Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

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Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

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Bomb-disposal expert Peter Gurney walked in to find his best friend lying dead in the basement of a fast-food outlet in London in 1981, after an IRA booby trap was triggered. He covers the political background of Northern Ireland’s Troubles with brisk efficiency, but the real fascination lies in the countdown to the assassination attempt, the tension building with every page. It toppled through the blast hole, then veered sideways and plunged down a vertical stack of rooms with numbers ending in 8.

As an English guy who would only have been 5 years old when this happened, I think it is so important to understand what was happening in Northern Ireland, and the mainland, during the 'troubles'. The target narrowly missed being injured, if not killed, when the bomb went off on the sixth floor and sent all manner of debris cascading through the hotel. It was 1984, the fifteenth year of the Troubles, and London seemed to have endless bomb scares (and bombs, some of which are covered in detail here) during that period. Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton the day after the bombing in 1984. This book not only investigates the events around that day in depth, but also evokes the time period of the Troubles very well.Magee’s counsel, a former Ulster Unionist politician, did his best, trying to persuade the jury that police had faked evidence. The members of the IRA gang that fired that rocket, and a second mortar bomb, from a Ford Transit van parked in nearby Whitehall on February 7th, 1991, have never been identified or apprehended. She came to power in 1979, a few months after her confidant, Airy Neave, had been killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the House of Commons. Mrs Thatcher was still fully dressed and polishing her speech for the final day of the Conservative Party conference when the bomb exploded five floors above her at 2. Thatcher emerged more or less unscathed but five people were killed and several more were horribly injured.

Within six months the IRA had assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten with a bomb that exploded as his boat exited Mullughmore harbour in Co Sligo. The army wanted to crush the IRA militarily, but the RUC chief constable Kenneth Newman persuaded her that the policy of ‘Ulsterisation’ and ‘criminalisation’ of IRA captives was working. If the debris of that Victorian chimney stack had taken a slightly different downward trajectory, we can only guess what the real and enduring cost of killing Thatcher might have been. This may seem crushingly obvious, but has to be emphasised because the great drama of the event lay in what did not happen.Almost four thousand rubbish bins were used to take the wreckage of the hotel away for examination by forensic scientists.

Rory Carroll, currently the Guardian's chief Ireland correspondent, was a 12-year-old living in Dublin at the time and remembers the scenes in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing. Thank you for coming”, she is recorded as saying to the emergency workers, who just didn’t know what to make of her.Biography: Rory Carroll, currently the Guardian's chief Ireland correspondent, was a 12-year-old living in Dublin at the time and remembers the scenes in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing. on 12 October 1984, a bomb, which had been concealed in room 629 of the Grand hotel in Brighton several weeks earlier, detonated with such force that it toppled one of the hotel’s five-ton Victorian chimney stacks. He checked in as Roy Walsh, later insisting he was unaware that it was the name of another IRA volunteer who had carried out a bombing in London in 1973, and paid in cash for a three-night stay in room 629, which afforded him an expansive view of the promenade and the sea.

Neave had been shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland and had advocated military escalation against the IRA. Century, History, Ireland, Margaret Thatcher, The Troubles Read more by Richard Vinen Thirty Minutes of Fame Foes in High Places Dates with Destiny Which Side Are You On?For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.



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