IRA bombings in Belfast, Northern Ireland
Bloody Friday is the name given to the bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland on 21 July 1972, during the Troubles. At least twenty bombs exploded in the space of eighty minutes, most within a half-hour period. Most of them were car bombs and most targeted infrastructure, especially the transport network. Nine people were killed: five civilians, two British soldiers, a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reservist, and an Ulster Defence Association (UDA) member, while 130 were injured. The IRA said it sent telephoned warnings at least thirty minutes before each explosion and said that the security forces wilfully ignored some of the warnings for their own ends. The security forces said that was not the case and said they were overstretched by the sheer number of bombs and bomb warnings, some of which were hoaxes.
The bombings were partly a response to the breakdown of talks between the IRA and the British government. Since the beginning of its campaign in 1970, the IRA had carried out a bombing campaign against civilian, economic, military and political targets in Northern Ireland and less often elsewhere. It carried out 1,300 bombings in 1972. However, Bloody Friday was a major setback for the IRA as there was a backlash against the organisation. Immediately after the bombings, the security forces carried out raids on the homes of republicans. Ten days later, the British Army launched Operation Motorman, in which it re-took the no-go areas controlled by Republicans. Loyalist paramilitaries also reacted to the bombings by carrying out "revenge" attacks on Catholic civilians.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the bombings, the IRA formally apologised to the families of all the civilians it had killed and injured.
Background.
In late June and early July 1972, a British government delegation led by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw held secret talks with the Provisional IRA leadership. As part of the talks, the IRA agreed to a temporary ceasefire beginning on 26 June. The IRA leaders sought a peace settlement that included a British withdrawal from Northern Ireland by 1975 and the release of republican prisoners. However, the British refused and the talks broke down. The ceasefire came to an end on 9 July.
"Bloody Friday" was the IRA's response to the breakdown of the talks. According to the IRA's Chief of Staff, Seán Mac Stíofáin, the main goal of the bombing operation was to wreak financial harm. It was a "message to the British government that the IRA could and would make a commercial desert of the city unless its demands were met". The attack was carried out by the IRA's Belfast Brigade and the main organiser was Brendan Hughes, the brigade's Officer Commanding.
The bombings.
The bombings happened during an 80-minute period on the afternoon of Friday 21 July. At least 24 bombs were planted; at least 20 exploded and the rest failed to detonate or were defused. At the height of the bombing, the middle of Belfast "resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds of suffocating smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost drowning out the hysterical screams of panicked shoppers". According to "The Guardian": "for much of the afternoon, Belfast was reduced to near total chaos and panic. Thousands streamed out of the stricken city […] and huge traffic jams built up. All bus services were cancelled, and on some roads, hitchhikers frantically trying to get away lined the pavements".
Nine people were killed and a further 130 injured, some of them horrifically mutilated. Of those injured, 77 were women and children. All of the deaths were caused by two of the bombs: at Oxford Street bus depot, and at Cavehill Road. The Oxford Street bomb killed two British soldiers and four Ulsterbus employees. One of these employees was a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) reservist; one was an Ulster loyalist paramilitary; and the other two were civilians. The Cavehill Road bomb killed three civilians.
Timeline.
The accounts of the events that appeared in the first editions of local and national newspapers were, naturally enough, somewhat confused about the details of the events of the day. The timetable below is approximate and given in BST (GMT+1). The details are based on a number of accounts.
The car had been stolen from outside Inglis's bakery in Eliza Street in the Markets area of Belfast between 6:15am and when the owner discovered it missing at 2:30pm on Friday 21 July 1972, whilst the owner was at work in the bakery. A warning was received by the army (39th Brigade) from the Public Protection Agency just after 2:25pm about a 200lb bomb in the depot (later estimated at 110 lbs by the army technical officer) and a telephoned warning was sent to the RUC at 2:42pm, twenty minutes before the bomb exploded. According to the RUC, the line to the station was busy, so they asked the Army to send a patrol but there were a few minutes delay in making contact as the police network was extremely busy. The Welsh Guards patrol, based in the Grand Central Hotel, was thus mobilised just after 2:42pm and almost immediately got held up in traffic due to gridlock caused by the many bomb warnings. They arrived at about 2:55pm, just six or seven minutes before the detonation, in an Armoured Personnel Carrier and began searching for the bomb car, assisted by some Ulsterbus employees. While this was ongoing, it exploded. Two British soldiers, Royal Corps of Transport driver Stephen Cooper (19) and Welsh Guards Sergeant Philip Price (27), were killed outright. Four Ulsterbus workers, all Protestants, were killed: Robert "Jackie" Gibson (45), Thomas Killops (39), William Irvine (18) and William Crothers (15). Jackie Gibson was a bus driver and had joined the part-time RUC Reserve just a few weeks earlier He had finished his bus route, the 2.20pm from Ballygowan, minutes before the blast. Irvine was a member of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a loyalist paramilitary group. Some of the victims' bodies were torn to pieces by the blast, which led authorities to give an initial estimate of eleven deaths. Some sources give the time of this bombing as 3:10 pm.
Two other bombs were defused: one on the Albert Bridge and one on a road bridge over the Sydenham bypass.
There were also notable IRA bombings outside Belfast on Bloody Friday. In Derry, a 300lb van bomb exploded at Waterloo Place, near the city's RUC headquarters. It blasted the six-storey Embassy Court building and dislodged a British Army observation post on the roof. Another IRA bomb derailed ten wagons of a goods train near Portadown. There were three other large car bombs that exploded in Derry, however unlike in Belfast the Derry bombings did not cause a single injury.
Warnings.
The IRA's Belfast Brigade claimed responsibility for the bombings and said that it had given warnings to the security forces before the bombs exploded. It said that the Public Protection Agency, the Samaritans and the press "were informed of bomb positions at least 30 minutes to one hour before each explosion". Mac Stíofáin said that "It required only one man with a loudhailer to clear each target area in no time" and alleged that the warnings for the two bombs that claimed lives were deliberately ignored by the British for "strategic policy reasons".
The Public Protection Agency said it received telephone warnings of the two bombs that claimed lives, and immediately passed the warnings on to the security forces. It said it received a warning of the Cavehill Road bomb an hour and eight minutes before the explosion, and a warning of the Oxford Street bomb 22 minutes before the explosion. According to an article in "The Guardian", a warning of the Oxford Street bomb was heard over military radio almost an hour before the explosion.
The security forces denied that they wilfully ignored warnings and said they were overstretched by the sheer number of bombs and bomb warnings. The security forces also received hoax warnings, which "added to the chaos in the streets". The RUC and British Army only effectively cleared a small number of areas before the bombs went off. Furthermore, because of the large number of bomb threats in the confined area of Belfast city centre, people evacuated from the site of one bomb were mistakenly moved into the vicinity of other bombs.
Immediate aftermath.
After the bombings there was a two-hour emergency meeting at Stormont Castle. It was attended by William Whitelaw, the British government's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland; Peter Carrington, Secretary of State for Defence; Harry Tuzo, the British Army's commander in Northern Ireland; David Corbett, the acting chief of the RUC; and other advisers. Whitelaw announced that immediate action would be taken against the IRA. Unionist politicians demanded a further wave of arrests and internment of IRA suspects.
That night, 2,000 British troops began carrying out raids on the homes of IRA suspects in Belfast. They arrested 58 people and seized bomb-making equipment, explosives and ammunition. The raids sparked gun battles. In the Markets area, IRA member Joseph Downey (23) was shot dead and five other people were wounded. The British Army claim to have hit at least three gunmen. In Ardoyne, at least 900 shots were fired at soldiers and the British Army claim to have hit at least five gunmen. In Andersonstown, two soldiers were shot and they claim to have hit one gunman. Shots were also fired at the security force bases on Oldpark Road, Glenravel Street and York Street. The raids continued over the next three days. More than 100 people were arrested, weapons were seized in Belfast and Portadown, and barricades were demolished in Belfast and Armagh.
Loyalist paramilitaries also reacted to the bombings. On the Friday night, members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) took to the streets in Protestant areas and began carrying out "patrols" and setting up checkpoints. Four Catholic civilians were killed by loyalists that night, allegedly in retaliation for the bombings. Joseph Rosato (59) was shot by gunmen who called at his home in the Oldpark district. Patrick O'Neill (26) and Rosemary McCartney (27) were found shot dead in a car on Forthriver Road. Another, Francis Arthurs (34) was found shot dead in a car on Liffey Street.
Reactions.
According to former RUC officer Jack Dale, a large group of people in the republican Markets area had "jeered and shouted and yelled" as if each explosion was "a good thing".
Speaking in the House of Commons on 24 July, William Whitelaw called the bombings "appallingly bloodthirsty". He also drew attention to the Catholic victims, and mentioned the revulsion in the United States, Republic of Ireland, and elsewhere. Leader of the Opposition Harold Wilson described the events as "a shocking crime against an already innocent population". The "Irish Times" wrote, "The chief injury is not to the British Army, to the Establishment or to big business but to the plain people of Belfast and Ireland. Anyone who supports violence from any side after yesterday's events is sick with the same affliction as those who did the deed". Television images of firefighters shovelling body parts into plastic bags at the Oxford Street bus station were the most shocking of the day.
Twenty-five years later, a police officer who had been at Oxford Street bus station described to journalist Peter Taylor the scene he came upon in the wake of the bombing:
The first thing that caught my eye was a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street. It was recognisable as a torso because the clothes had been blown off and you could actually see parts of the human anatomy. One of the victims was a soldier I knew personally. He'd had his arms and legs blown off and some of his body had been blown through the railings. One of the most horrendous memories for me was seeing a head stuck to the wall. A couple of days later, we found vertebrae and a rib cage on the roof of a nearby building. The reason we found it was because the seagulls were diving onto it. I've tried to put it at the back of my mind for twenty-five years.
In "The Longest War", author Kevin Kelley wrote that the IRA "had done irreparable damage to their cause – in Britain, abroad, and in their own communities.