well in advance. It was not a sudden eruption of rage, but a calculated operation. The men were targeted solely because they were Protestants. Responsibility was initially claimed by a group styling itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force. This, the coroner later ruled, was a fiction. The cover name existed to provide deniability, because the Provisional IRA was officially on ceasefire at the time. Both the Historical Enquiries Team in 2011 and the 2024 inquest concluded that the massacre was carried out by the Provisional IRA. They dead of Kingsmill ranged in age from teenagers to men nearing retirement. All were ordinary workers. None were combatants. Weapons used at Kingsmills were later linked by forensic ballistics to more than forty other paramilitary attacks across a fifteen-year period. Suspects were known to the security forces. Intelligence existed. Yet no one was ever convicted. In April 2024, a coroner ruled unequivocally that Kingsmills was an overtly sectarian act carried out by the IRA. In April 2025, the Police Ombudsman published a report detailing serious failings in the original RUC investigation, including the failure to arrest and interview eleven suspects identified at the time, and the loss of crucial records. Half a century on, memorial services are still held in Bessbrook and at the roadside where the bus was stopped. The massacre exposes the core horror of the Troubles, the stripping away of individuality, the reduction of human beings to religious labels, the cold efficiency with which men could be selected for death. The men murdered at Kingsmill: John Bryans (46) Robert Chambers (19) Reginald Chapman (25) Walter Chapman (23) Robert Freeburn (50) Joseph Lemmon (46) John McConville (20) James McWhirter (58) Robert Walker (46) Kenneth Worton (24)

BUCHANAN: Dublin Time Machine

@RobLooseCannon