When I watched Britain’s Prince Charles on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with the Queen during her platinum anniversary celebrations, I couldn’t help but think how much he’d aged since those iconic years when he was married to Princess Diana. On the other hand, it will soon be 25 years since Diana died in that terrible car accident in Paris, a few days of us will ever forget. Another, even more distant memory came to my mind – of the time when the Provisional IRA planned to kill them both.
In 1983, the Provos desperately wanted to strike at the heart of the British establishment as revenge for the deaths of the hunger strikers at Maze Prison. They learned that Charles and Diana would attend a concert on July 20 at the Dominion Theater on Tottenham Court Road in London.
The concert benefited The Prince’s Trust, a charity set up to help vulnerable young people. That meant the royal couple would definitely be there, so the Provo’s self-proclaimed “England Department” devised a plan to kill them.
The man who had to do this was Sean O’Callaghan from Kerry. In his book, the informant, he described how he “shrouded” the theater beforehand.
Twenty-five pounds worth of Frangex explosives, hidden in the men’s room behind the royal box, he estimated would kill or injure anyone within a radius of about 60 feet. However, he said he had no intention of planting such a bomb and, as an informant, told his garda contact about the plan.
O’Callaghan’s account was later confirmed by Garrett FitzGerald. As Taoiseach, he said, he was told about the assassination plot and “how a key participant who was also an agent of the Garda Síochána managed to tear it down without losing the trust of his IRA colleagues at the same time”.
FitzGerald said he faxed British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and said she was “very happy with the message”.
However, as O’Callaghan recalled, the Grand Hotel in Brighton was torn apart by an IRA bomb the following year, and she was lucky enough to escape with her life.
Fitted with a long delay timer, the bomb is said to have been hidden in the hotel three weeks earlier. It exploded on the last night of the
Conservative party conference, which killed five people and injured dozens of others. Thatcher’s suite was damaged, but she escaped unharmed and delivered a defiant speech several hours later.
O’Callaghan said the IRA had timers in place at the time that could delay the detonation by 32 days. That was a far cry from the early days of the Troubles when they used what The Dubliners ballad called “the old alarm clock” or its equivalent — cheap wristwatches and other types of clocks to delay the blast by up to an hour.
While the ballad romanticized the use of the alarm clock, there was nothing romantic about the 1978 IRA bombing of the La Mon hotel and restaurant in Co Down. In one of the Troubles’ most horrific attacks, they used a travel clock to detonate an explosion at the window of the Peacock room where members of the Irish Collie Club held their annual dinner. The explosion ignited a fireball of burning gasoline mixed with sugar to make it stick. Twelve people were killed and more than 30 injured, many of them severely burned.
A grievous apology from the IRA followed. They thought the RUC was meeting there, but got the date wrong; they were delayed in alerting the RUC. However, nothing could apologize for what happened. The travel clock had delayed the detonation by 58 minutes. Time for the perpetrators to get away; time for many innocent people to die; time for others to suffer a life of sorrow and pain.
Tom McCaughren was a security correspondent at RTÉ
