The Massereene Barracks shooting was a deadly attack by the Real Irish Republican Army on soldiers at a Northern Ireland base on 7 March 2009. Two soldiers were killed while waiting for pizza before deployment to Afghanistan; two more soldiers and both delivery drivers were wounded. The assault brought lethal violence against British forces back into view after twelve years without a British soldier being killed in Northern Ireland, making the attack a sharp reminder that the peace process had not ended dissident armed activity.

Setting and Target

On Saturday nights, soldiers at Massereene Barracks often ordered pizza from a nearby Domino’s. Shortly before ten o’clock, two young soldiers stepped out to the brick gatehouse at the base entrance to collect their food. Dressed in desert camouflage, they were due to fly to Afghanistan a few hours later for a six-month tour. Two delivery cars arrived in quick succession with overlapping orders from the same restaurant.

The ordinary routine and the soldiers’ imminent departure framed the attack: they had come outside for food before a deployment overseas. A third car, a green sedan, arrived as the deliveries were being made. Two gunmen in dark clothing and balaclavas opened fire.

The Shooting

After a sustained first volley, the gunmen approached the soldiers, who were lying on the ground, and fired repeatedly at close range. They discharged more than sixty rounds in roughly half a minute, then escaped in the green car. Patrick Azimkar, aged twenty-one and from north London, and Mark Quinsey, aged twenty-three and from Birmingham, were killed. Two other soldiers and both delivery drivers were wounded; one driver was a local resident and the other an immigrant from Poland.

The attack therefore extended beyond its two military victims. The delivery workers had been carrying out an ordinary job, but the Real Irish Republican Army’s spokesman later claimed that they too were legitimate targets because their service to the soldiers amounted to collaboration. The claim widened the group’s asserted responsibility from an attack on the armed forces to violence against civilians whose work brought them into contact with those forces.

Claim and Investigation

Twelve years had passed since the last British soldier was killed in Northern Ireland. The Real Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility in a telephone call to a Dublin newspaper. The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland characterized the attackers as a small and increasingly desperate group seeking to draw the wider community back into conflict, a description that emphasized the gap between the gunmen’s actions and the wishes of most residents.

A major investigation followed, with several arrests. Eight months after the shooting, heavily armed police officers entered a house in Andersonstown. Investigators had traced the telephone used to claim responsibility: a pay-as-you-go handset bought at a Tesco supermarket in Newtownabbey the day after the attack. CCTV footage showed Marian Price purchasing the phone. The image recorded her looking directly toward the surveillance camera as she reached into her wallet.

After two days of questioning about the barracks shooting, Marian Price was released without charge. Eighteen months later she was detained again and charged with providing property for terrorist purposes; she also faced a separate charge connected with a dissident rally in Derry. The account establishes the phone purchase and the subsequent charges, but does not establish that she was convicted of involvement in the shooting.

Aftermath and Significance

The assault demonstrated that the end of large-scale conflict had not removed the capacity or intent of dissident groups to kill. Northern Ireland was described as peaceful apart from occasional dissident attacks, and the Massereene killings were an especially stark instance of that continuing violence. The victims’ scheduled flight to Afghanistan made the encounter part of a military deployment, but the gunmen brought the conflict back to the barracks gate and injured people delivering food.

The attack also sits within a broader unresolved struggle over how the conflict would be remembered and discussed. The book frames the Troubles as a war fought both on the battlefield and later in memory, while noting that there was no formal process for deciding how to commemorate or understand it. Political discipline and silence shaped that afterlife: republican leaders sought to preserve a particular account of the armed struggle, even as persistent paramilitary hierarchies could, paradoxically, restrain members and help prevent violence from reigniting on a wider scale. Against that uneasy background, the Massereene shooting marked both the persistence of armed dissent and the limits of any simple claim that the conflict had simply disappeared.