Shankill Road bombing

1993 IRA attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland

The Shankill Road bombing was carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 23 October 1993 and is one of the most well known incidents of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The IRA aimed to assassinate the leadership of the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA), supposedly attending a meeting above Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road, Belfast. Two IRA members disguised as deliverymen entered the shop carrying a bomb, which detonated prematurely. Ten people were killed: one of the IRA bombers, a UDA member and eight Protestant civilians, two of whom were children. More than fifty people were wounded. The targeted office was empty at the time of the bombing, but the IRA had allegedly realised that the tightly packed area below would inevitably cause "collateral damage" of civilian casualties and continued regardless. However, the IRA have denied this saying that they intended to evacuate the civilians before the explosion. The loyalist Shankill Road had been the location of other bomb and gun attacks, including the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in 1971 and the Mountainview Tavern attack and Bayardo Bar attack both in 1975, but the 1993 bombing had the most casualties. It resulted in a wave of revenge attacks by loyalists, who killed 14 civilians in the week that followed, almost all of them Catholics. The deadliest attack was the Greysteel massacre.

During the early 1990s, loyalist paramilitaries drastically increased their attacks on the Irish Catholic and Irish nationalist community and – for the first time since the beginning of the Troubles – were responsible for more deaths than republicans. The UDA's West Belfast brigade, and its commander Johnny Adair, played a key role in this. Adair had become the group's commander in 1990. In 1993 it became public that Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams were engaged in talks as part of the unfolding Northern Ireland peace process aimed at securing an IRA ceasefire. Loyalists saw this process as a serious threat to their position within the United Kingdom from what they labelled the "pan nationalist front" (allegedly encompassing the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the Irish government, and even the Gaelic Athletic Association). Throughout the autumn of 1993 loyalist paramilitaries intensified their campaign of bombings and shootings against the entire Catholic community in Northern Ireland, particularly in North and West Belfast. In one case a mentally impaired Catholic man was beaten to death by a Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gang. However, nationalist politicians such as SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon pointed out that loyalist paramilitaries had been carrying out indiscriminate sectarian murders long before the emergence of the Hume Adams talks. The relentless attacks upon the Catholic community in Belfast led to grassroots pressure upon the IRA to retaliate; the IRA was reluctant to do so because they believed it would divert energy from their campaign against British security forces and "economic targets". Allegedly, after a pub in West Belfast was sprayed with gunfire by the UDA, an IRA unit planned to detonate a large car bomb in a Protestant housing estate in Lisburn, but IRA commanders quickly threatened to expel anyone involved in such an unauthorised attack. Interviewed a week before the Shankill Road bombing, a representative of the IRA's "General Headquarters Staff" stated:

We in the IRA are very clear about a number of issues. One is that no one should respond to the activities of the loyalist death squads in anything but a disciplined manner. We in the IRA will under no circumstances play into British hands by going down the cul de sac of sectarian warfare, which would allow our enemy to portray itself as somehow holding the ring between warring factions in Ireland. But as we have demonstrated . there is no hiding place for those involved with the loyalist death squads. We are determined to exact a price from them. No one should be under any illusions. Those involved with the loyalist death squads will be held accountable for their actions. The UDA's Shankill headquarters was above Frizzell's fish shop on Shankill Road. Peter Taylor says it was also the office of the Loyalist Prisoners' Association (LPA), and on Saturday mornings was normally crowded, as that was when money was given to prisoners' families. In 1992 a police informer had heard that the IRA were planning to attack the building using coffee jar bombs packed with Semtex but the plan never materialised. According to Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack, the IRA had the building under surveillance for some time. and three days before the Shankill Road bomb an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) hit squad was arrested by the RUC near his home. An interview Adair gave to The Guardian newspaper bestowed the IRA's plans even greater urgency; striking at the UDA's headquarters, killing Adair and other senior UDA men mere days after he had boasted about killing Catholics in a national newspaper would be the "ideal rebuttal" to the growing number of critics the IRA faced in Catholic Belfast, and in the organisation's own ranks. On 22 October, in Newtownabbey on the outskirts of Belfast, the UDA shot and seriously injured a Catholic taxi driver and carried out pipe bomb attacks on two homes it believed Catholics resided in. The group also claimed responsibility for a car bomb that failed to detonate in the predominantly Catholic Elmfield estate. Reportedly, the IRA made the final decision to launch the operation when one of their scouts spotted Adair entering the building on the morning of Saturday 23 October 1993. It had an eleven second fuse, and the IRA stated that this would have allowed just enough time to clear the downstairs shop but not enough for those upstairs to escape. The operation would be carried out by Thomas Begley and Seán Kelly, two IRA members in their early twenties from Ardoyne. They drove from Ardoyne to the Shankill in a hijacked blue Ford Escort, which they parked on Berlin Street, around the corner from Frizzell's. Dressed as deliverymen, they entered the shop with the five pound bomb in a holdall. Begley was killed along with nine other people, two of them children. his partner Evelyn Baird (27) and their daughter Michelle (7); George Williamson (63) and his wife Gillian (49); and Wilma McKee (38). The force of the blast caused the old building to collapse into a pile of rubble. The upper floor came down upon those inside the shop, crushing many of the survivors under the rubble, where they remained until rescued some hours later by volunteers and emergency services. About 57 people were injured.

There was great anger and outrage in the Shankill in the wake of the bombing. Billy McQuiston told journalist Peter Taylor that "anybody on the Shankill Road that day, from a Boy Scout to a granny, if you'd given them a gun they would have gone out and retaliated". In the week following the bombing, the UDA and UVF launched a wave of "revenge attacks", killing 14 civilians. On 26 October, the UDA shot dead another two Catholic civilians and wounded five in an indiscriminate attack at a Council Depot on Kennedy Way, Belfast. Begley was given a republican funeral in west Belfast. Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin, used "unusually strong language" in condemning the bombing, saying it was wrong and could not be excused. However, he was criticised for being a pall bearer at Begley's funeral. David McKittrick and Eamonn Mallie wrote that if Adams had shunned the funeral it would have been "the end of him as a republican leader". They explain that it would have severely damaged his credibility within the republican movement and made it difficult for him to secure an IRA ceasefire. Others, such as Taoiseach Albert Reynolds and RUC Chief Constable Hugh Annesley, agreed with this view. Seán Kelly, the surviving IRA member, was badly wounded in the blast, having lost his left eye and was unable to move his left arm. IRA members believe the informer was given the go ahead by his handlers to rig the bomb so that it exploded prematurely. They believe the goal was to cause mass civilian casualties, weakening those in the IRA who opposed a ceasefire and who wanted to continue the armed campaign. Relatives of the victims asked the Police Ombudsman to investigate whether police knew about the attack before it happened.