It was a beautiful day. I took a walk down Royal Avenue with Eddie, one of the other reporters. The outsider might not understand that even under such routine murders, normal life continued. Not all of us were so exhausted that we couldn’t enjoy the summer heat, shop the shop windows after lunch and spend some money.
ombs were part of our lives, and even more so as hoaxes, so there were times in the office when the alarm went off and everyone moaned in annoyance at having to leave the building again.
And what were the odds that, if a bomb had been planted, someone would find it in a short half-hour search, given the mess we were working in?
There was an explosion. And another. The realization settled down that the scale of the bombing was new and we had no idea what to expect or how to respond
I saw a suede jacket in a shop window, priced at nine guineas. I thought it looked really nice, with its two-tone color and the small breast pockets that opened up like slices.
I went in, tried it, wrote the check and when the bombs started going off I even harbored the evil thought that my check would end up under the rubble and no money would come out of my account to buy this beautiful addition to my wardrobe to pay. We heard the first as we walked back to the office along Royal Avenue.
You would think that if you heard a bomb on a city street, you would rush to take cover, that people around you would scream. It wasn’t like that yet. A bomb. Too bad for someone, maybe catastrophic, but you heard and you were spared. When we got back to the office, we would hear what had happened.
Then there was another explosion. And another. In the newspaper office we felt we were in danger. The realization settled that the scale of the bombing was new to us and we had no idea what to expect or how to respond. A journalist from the Press Association who was there looked at me and said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure, fine.”
Devastating scenes on Bloody Friday
But he had seen the fear in my face. We were evacuated to the print room. A woman who had been previously injured by a bomb at another job, a woman I smiled and joked with as I passed her on the stairs, screamed. She waved her arms in panic. Her friends carried her.
As we waited downstairs, Stephen, another reporter, nudged me and looked up. This stark dusty workspace was lit from high above by a series of skylights, glass. In the stupid way you’d rather not alarm people or draw attention to yourself, even to save your life, we didn’t say anything.
There were 19 bomb explosions in the city between 2:10 p.m. and 3:15 p.m.
Eamon Hanna, one of the founders of the SDLP, was on North Street. His wife, Carmel, nursed at Mater Hospital, treating the wounded and dead who came in.
“It was quite a nice day. On the way home and the horror of it. I had a close relationship with a man named Tom Donnelly. His sister was murdered in the Cavehill stores, Margaret Mary O’Hare. He called me later that evening to say that they had found Margaret Mary dead. He had been to the morgue. He had walked past the bodies and said, “No, it’s not her, because she was wearing a white dress.” And then he realized it was the blood. She had been shot to shreds.”
Jennifer and Rosie McNern, who were injured in the Abercorn bomb in April, were still at Musgrave Park Hospital learning how to work with artificial limbs.
Bloody Friday massacre in Belfast
The worst bomb was on the Oxford Street bus station. Six died there. Young firefighters who were on parade because they had just completed their training were led to the scene. You can see them in the old statues, in uniform, scooping torn flesh. Another fire truck heading for another bomb swerved to avoid a woman’s head lying on the road.
There were 19 bomb explosions in the city between 2:10 PM and 3:15 PM. The first one Eddie and I heard while we were still on the street had been at the Smithfield bus station. The targets were other bus and train stations in Oxford Street and York Road, Great Victoria Street and the terminus of the Liverpool ferry. Taxi companies, garages and hotels were affected, as were busy intersections and bridges.
In the editorial office, I took a call from the Provisional IRA’s Provisional IRA Press Officer. ‘What the f*** was the point of all that?’ I asked
There were 27 explosions in Northern Ireland that day. In addition to the nine dead, 130 people were injured. William Whitelaw, the Secretary of State, would tell Parliament that “at least 40 were Roman Catholics, 53 men and boys, 77 women and children”.
When the bombs stopped, we went back to the office to resume work, trying to figure out the extent of what had happened. Jim, the news editor, called to say that if his wife called, we’d say he was fine, although he had been blown off his feet by the bomb that killed Margaret Mary O’Hare. He was grim when he returned, but sat down at his typewriter and started writing.
Buses on fire after the explosion on Bloody Friday
I took a call. It was Gerry O’Hare, the Provisional IRA’s brigade staff press officer. “What the f*** was the point of all that?” I said. Jim took the phone from me and dealt with him more professionally.
Bloody Friday, as they called it, kept the Sunday papers busy that week. An editorial in Dublin’s Sunday Independent said the entire country was partly to blame. “There is a black sin on the face of Irish republicanism today that will never be erased. Murder now lies at the feet of the Irish nation and that fact is undeniable.”
Whitelaw thought the massacre was a huge mistake by the IRA that would end popular support for them: “Even those sectors of Roman Catholic opinion around the world that have traditionally identified with and perhaps benefited have given to a group of men who claimed to speak on behalf of the Irish republican movement certainly cannot continue to defend the men responsible for Friday’s horrific massacre.”
The IRA caused explosions in the city of Belfast. Photo: Belfast Telegraph
The ceasefire and negotiations with the IRA had failed, so he concluded that the IRA had no interest in advancing their cause through politics: “They have degraded the human race, and it must now be clear to everyone are that their sole purpose is to further their goals. by violence and only by violence.”
And he indicated that he now intended to destroy the IRA: “No one can deny that Her Majesty’s Government now has an absolutely indisputable right to ask this House, this country and indeed the whole world for their support in an absolute determination to the IRA’s capacity for further acts of inhumanity.”
There were 27 explosions in Northern Ireland that day, killing nine and injuring 130
The government and military would now prepare to act on two assumptions: that the IRA could be crushed; and that the Catholic people, appalled by Bloody Friday, could somehow deny them.
It would take them 26 years to realize it’s never been easier.
From Malachi O’Doherty’s book, now in paperback, ‘The Year of Chaos: Northern Ireland on the Brink of Civil War, 1971-72’, published by Atlantic Books