Watchtower with a history

By Paul Rocks
BBC News Online

The tower is the last part of the base to be removed

Work has started to remove the Cloghogue military installation after 15 years of watching over the south Armagh border.

It survived rocket, bomb and gun attacks from the IRA but the controversial base is finally being taken down by those who built it.

At the height of the Troubles, it covered a large area from the hilltop watchtower on Cloghogue mountain to the main Belfast to Dublin road.

It was erected in 1988 after Robin and Maureen Hanna, and their six-year-old son David, were killed in an IRA explosion after crossing the border into Northern Ireland.

The Hillsborough family were returning from holiday when their four-wheel-drive vehicle was mistaken for one belonging to a senior judge.

A year earlier Lord Justice Gibson and his wife, Cecily, were blown up in the same place while four police officers died in a similar attack in 1985.

Its first purpose was a permanent vehicle checkpoint - a move that attracted opposition locally and further afield.

Long tailbacks of cross-border traffic were a consequence and, in a staunch republican area like south Armagh, it was inevitably a target for the IRA.

Army surveillance equipment has been taken down

In 1990, a soldier and a civilian were killed in a car bomb attack while a soldier was killed in another incident when a van was rolled down a nearby rail track. The huge bomb was detonated as it reached the checkpoint.

There were many other attacks on the installation, including mortar bombings. Protests followed from Cloghogue residents who wanted the base removed because of its proximity to the local primary school.

These were heightened after a mortar shell landed near the school during an IRA attack.

The school was shut at the time and there were no injuries but, with the base being increased in size, the principal decided to move the pupils to a convent a mile away in Newry until a school was built away from the security apparatus.

In the months after the 1994 IRA ceasefire, the permanent checkpoint was removed and ramps on the main road were levelled.

The base provided a birds-eye view over south Armagh

But the hilltop base remained key to the Army surveillance of the border area where there remained a threat from dissident republicans opposed to the peace process.

It was equipped with powerful cameras, making use of its vantage point. But these too courted controversy, with claims that radiation from radio microwaves were affecting the health of the people of Cloghogue.

In May 2000, the then Chief Constable Sir Ronnie Flanagan announced a package of demilitarisation measures and Cloghogue was on the list.

But politicians and residents accused the government of conning them when it emerged that only part of the base that was not being used was to be removed.

On Friday, work started on dismantling the watchtower and its hi-tech spying equipment.

That work will take six months to complete but by then, the Army says, Cloghogue mountain will be as it was 15 years ago.