Terrorists Terrorise

Gelignite 

4th March 1972

Two friends, Anne Owens and Janet Bereen, both aged in their early twenties, called in at the Abercorn Resturant in Castle Lane, for a cup of coffee and a chat, during a shopping trip into the centre of Belfast.

The Abercorn was located in a busy shopping area in the centre of the city and had a ground floor restaurant with a bar upstairs. It was popular with shoppers and on that Saturday afternoon, the place was bustling with customers, many of whom were women and children. One customer would later recall seeing two teenaged females walk out of the Abercorn, leaving a handbag under a table. 

At 4.28 pm, an anonymous telephone caller to the emergency 999 number, warned of a bomb in Castle Lane, that was due to explode in five minutes. The caller did not give a precise location for the bomb.

Two minutes after the telephone warning, a bomb consisting of five pounds of gelignite packed inside a handbag, detonated at the Abercorn. The two Catholic friends, Anne and Janet, were seated next to the epicentre of the explosion and took the full force of a blast that was strong enough to cause the ceiling of the restaurant to collapse. The blast also shredded it's way through the restaurant's furniture and the bodies of the customers and staff; mutilating, decapitating, burning, bursting, blinding.

When police arrived outside the Abercorn, they encountered a scene of carnage. They could hear squealing, crying and moaning from the victims who had injuries you would find on a battlefield: missing limbs; burns; deep cuts; shards of glass and debris lodged in flesh and eyes, perforated ear drums. Walking wounded were dazed and stumbling through the smoke. Mutlilated bodies lying motionless on the ground, where the blast had thrown them. Handbags and toys scattered amongst the rubble.

A total of 130 people were injured and two young friends named Anne and Janet, were murdered.

Crimes Against Humanity

No terrorist organisation has ever claimed responsibility for the Abercorn explosion, but it is widely accepted that the first battalion of the Provisional IRA were to blame for the attack. The bombing provoked a backlash against PIRA, including in the neighbourhoods PIRA would have expected to receive support. The Abercorn was popular with Catholics who came from those areas.

The bombing of the Abercorn and PIRA's attempt to distance itself from the atrocity, when it realised that it risked losing support, would not be the last time it would try to lie it's way out of a problem, or falsely deny responsibility for murder. I would suggest that the Abercorn bombing is an example of PIRA's willingness to lie about it's actions and also evidence that their template for deceit was already in existence, early on in the troubles.

I would also suggest that the Abercorn bombing is an early example of PIRA's strategy of targeting civilians for death or injury. This was terror being used against the civilian populace and therefore a crime against humanity. The five minute warning given about the bomb, which in reality was only two minutes and did not even provide a specific location, was purposely insufficient to clear the area. The phoned warning was simply made for the benefit of a planned propaganda narrative, that would claim a warning had been provided and that subsequent casualties were the fault of emergency services, for not clearing the area on time. However, in this case, PIRA quickly concluded that in light of the widespread revulsion of the bombing, their narrative would not be accepted and an admission of responsibility would be unwise.

One might be tempted to give PIRA the benefit of the doubt and accept that they made a mistake, but with hindsight, it can be seen that it was one incident in a long term pattern of terrorist attacks against civilians. The 'mistake' narrative only works on those who are inclined to sympathise with PIRA, or people who view a single atrocity in isolation and ignore the pattern in behaviour.

In subsequent blogs, I will show how lies and deliberate targeting of civilians are recurring themes in PIRA terrorism. Whilst PIRA has claimed that deaths and injuries sustained by civilians in various attacks were accidental and regrettable, there is an abundance of evidence that PIRA not only had a reckless disregard for the safety of civilians, but viewed them as expendable pawns in their morally bankrupt game of terror.

The reality behind the myth of the Provisional IRA

You can read my next blog here: Ends & Means

The Black Stuff

Whilst most people enjoyed end of year festivities, Jack McDade spent time after Christmas 1971, in his garage north of Dublin, blending a fertilizer based homemade bomb. This experimental mix known within the Provisional IRA as "the black stuff", had chemical properties that brought an end to McDade's war against the British. When the shovel he was using to blend the explosives, made contact with the garage floor and produced a spark, PIRA lost it's Quartermaster General in the blast, but gained a deadly new strategy that would bedevil Northern Ireland for the remaining decades of the troubles in Northern Ireland.

PIRA's Belfast Brigade had received a large shipment of McDade's black stuff, prior to his demise. When they were warned about the dangers in handling the explosives, they opted to dispose of it by putting it inside a car and detonating it in downtown Belfast. The evolutionary turning point that occurred as a result of Jack McDade's premature death, was that PIRA had devised a tactic for delivering large amounts of explosives to targets. This was the birth of the PIRA car bomb.

Further development of the black stuff, over the space of several weeks, made it safer to handle. This meant that PIRA now had a virtually unlimited amount of explosives and was no longer dependent solely on gelignite, the supply of which was being interrupted by British and Irish authorities.

With this significant logistical advance in early 1972 enabling the manufacture of much larger bombs and huge landmines for rural areas, PIRA was able to escalate the level of violence, but the unsurprising cost of frequently detonating large bombs in public places, was the carnage visited upon the civilian population.

Civilian casualties of PIRA terrorist attacks would be a recurring theme throughout the troubles, with the atrocities usually accompanied by excuses and lies, as PIRA tried to shift blame onto others. Sometimes civilian casualties were an unintended consequence of their terrorist activities, but an objective consideration of their track record, leads to an unavoidable conclusion, PIRA not only accepted the likelihood of maiming or killing civilians in attacks, their injuries and fatalities were often deliberate and a means to an end.

Behind the PIRA propaganda narrative that they did not deliberately target civilians, the cold blooded reality is that they, as with Loyalist terrorist groups, had a strategy of terror against the civilian populace, which was primarily, but not exclusively, sectarian in nature. This willingness by PIRA, to not only endanger but to actually target civilians, would become apparent early on in the troubles. To observe this decades long terror strategy in action, there are events in 1972, probably the deadliest year of the troubles, that expose it's full horror.

1972 was a pivotal year in the bloody history of the Northern Ireland troubles. Some of the events and key actors in the early productions of this theatre of terrorism, will be the subject of following blogs.

You can read my next blog here: Terrorists Terrorise

The Disneyfication of Terrorism

How do you solve a problem like murder?

PIRA Sinn Fein aspires to be a mainstream political party, but it has a problematic past. 

They are responsible for approximately 1700 murders and thousands of more people injured in bombings, shootings and beatings. A number of murder victims were tortured before they were killed, whilst others were "disappeared" in secret burials. 

Despite claims to the contrary, PIRA Sinn Fein was willing, not only to endanger the lives of civilians, but to deliberately target them for injury and death. This included nakedly sectarian attacks on protestants. 

The terrorist organisation's modus operandi means that it is guilty of crimes against humanity.

When an organisation has all this and more in it's past, future political success requires a highly creative approach in managing it's history. Not just an airbrushing, but a complete reimagination of the past, involving a Disneyfication of terror that sanitises murder, maiming and mayhem.

Whilst PIRA Sinn Fein had to take on this tricky public relations exercise, we must not overlook the generous assistance of Tony Blair and others, who facilitated a smooth transition for PIRA Sinn Fein, from unrepentant terrorists in balaclavas, to unrepentant terrorists in suits. Tony provided the mad men of terror marketing, with early prisoner releases, comfort letters and royal pardons, with no expectation of genuine expressions of remorse or acceptance that they had done something wrong or immoral.

As if that wasn't enough, the British government looked the other way as PIRA Sinn Fein ramped up their propaganda war, to exact revenge on those who had defeated them in the intelligence war. This of course was part of a wider PR strategy for the legitimisation of past criminal behaviour, by employing conspiracy theories to demonise those who successfully opposed terrorism. 

PIRA Sinn Fein were also given time and space to manage public perception, to ensure that not only their groupies, but the naive and uninformed could internalise the myth that there was an equivalence between terrorists and the security forces on the opposing side. Combatants engaged in a war on equal terms.

This process of reimagination and Disneyficaction of terrorism continues apace, largely unchallenged by government or media, or a busy general public that has other more pressing matters to attend to in our fast paced 24/7 world. However, the corruption of democracy, the moral compromises, the contempt for public concerns, the betrayal of those who gave their loyalty and their lives to defend principles and values necessary in a free and just society, are the causes of a disease that now infects wider society in Northern Ireland. In the rush to normalise the abnormal, the moral core of society was sacrificed.

Anyone beyond our shores, in the rest of the UK who had paid attention to how the peace process and subsequent events were handled, would have had an early warning as to what they could expect from the political class, when their status quo was threatened by Brexit. To patriotic Leave voters who feel that they have been shafted by a morally bankrupt, self serving political class that views you as a problem in need of management, may I say on behalf of many in Northern Ireland, welcome to our world.

The reimagined and Disneyfied past:

The brutal reality:

You can read my next blog here: The Black Stuff