The challenge of selecting and managing appropriate levels of violence to be used to put down insurgencies drew incoherent and strategically damaging responses among units that served in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921 and during the early part of Operation Banner in the 1970s. Charles Townshend's work on British counterinsurgency operations in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 offers a valuable account of reprisals, the hardening of attitudes and the collective punishment of the local population among certain Army and police units during that time, a diversity of behaviour that falls outside general instructions and standard procedures. In the early 1970s, although ‘exemplary counterinsurgency’ was officially at an end, different units and officers could still hold starkly contrasting views on what constituted ‘firmness’ or resolve and excessive violence or punishment of an area. Senior officers often failed to recognise patterns of behaviour that caused serious damage to community relations, police work and the gathering of intelligence.

On May 11, 1992, a soldier from 3 PARA was badly injured in an explosion near Cappagh in East Tyrone. The following day soldiers from his battalion decided to vent their anger on the nearby village of Coalisland. They ‘sealed off the town’ and ransacked two bars in the village, shooting three local men, one of whom who had tried to close the door of his bar, the Rossmore, to prevent the soldiers from gaining access. The local RUC were incensed; in a few hours, 3 PARA was undoing years of increasingly successful police work in the area, including beating up sources that were providing vital information against the IRA. At a meeting with the local RUC, the CO of 3 PARA was told that, ‘his men were now the best recruiting sergeant for the East Tyrone IRA’.