Second paragraph of third chapter:

At the moment, Magee was on a break from the war and living in Shannon in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, a world away from Belfast, 250 miles to the north. Shannon was a collection of housing estates built on reclaimed marshland next to an airport and factories. It was Ireland’s newest town, but poor design gave it no center, no heart, and exposed residents to wind and rain. Magee had moved here several months earlier under instructions to lie low and take it easy, but that plan, too, had design flaws. He was on edge, restless, and gazing north.

In September 1996, I attended the Liberal Democrats’ party conference in Brighton, wearing several hats – I was the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland’s Party Organiser and an aide to their delegation in the talks which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement, but I was also the Chair of the vestigial group of Liberal Democrat party members in Northern Ireland. An earnest BBC radio reporter sat me down for an interview in the Grand Hotel at breakfast time. “The situation in Northern Ireland is rather a distant concern for us here at this conference, isn’t it?” she asked me.

I looked back at her. “This building, where we are sitting right now, was blown up by the IRA twelve years ago.”

I know Rory Carroll, and have occasionally given him quotes. In this book he goes in depth into one of the IRA’s most audacious operations, the attempted assassination of Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party’s annual conference in September 1984. She narrowly escaped; five party activists were killed; others suffered life-changing injuries. I vividly remember the coverage of Thatcher’s lieutenant Norman Tebbit being dug out of the rubble.

The book goes into intense detail of how the Brighton bomb, and the bomber Patrick Magee, fitted into the IRA’s overall strategy. The leadership were not immediately convinced of the return on investment of such a high risk act, in the wake of the Mountbatten murder. But in the end they were persuaded and the plot went ahead, with Magee planting the bomb with a slow but precise timer weeks in advance.

Magee himself was one of the IRA’s top bomb-makers, but had a complex personal life. I was interested that at one point, while on the run, he found accommodation and work at Venray in the Netherlands, which is where my cousin Gerard Ryan died and is buried. Carroll also gives vivid details of the police side of the story; the forensic investigation of the fragments of the bomb, the identification of Magee’s handprint from his hotel registration, the mixture of chance and preparation leading to his finally being arrested in Scotland in June 1985, while planning more action with a team including Martina Anderson, who I got to know decades later when she was a Member of the European Parliament.

Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, are big and important events, and Rory Carroll’s book gives answers to a lot of the questions that I suppose I had been vaguely wondering about since 1984. It has a couple of minor flaws – the opening chapters jump around the timeline in a way that could be confusing to readers less familiar with the history, and there are a couple of weird repetitions of detail between early and later chapters. So I rank it just below From A Clear Blue Sky and Say Nothing. But overall it’s a fascinating read about the biggest political bombing in British history. (The Gunpowder Plot doesn’t count, because it was thwarted.)

You can get Killing Thatcher here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution, by James Tipton.