Qualla: Strabane Ambush

Strabane Ambush: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.khiao, CC BY-SA 4.0. David Devine was sixteen years old when the SAS shot him in Plumbridge Road, Strabane on 23 February 1985. He is the youngest IRA volunteer killed in the Troubles. With him died his brother Michael, who was twenty-two, and their unit commander Charles 'Charlie' Breslin, who was twenty-one. Over one hundred rounds were fired into them inside a single field on the edge of a quiet town. A pathologist would later testify that two of the men had been hit twenty-eight times, mostly while on the ground, and that all three had single bullet wounds to the head. It would be remembered as the most successful SAS operation against the IRA until Loughgall two years later. For the families left behind, it was the start of a seventeen-year fight to be heard.

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Image: P.khiao | CC BY-SA 4.0

Strabane Ambush: The Most Bombed Town in Europe

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaxPride, CC BY-SA 3.0. Strabane in the 1980s was a town on edge. Sitting directly on the border with the Republic, with Lifford visible across the Foyle, it was a place where the IRA could attack and disappear in minutes. Between 1971 and 1991, sixteen separate Republican attacks killed at least one me...

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Image: MaxPride | CC BY-SA 3.0

Strabane Ambush: Plumbridge Road

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the morning of 23 February 1985, the three Strabane volunteers were either returning weapons to an arms cache off Plumbridge Road, or collecting fresh ones - accounts differ. As they entered a field beside the road, an SAS unit opened fire. Local witnesses said no warning to s...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Strabane Ambush: Seventeen Years to Court

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 7 May 2002, more than seventeen years after the shooting, the Ministry of Defence settled a case brought by the families of the Devine brothers and Charlie Breslin in Belfast High Court. The sum was undisclosed. The settlement did not amount to an admission of wrongdoing, but ...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Strabane Ambush: Beginning of a Pattern

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Strabane ambush was the first in a long sequence of SAS and undercover operations against the IRA between 1985 and 1992, concentrated along the Fermanagh, Tyrone and South Armagh borders. A year later the IRA's Fermanagh commander Séamus McElwaine was killed in an ambush. In ...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0