As Israel rained bombs on Lebanon, a group of anti-war campaigners in Derry, Northern Ireland watched the news in horror. It was 2006 and more than 1,100 Lebanese people had been killed over just 34 days. Then they discovered that a bunker buster bomb, dropped on the southern Lebanon village of Qana on 30 July 2006, had been guided by software made by arms giant Raytheon. It was time to act.
‘We couldn’t tolerate it any more,’ says Colm Bryce. ‘I just found it unbearable, sitting watching.’
The Qana strike killed 28 people as they sheltered in their basements – bunker buster bombs are used to penetrate deep into buildings. Days later, on 9 August, Bryce and others broke into the offices of US arms giant Raytheon, at a site in the Springtown area of the city, destroying paperwork, throwing computers our of the window and disabling the mainframe computer. All in all they caused around £350,000 of damage (around $452,500 at the time).
There had been a campaign against Raytheon’s presence in Derry ever since it arrived in 1999, with marches, weekly vigils and a range of creative actions such as digging a pretend grave outside the facility. A coalition of groups took part, including the Derry Anti-War Campaign (DAWC) and Foyle Ethical Investment Campaign. Everyone had a part to play – from writing letters to local newspapers to solidarity demonstrations outside court cases.
In 2003 there had been another occupation, sparked by the news that a Raytheon-made guided missile had killed 62 people at a market in Baghdad, Iraq.1 ‘We managed to force our way in, and we had a sit-in until we were removed by the police,’ says Bryce, ‘but didn’t go much further than that.’
In 2006 it was a different story. ‘They sent hostage negotiators down from Belfast,’ says Goretti Horgan, who took part in several of the occupations in Derry. As police arrived she was outside the building, while her partner Eamonn McCann remained inside with the eight other men.
Horgan saw large black cars, with tinted windows and dogs in the back, draw up. ‘That was really scary,’ she says. Video footage shows police officers dressed for a riot, clad in black helmets and visors and bearing shields. They entered the building to find the men sitting around playing cards. The group became known as the ‘Raytheon 9’, and in 2008 they were acquitted of multiple counts of criminal damage in a Belfast court.
In January 2009, an Israeli assault on Gaza killed at least 1,383 Palestinians over three weeks. Horgan returned as part of a group of nine women, who chained themselves to each other and to the doors leading into the building. The women were acquitted too: like the men, they argued that their actions had been to protect the lives and property of people in Gaza, and to stop war crimes being committed by Israel.
Something like peace
The arrival of Raytheon to Derry, in 1999, was announced just one year after the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Although this accord had brought an end to much of the violence of the Troubles, Derry was a city still scarred. Over the years it had been hit hard by the violence, including the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in which British soldiers killed 26 unarmed civilians. Still, an arms company opening up shop in the city was celebrated by local politicians and media as part of the ‘peace dividend’ – a symbol of economic progress.
Community activists began to organize immediately. ‘It was just so outrageous,’ says Horgan. ‘We had to reject the idea that we can have a peace dividend based on other people’s suffering, death and destruction.’
‘We had to reject the idea that we can have a peace dividend based on other people’s suffering’
Not everyone agreed. For many years, campaigners faced significant opposition from those who felt they were jeopardizing jobs and future potential foreign investment in Derry, a city which Bryce describes as an ‘unemployment black spot’.
‘It was not pleasant in Derry at all,’ he says. ‘The business class and the political class came down on us like a ton of bricks.’
But campaigners always tried to keep the focus on the human cost of Raytheon’s work. In 2007 Horgan, Bryce and others travelled to Lebanon to meet survivors of the bombing that had triggered the Raytheon 9 occupation.
‘Going to Lebanon was absolutely shocking,’ says Bryce. ‘A lot of us who went out there were thinking “we’ve grown up in Derry throughout the Troubles – we’ve seen a bit.” But nothing prepared us for the scale of it.’
Horgan still vividly remembers a conversation with a woman who had survived the Qana bombing as she sheltered in the basement of her block of flats. ‘She had a baby in her arms. Her toddler was beside her, and when she came around she knew immediately that the baby was dead, but her toddler was calling out for her – that he couldn’t breathe. Then he stopped calling out, and she realized he was dead. She lost not just her two children, but her mother, father, one of her sisters and two of her brothers.
‘I thought, even if everybody’s going down for a few years, what is it compared to what she’s been through?’
Horgan and Bryce were taken aback with the reception they got in Lebanon. ‘You might think that what you’re doing in Derry in the northwest of Ireland, that people in Lebanon are not going to hear about it,’ says Horgan. ‘But they had heard about it, and that it had made them feel like there were people in the world who cared.’
Broken promises
When the company arrived in Derry, 150 new jobs were promised. But only around 50 materialized, and by the time Raytheon shut down the site, which focused on software development, in 2010 the headcount had dwindled to just seven.2
‘If they had taken the [public] money, all the millions that they gave Raytheon, and distributed it among the people at Derry, it would have actually made more of a difference,’ says Horgan.
Another false narrative was that Raytheon was only carrying out work in Derry for civilian use. Once they had been laid off, former Raytheon workers themselves let campaigners know that this was not the case. It was also confirmed through freedom of information requests by journalists.3
Bryce describes the frustration of dealing with politicians – including those that professed to have pro-peace and anti-imperialist politics. ‘We would put our case in front of Derry City Council, which had openly welcomed and defended Raytheon’s presence, and we would say to people who are involved in Sinn Féin and the SDLP [both nationalist parties]: “You say that you’re against all these wars that are happening in the Middle East, and yet you’ve got one of the biggest arms companies in the world sitting on your doorstep”.’
In 2010, the year after the women’s occupation and before the activists even went on trial, Raytheon finally announced it would be shutting up shop in Derry. ‘We were amazed,’ says Horgan. ‘I don’t think we ever thought that they’d actually leave – although that was always our demand.’
Although it was not publicly admitted, journalists did discover that senior management at Raytheon was rattled by the campaign and, after the acquittal of the Raytheon 9, thought that the company’s interests would not be sufficiently protected by the legal system.4
‘What [the women’s occupation] proved to Raytheon was that every time that their weapons were used somewhere for some war crime, that we’d be arriving,’ says Horgan. ‘We made it clear, you can up your security at the doors… but we’ll be coming every time.’
As well as sheer determination, Horgan explains that research was a central part of both exposing Raytheon and building the activists’ court defences. Her advice to others wanting to kick out arms giants from their communities is ‘go down every pathway to expose what’s going on and keep some kind of record of it’. Building links with whistleblowing workers and campaigners abroad were also key.
Building a mass movement
Today Raytheon – now named RTX Corporation – is the second biggest arms company in the world. Human Rights Watch has documented that RTX’s Paveway IV guided bombs have been used against civilian structures in Yemen.5 The company also makes a range of parts for fighter jets, and other weapon systems used by the Israeli military and its surveillance technology is used on the US-Mexico border.6
People continue to take action against the company and its subsidiaries across the globe. On 16 November 2024, activists in Ontario, Canada protested outside a Raytheon ECLAN plant as part of a national day of action against companies producing components for F-35 fighter jets.7 In Britain, Queers For Palestine has demanded that LGBTQI+ charity Stonewall cuts ties with arms companies, including Raytheon, which is a ‘Stonewall Diversity Champion’.8
‘I don’t think that any arms company would come back to Derry,’ says Horgan. However she points out that Collins Aerospace – a subsidiary of RTX – has a facility in the more rural Kilkeel, less than a three hour drive away. ‘Arms companies will go wherever they think they can get away with being,’ she says.
The successes of the Derry campaign underscores the impact of grassroots, community-led resistance in challenging the global arms trade. The global war machine can be most vulnerable in its smallest outposts – and building a large, internationalist movement sometimes begins at home.
‘What we did in Derry, from very small beginnings, is build up a groundswell of opposition to Raytheon and the arms trade, alongside building the wider, anti-war movement,’ Bryce adds.
- Julie Kipp, ‘The antiwar movement in Northern Ireland...’, The Irish Review, No. 38, 2008, a.nin.tl/kipp
- George Jackson, ‘Raytheon to close its plant in Derry’, The Irish Times, 14 January 2010, a.nin.tl/close
- Eamon McCann, ‘Derry plant involved in arms work’, Politico.ie, 5 October 2007
- Gull Allmond and Mark Chapman, ‘Run Raytheon run’, Peace News, February 2010, a.nin.tl/run
- Campaign Against The Arms Trade, ‘Raytheon Technologies’, 19 October 2021, a.nin.tl/caatprofile
- Investigate, ‘RTX Corp’, 29 October 2022, a.nin.tl/rtx
- Andrew Philips, ‘Midland protesters demand...’, Barrie Today, 16 November 2024, a.nin.tl/midland
- Niall Christie, ‘Exclusive: Stonewall told it must stop…’, Third Force News, 4 November 2024, a.nin.tl/stone
