Martin Dillon's new book The Sorrow and the Loss explores the toll that the Troubles had on women. We produce below an extract which claims that MI5 knew about the 1987 Enniskillen Cenotaph bombing and tampered with the timer on the device.
IN the hours after the explosion, Provisional IRA leaders were scrambling to come up with an explanation for the atrocity caused by their no-warning bomb. They saw the global outrage on television newscasts and were especially concerned by the expressions of condemnation and horror from across the political spectrum in the United States and the outrage in Ireland. Alan Dukes, the opposition leader in the Irish Parliament, referred to the IRA as ‘these rats scurrying for cover in the sewers of their own violence’. Musicians and artists also denounced it as a violent act of terror. U2, the Irish rock band, were on tour in the US and its leader, Bono, interrupted a performance of their song ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday’, to condemn the barbaric attack. He said: ‘Fuck the revolution! Where is the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day?’ Chris de Burgh, a famous Irish singer-songwriter dedicated his song ‘At the War Memorial’ to the victims of the Enniskillen bombing. His words expressed the hurt people felt across the world: ‘People getting ready there are waiting for the bands. / And old men with their memories of comrades gone away.’
There were, I was told, frantic calls between Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin leaders in Northern Ireland and Dublin in the hours after the bombing, but it would take another ten years before the IRA would issue a hollow apology. Six hours after the blast, it instead came up with a bunch of lies in a phoned message to the BBC in Belfast. The message began with a statement of regret and a claim that the bomb had been ‘aimed at catching Crown Forces personnel on patrol in connection with Remembrance Day services but not during it’. But here was the biggest lie of all in the IRA’s faux apology:
The bomb blew up without being triggered by our radio signal. There has been an ongoing battle for supremacy between the IRA and British Army electronic engineers over the use of remote-controlled bombs. In the past, some of our landmines have been triggered by the British Army scanning high frequencies and other devices have been jammed and neutralised. On each occasion we overcame the problem and recently believed that we were in advance of counter measures. In the present climate, nothing we can say in explanation will be given the attention the truth deserves, nor will it compensate for the feelings of the injured or bereaved.
This verbiage only appealed to ardent IRA supporters. By the time it was delivered, a forensic expert had already discovered that the Enniskillen bomb was triggered by an electronic timer, a microswitch and a battery. There was no evidence of a remote-control device, as the IRA had claimed. The thoroughness of this forensic examination was confirmed days later after skips full of debris from the bomb site were transported to a forensic laboratory and examined in minute detail.
The only reasonable conclusion, given the bomb was on a timer and not remotely controlled, was that it either exploded at the exact time the IRA had planned or it exploded prematurely. Given that the IRA wanted to kill a lot of members of the police and military, the most likely scenario, because only civilians were murdered, is that the bomb exploded prematurely. However, it must be stated that either scenario confirmed the IRA was prepared to kill civilians, considering them collateral damage, and it was going to be a mass casualty event.
I have always felt that there was something missing in the coverage of the Enniskillen tragedy and I believe there is a matter worth considering. The British and Irish governments have been sitting on highly classified papers related to the bombing. One concerns the fact that after the atrocity, a member of Britain’s MI5 who was closely connected to secret operations against the IRA, particularly the running of agents within the Provisionals, broke ranks. He complained that his agency knew, as it did about many IRA operations, that the attack on the Cenotaph was planned. He went further, making a claim which, if aired publicly in the aftermath of the bombing, would have been political dynamite. He claimed that MI5 tampered with the bomb’s timing mechanism, determined that the explosion would devastate the IRA’s public image. One must treat a matter like this with considerable caution. Was the MI5 agent a disgruntled figure? Was this a bogus story concocted to damage the agency? I spoke to several sources I trust and I can confirm that the British and Irish governments have concealed this document. One retired intelligence figure told me that he had heard there were files ‘scrubbed’ in the wake of the bombing and that a ‘matter arose which muddied the waters in the intelligence corridors’ in Northern Ireland, specifically about the running of agents. Perhaps the governments have been unable to untangle or address this issue. If they did so now it would imply that they deliberately buried it for decades. The truth is not easy to locate in the intelligence world, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that we do not and may never know the whole story of the Enniskillen bombing.
Not in doubt is the fact that the IRA planned an attack on the Remembrance Day parade. However, I have always suspected that State assets were a part of the planned bombing in Enniskillen. As for the bomb’s timer being altered by MI5, it is likely to remain a mystery unless the IRA offers for interview the bomb-maker and that is unlikely.
The Sorrow and The Loss is published by Merrion Press and is priced £18.99.
