TWBN#1: The IRA Bombing Campaign

This is the first in what might be a series of "Think the World is Bad Now?" (TWBN) posts, which I warned you about in an earlier post. People seem to think everything is worse than it used to be, but a lot of things that are going wrong now are not unprecedented and some things have actually got better. I'll start with a terrorist campaign that was "provoked", instigated and nurtured, then was relaxed, revived and finally (?) abandoned, all within the UK (although many would say it would never have got far without serious financial support from Irish Americans).

I only want to talk about what I remember of this with just a bit of prompting / help from other sources. I think it can teach us a lot about living with a terrorist threat and what mistakes it can push the Government into. I don't remember much about the first period in the early seventies, I don't think I paid much attention to the news in general at that point, but I did sort of know that some people were letting off car bombs and sending letter bombs. The main attacks in the early seventies were the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings. The ones I remember are these (I had to look up the dates):

Car bomb kills Airey Neave (1979)
Hyde Park Bandstand Bombing (1982)
Harrods bomb (1983)
Grand Hotel Brighton blown up during the Conservative Party Conference (1984)
Manchester Arndale Centre (1996)
Mortars in Whitehall (1991)
Canary Wharf (1996)
Bus bomb near Waterloo Bridge (1996)

When Airey Neave was killed it was a big shock because it was a car bomb that went off in the House of Commons car park. The Hyde Park bandstand bombing stands out because the press made a big fuss about the horses that were killed and injured. I remember that being on the front pages. The Harrod's bomb apparently made some of my family worry for me because I lived in London at that point. This attack was apparently the model for a similar one in Doris Lessing's "The Good Terrorist" (good book by the way).

The biggest attack of the 80's was the Grand Hotel in Brighton which was blown up during the Conservative Party Conference. The Tories at that time were at the height of their powers, Thatcher particularly. I hated the Government and its policies at that time, but this attack was pretty shocking and the pictures made me queasy. The stand-out image was of Norman Tebbit (he was once paraphrased as telling unemployed people to "get on your bikes" to look for work) being lifted from the ruins in his pyjamas I think (the bomb went off in the middle of the night).

The Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996 is the one I remembered out of order. It actually came after Canary Wharf. I just read on the BBC site about this one that it went off while bomb disposal people were trying defuse it (or were about to) and that those injured were mostly outside the police cordon (hit by flying glass). Apparently the Centre has been rebuilt and is much better than it used to be.

The mortars that went off in Whitehall were fired from the back of a van. One exploded in the Garden of 10 Downing Street but no one was hurt.

Canary Wharf was hit by a large bomb in 1996. This marked the breaking of a ceasefire that had lasted over a year. The bomb that went off prematurely in Aldwych near the Strand killed a young man called Edawrd O'Brien, the bomber. This one brought home to me that the IRA frequently chose volunteers who were able to blend into their surroundings and seemed unremarkable.

In 1997 the IRA declared a new ceasefire that has remained in place since then, though there have been further attacks by splinter groups, notably the Real IRA.

Sources
Wikipedia
20th Century London
BBC News