The IRA in Brighton: ‘Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.’

1984 was a year that saw the British Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, step up its war in Ireland. Britains counter-gangs, the paramilitary organisations of the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, continued their campaign of sectarian murder and blood-letting, whilst paid perjurers were used to round up Irish citizens in what can only be described as internment.

It was also a year in which the IRA were to respond in kind.

At approximately 2:54 am, on this day 36 years ago, as the top tier of the British government settled into their beds in Brightons ‘Grand Hotel’, a long-delay timer attached to a 20lb gelignite bomb developed by the IRA’s engineering department, initiated.

Understood to be hidden inside the frame of a bath within room 629 in the weeks previous to the Conservative party conference, the device was positioned just five floors above where the British Prime Minister would be settling down and preparing for her next day’s work. As Thatcher rehearsed a speech she had planned, the blast took hold. 

Tearing through the framework of the old Victorian building, five tons of brickwork in the form of an old chimney stack, fell from the height of the structure, down through each floor and into the basement. Amidst the smoke, dust and debris, a massive gaping hole gave view to the internals of the Grand Hotel, which were now exposed to the dark Brighton sky.

‘They Missed Her By Two Minutes’, cried the headlines as it became clear that the IRA had almost wiped out many members of the British Cabinet, including Thatcher herself. The blast severely damaged part of Thatcher’s hotel suite which she was in at the time, though she and her husband escaped and were led out through the wreckage to safety. 

Five people died in the blast, including Tory MP Sir Anthony Berry, Deputy Chief Whip for the Conservative Party. Amongst the injured were several notable figures including Conservative politician Sir Walter Clegg who’s bedroom was directly above the blast, and Baron Norman Tebbitt, then a member of the Conservative governments Cabinet, and who, when asked by hospital staff in the immediate aftermath of the incident if he had any allergies, is said to have replied, “yes, bombs.”

Thatcher went on to say that the attack was “an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government”.

The IRA’s response was forthright:

“Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.”  

Republican ex-Prisoner Patrick Magee, who served a sentence for his role in the IRA Active Service Unit who conducted the operation, and oftentimes referred to by the media as ‘The Brighton Bomber’, said that the British Government’s strategy at the time was to depict the IRA as mere criminals, and to contain the war to the Six Counties.

“As long as the war was kept in that context”, he said, “ they could sustain the years of attrition. But in the early 1980s we succeeded in destroying both strategies. The hunger strike destroyed the notion of criminalisation and the Brighton bombing destroyed the notion of containment. After Brighton, anything was possible and the British for the first time began to look very differently at us; even the IRA itself, I believe, began to fully accept the priority of the campaign in England.”