Donegall Street bombing

On Monday 20 March 1972, at 11.45 a.m., a local carpet dealer received a telephone call warning that a bomb would explode in Belfast city centre's Church Street which was crowded with shoppers, office workers on lunch breaks, and schoolchildren. British Army troops and the RUC were alerted and immediately began to evacuate the people into nearby Lower Donegall Street. The second call to the Irish News newspaper seven minutes later also gave Church Street as the location for the device. When a final call came at 11.55 advising the News Letter newspaper that the bomb was instead placed outside its offices in Lower Donegall Street where the crowds were being sent. Thus, the warning arrived too late for the security forces to clear the street. Staff working inside the News Letter were told by the caller that they had 15 minutes in which to leave the building, but they never had a chance to evacuate.[1]

The car bomb exploded outside The News Letter offices located at 55-59 Donegall Street

At 11.58 a.m. a 100 pounds (45 kg) gelignite bomb exploded inside a green Ford Cortina parked in the street outside the offices of the News Letter,[1] shaking the city centre with the force of its blast, and instantly killing the two RUC constables, Ernest McAllister (31) and Bernard O'Neill (36), who had been examining the vehicle.[2] The remains of the two policemen, who had been blown to pieces, were alleged to have been found inside a nearby building.[2] Minutes earlier they had been helping to escort people away from Church Street.[1][3]

The explosion sent a ball of flame rolling down the street and a pall of black smoke rose upwards.[4] The blast wave ripped into the crowds of people who had run into Donegall Street for safety, tossing them in all directions and killing another four men outright: three of them, Ernest Dougan (39), James Macklin (30) and Samuel Trainor (39) were corporation binmen working in the area, and the fourth man was Sydney Bell (65). Trainor was also an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier and a member of the Orange Order. A seriously wounded pensioner, Henry Miller (79) would die in hospital on 5 April. Most of the dead were mutilated beyond recognition;[5] one of the binmen lay in the road with his head shattered.[6] With the exception of Constable O'Neill, who was a Catholic, the other six victims were Protestants.[7]

The explosion blew out all the windows in the vicinity, sending shards of glass into people's bodies as they were hit by falling masonry and timber; severed limbs were hurled into the road and into the mangled front of an office building. The ground floor of the News Letter offices and all buildings in the area suffered heavy damage.[4] The News Letter library in particular sustained considerable damage with many priceless photographs and old documents destroyed.[8] Around the blast's epicentre, the street resembled a battlefield. About one hundred schoolgirls lay wounded on the rubble-strewn, bloody pavement covered in glass and debris, and screaming in pain and fright.[6] A total of 148 people were injured in the explosion, 19 of them seriously,[2][3] including people who had lost eyes and were badly maimed.[9] Among the injured were many News Letter staff.[8]

One of the wounded was a child whose injuries were so severe a rescue worker at the scene assumed the child had been killed.[4] A young Czech art student Blanka Sochor (22) received severe injuries to her legs; she was photographed by Derek Brind of the Associated Press as a British Paratrooper held her in his arms.[10] Passerby Frank Heagan witnessed the explosion and came upon what was left of two binmen who had been "blown to pieces". He added that "there was blood everywhere and people moaning and screaming. The street was full of girls and women all wandering around".[6] The injured could be heard screaming as the ambulances transported them to hospital; emergency amputations were performed at the scene.[4] One policeman angrily denounced the attack by stating: "This was a deliberate attempt to kill innocent people. The people who planted it must have known that people were being evacuated into its path".[4]

Whilst the security forces and firemen pulled victims from the debris in Donegall Street, two more bombs went off elsewhere in the city centre; however, nobody was hurt in either attack.[9] That same day in Derry, a British soldier, John Taylor, was shot dead by an IRA sniper. In Dublin, the IRA's Chief of Staff, Seán Mac Stíofáin, suffered burns to his face and hands after he opened a letter bomb sent to him through the post. Cathal Goulding, head of the Official IRA, also received a letter bomb but escaped injury by having dismantled the device before it exploded.[11]

This was amongst the first car bombs that the Provisional IRA used during The Troubles in its militant campaign to force a British military withdrawal and reunite the six counties of Northern Ireland with the rest of the island of Ireland.[3][12] It was part of the IRA's escalation of violence to avenge the Bloody Sunday killings in which 13 unarmed Catholic civilian men were killed by the British Army's Parachute Regiment when the latter opened fire during an anti-internment demonstration held in Derry on 30 January 1972.[13]

Lower Donegall Street in 2007, looking south