The Grenadier Captain Who Walked Into the IRA's Pub Alone — Robert Nairac, South Armagh, 1977

On a wet Saturday night in May 1977, a British Army captain in a brown leather jacket walked out of a pub called the Three Steps Inn in a village called Dromintee, three miles from the Irish border in South Armagh. In the car park, seven men were waiting for him. The captain was thirty-one years old, six feet tall, an Oxford history graduate, a Catholic, a boxer, a falconer, a serving officer of the Grenadier Guards on attachment to a British Army unit that did not officially exist. The seven men who were waiting for him were a Provisional IRA Active Service Unit, and they had been told he was the man who had been sitting at the bar for three hours pretending to be one of them. What happened in the car park took fifteen minutes and required every one of the seven men. By dawn the captain was dead in a forest across the border in the Republic. By dawn his body was already gone. His name was Robert Nairac. The men who knew what he actually was have, almost to a man, refused to talk about it. Until now. The pub was called the Three Steps. The village was called Dromintee. The road outside ran for a mile and a quarter to the border at Flurrybridge, and after that it ran into the Republic of Ireland, and after that the British Army could not follow. The proprietor was a man named Desmond McCreesh. The publican knew most of the men in the bar that night. The publican did not know the captain. Almost nobody did. The captain had told everyone in the pub that his name was Danny McErlaine. He had told them he was a motor mechanic from the Ardoyne district of North Belfast. He had told them he was a member of the Official IRA. None of this was true. The real Daniel McErlaine had been on the run from the security services since 1974, and would himself be killed by the Provisional IRA in June of the following year. The captain was wearing his stolen name like a borrowed coat. The captain had been at the bar of the Three Steps for nearly three hours. He had bought drinks. He had played pool. He had sung two republican songs with the live band, and several of the regulars had clapped him on the back when he finished. He left the pub at approximately eleven forty-five at night. He walked out alone, into the car park, into a wet South Armagh dark.