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The occupation lasted just eight hours. That’s all they needed.

Twenty years ago last month nine members of the Derry Antiwar Coalition walked into the premises of international arms dealer Raytheon. The group, a mixture of socialists and Irish republicans, caused more than £300,000 worth of damage, destroying several computers and other expensive pieces of equipment. They placed a sign in a window – Raytheon is now decommissioned – and sat at a table playing a game of cards, waiting for authorities to arrive.

Raytheon had opened its Derry office in 1999 after an invitation from SDLP and UUP leaders John Hume and David Trimble. The company was meant to employ around 150 people as part of the peace dividends afforded to the north under the Good Friday Agreement. Hume, weeks after winning a Nobel peace prize in December 1998 along with Trimble for their opposition to political violence, said Raytheon would “be warmly welcomed by all of our citizens” and participate in “government contracts” to the benefit of everyone in the north of Ireland.

Jobs at Raytheon however were inextricably linked to imperialist wars in the Middle East. Among Raytheon’s clients were – and still remain – the United States military and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s invading American soldiers used its Javelin system and TOW missile, both weapons designed to destroy armoured vehicles. During its 2006 offensive in Lebanon the IDF used munitions that activists linked directly to Raytheon’s facility in Derry. In July that year a Raytheon bunker-buster bomb struck a residential building in Qana and killed 28 people, some of whom were crushed to death.

Altother more than 1 million people died in these three conflicts, the vast majority in Iraq.

The PSNI arrested the men who came to be known as the Raytheon Nine under anti-terrorism legislation. Six of them later went to trial on lesser charges of criminal damage and affray. If convicted they faced a prison sentence of up to two years. They would deny nothing and argue before a jury that their actions had saved lives. They had  prevented greater crimes taking place.

An attack on job opportunities

Most mainstream politicians in the north condemned the Raytheon occupation because it was attacking an employer in Derry,  a city historically deprived of jobs because of its Catholic majority.

“People are rightly free to voice their disgust at the violence in the Middle East and the failure of Britain and America to challenge or contain Israeli actions,” said Mark Durkan, then SDLP MP, in 2006. “People are also free to express opposition to the arms trade and the role of a company like Raytheon at a global level within that, but destroying property and possibly prejudicing other investment and employment prospects is not the way to register such concerns.”

Some argued the Springtown office wasn’t involved in arms production anyway, having received “assurances” from Raytheon. This  claim was contradicted in September 2006 by the Belfast Telegraph, which obtained documents under freedom of information legislation confirming the Derry factory was indeed producing military software, with the British Ministry of Defence one recipient. A letter to John Hume from the Industrial Development Board, sent in February 1999, had even warned that if other companies in the north got British defence contracts, Raytheon might be deterred from investing.

The correspondence gave the position of then-company chairman Dennis Picard. “Raytheon is still very focused on the MoD programmes,” it read. “The bottom line: this could mean no project in Northern Ireland if Raytheon’s competitors are awarded the MoD business.”

Sinn Féin remained largely silent. In the south the party had opposed the US invasion of Iraq and demanded American troops lose access to Shannon Airport. Yet here was mainstream republicanism saying nothing as the north profited from the imperialism it once opposed. Making matters worse,  senior Raytheon staff had publicly denied self-determination to Palestinians, a people with whom Irish resistance movements long shared solidarity.

“A people must show some kind of national identity,” said Adam Cherrill, a manager of business development at Raytheon Business Systems, in 2002. “What political organisations, social institutions, literature, art, religion, or private correspondence express any ties between the Palestinian people to the Land of Israel?”

Their legal argument was simple

The Raytheon Nine went on trial in May 2008 in Belfast because, prosecutors successfully argued, they were too popular in Derry. (This led to Eamonn McCann’s lawyer telling the judge  this couldn’t possibly be true because his client had stood for election on multiple occasions and been soundly rejected by voters.)

Their legal argument was simple: Raytheon’s weapons were being used to murder innocent people on the other side of the world, and, like the men and women who who broke the train tracks that brought Jews, gypsies and gay people to Auschwitz, the Raytheon Nine were justified in acts of destruction that might in different circumstances have constituted criminal damage.

Among the exhibits was a video that showed people killed in Lebanon by a Raytheon missile, some lying  under rubble. An employee at the company took the stand, explaining that Raytheon’s Derry operation provided Israel and the US with software that enabled war crimes.

The company sent director John Reilly from its British HQ.  Reilly focused purely on the damage the group  had caused, according to “The Occupation” an RTÉ  documentary about the Raytheon action broadcast in 2017. When asked about the use of Raytheon missiles in Iraq in 2003, which resulted in the deaths of innocent people, he said he wouldn’t be worried about  it.  Raytheon’s legal representatives further claimed the Derry Antiwar Coalition was interested in “publicity” and didn’t care for lives in Lebanon.

In June, after three weeks in court, the jury returned its verdict: the Raytheon actionists were innocent.

After their victory, another occupation took place, this time with nine women. They also went on trial, with a jury returning the same result: not guilty. Raytheon, it was clear, wasn’t particularly welcome in Derry, and anyone found to have disrupted its activities would be likely found, by their peers, to have acted within the bounds of their legal duty.

By 2010 Raytheon announced its departure from Derry, though it didn’t acknowledge why.

Moving on

If you follow the political logic of “Northern Ireland”, inviting Raytheon to Derry made sense.

When what is called peace broke out in 1998 the north became yet another venue for neoliberalism. As Liam Ó Ruairc details, this was not a “peace process" based on justice or decolonisation, but a pacification process built on the defeat and cooptation of republicanism.

Integral to this project was the notion that the polity of north become like a normal state, something it was designed never to be. And normal states, under the neoliberal order, are filled with compliant individuals free from the burden of the historic and political contexts that produced them, who are incentivised to perceive weapons manufacturing as yet another business or employment opportunity, not a dangerous industry to oppose on ethical grounds.

Without decolonisation or justice for British crimes committed, this is moving on from the past: depoliticisation and complicity in the imperial system that continues to occupy the north.

Despite the Derry Antiwar Coalition’s victory, the north’s arms trade continues to thrive. In April of this year, Thales – which by its own account has “quadrupled” production in the north since 2022  – announced its intention to expand in county Down, submitting planning applications for facilities in Lough Mann in Teconnaught and Ballynahinch. According to the Belfast Telegraph the announcement followed an order last year from the British government for 5,000 air defense missiles for Ukraine – a contract expected to be worth up to £1.6 billion for Thales. In June, Thales won a £176 million deal with the British army.

As we are seeing in the south with lobbying groups like the Irish Defence and Security Association,  going all-in on defence in the north is increasingly presented to the public as both an economic necessity and a moral action.

“We’re investing in defence skills and education to expand the talent pool for businesses and create more opportunities for young people to forge a well-paid and meaningful career in defence,” wrote Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, earlier this year in the News Letter.  “Speaking with apprentices and workers this week, I’ve heard the pride they have in their work, knowing they are helping to defend against Russian and Iranian attacks on our citizens and our allies.” The north, in other words, continues to help the US and Israel.

Northern Ireland = Not Normal

The June 2008 verdict represented a loss for the northern  statelet. By siding with Lebanese children instead of an enterprise that profits from the annihilation of human life,  multiple juries exposed one of the contradictions of “Northern Ireland”: the absurd proposition that an order structured to facilitate slaughter can ever be called just or normal.

Southern politicians, too, know well that people like the Shannon Three –  who walked onto the airfield at Shannon Airport in March 2024 to protest US military flights and have spent nearly two years on bail on trespassing charges – could face a jury that looks on their actions favourably. Instead they’ve subjected them to a process intended to wear them down, to punish them for highlighting the complicity of the Free State in American and European crimes.

Elites, both north and south, are tirelessly fighting in service of a shared vision of subordination to neoliberal capital, a shared vision of their respective patches functioning as good little client states. We who oppose imperialism must also continue the fight for our vision: one of a reunified island unblighted by empire and its machinery of death.

A lesson to take from the Raytheon actions: when confronted with the reality of imperial violence, ordinary people sitting in judgement will choose humanity over barbarism.

Here’s to the Raytheon Nine: Jimmy Kelly, Sean Heaton, Eamonn O’Donnell, Michael Gallagher, Eamonn McCann, Colm Bryce, Kieran Gallagher, Paddy McDaid and Gary Donnelly.

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