By 1984, Margaret Thatcher’s government seemed unassailable. With the Iron Lady in command, the Argentinians had been vanquished and the miners faced defeat. But there was another enemy within, and one that did not conform to the rules of law or the rules of war. And when it struck, it was with devastating effect

AMONTH before the 1984 Conservative Party conference, a quiet Irishman checked into Brighton’s Grand Hotel under the pseudonym Roy Walsh.

In his room above the South Coast resort’s seafront, he concealed a 25lb bomb in a bathroom wall with a timing device set for October 12.

At 2.54am on that day, the bomb ripped a hole through the hotel’s elegant facade, killing five people and bringing the conference to an untimely end.

Mrs Thatcher was in the hotel working on her conference speech at the time of the explosion, sharing notes with John Gummer.

She emerged from the rubble visibly shaken by the devastation and loss of life, but displaying the iron qualities that had won a war and brought the unions to their knees.

The other enduring image of the bombing was of Norman Tebbit being rescued from the rubble while water from shattered pipes cascaded through masonry and collapsed floors from the heights above. Lord Tebbit’s wife was paralysed by the blast.

The five people killed were Sir Anthony Berry, 59, MP for Enfield Southgate; Roberta Wakeham, 45, wife of the then chief whip, Lord Wakeham; North-West area chairman Eric Taylor, 54; Muriel Maclean, 54, wife of Scottish chairman Sir Donald Maclean; and Jeanne Shattock, 52, wife of the western area chairman.

The search for the bomber began immediately. Police interviewed 800 guests who had stayed at the hotel in the month before the bombing, and only one was unaccounted for – Roy Walsh.

Walsh’s true identity was revealed when a palm print on a hotel registration card matched a print taken years earlier from a youth in Norwich – a certain Patrick Magee.

Magee was born in Belfast but moved with his family to Norwich when he was two years old. He returned to Belfast at the age of 18, in 1969, and joined the IRA soon afterwards.

The IRA had been operating in mainland Britain for a number of years, with the Birmingham and Guildford bombings being focal points of a campaign that brought death and terror to dozens of innocent people.

During the Thatcher years, the unrest in Northern Ireland and the politicising of the republican campaign intensified, brought about – to a great extent – by the hardening of the Government’s attitude towards internees.

Under Margaret Thatcher, IRA internees were denied the status of political prisoners. She demanded that Provisional prisoners be treated like common criminals, despite the fact that many of them had never stood trial.

The Northern Echo: Royal Sussex Hospital
Mrs Thatcher leaves Royal Sussex Hospital after visiting bomb victims

Several went on hunger strike in 1980 and 1981, to protest against these measures. Ten republicans starved themselves to death amid the worst violence witnessed in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s.

The hunger strikes were accompanied by a vigorous anti-British political campaign by Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker to die, had – only a short time before – been elected to Parliament.

The hunger strikes generated a huge amount of sympathy for the republican cause, and an equally huge amount of anti-Thatcher sentiment, on which Sinn Fein members and the IRA capitalised.

Other events of the Thatcher years included:

  • January 1981: Republican Bernadette McAliskey (formerly Devlin) and her husband are wounded by gunmen at their home in County Tyrone.
  • October 1981: The hunger strikes end on October 3. All prisoners are now allowed to wear their own clothes.
  • November 1981: The Official Unionist MP for Belfast South, Robert Bradford, is murdered by the IRA.
  • May 1982: The European Parliament calls for the banning of plastic bullets throughout the EC.
  • July 1982: The IRA detonates bombs in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. The former kills two members of the Household Cavalry and seven horses, the latter kills six soldiers from the Royal Green Jackets.
  • November 1982: The Northern Ireland Assembly opens but is boycotted by the SDLP and Sinn Fein.
  • December 1982: Seventeen people, 11 of them soldiers, are killed by an INLA bomb at the Droppin’ Well pub, County Derry.
  • September 1983: Thirtyeight IRA prisoners break out of the Maze Prison. Nineteen are recaptured soon after.
  • December 1983: Five people are killed and 80 wounded by an IRA bomb outside Harrods department store, London.
  • October 1984: Brighton bomb kills five.
  • November 1985: Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald sign the Anglo-Irish Agreement. This gives the Irish Republic a consultative role in Northern Ireland, setting up an intergovernmental conference of ministers and civil servants with its own secretariat. Unionists are outraged and all resign to force byelections.
  • January 1986: Unionists increase their share of the vote but lose Newry and Armagh to the SDLP.
  • June 1986: The deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester, John Stalker, is removed from the inquiry into the RUC’s alleged “shoot to kill” policy.
  • June 1986: The Northern Ireland Assembly is dissolved – 22 members, mostly DUP, have to be physically removed.
  • November 1986: A Remembrance Day parade in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, is hit by an IRA bomb. Eleven people are killed and 63 wounded.
  • January 1988: The Court of Appeal rejects a plea by six men found guilty of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.
  • March 1988: The SAS shoots dead three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar. At their funerals, in Belfast’s Milltown cemetery, loyalist Michael Stone opens fire and throws grenades at mourners, killing three and wounding 50.
  • October 1988: Home Secretary Douglas Hurd bans the words of those associated with violence from TV and radio in a bid to “starve them of the oxygen of publicity”. This idea is abandoned soon afterwards.
  • September 1989: An IRA bomb at Deal barracks, Kent, kills 11 Royal Marines bandsmen.

In 1985, police trailing IRA suspect Peter Sherry arrested Patrick Magee at a safe house in Glasgow as he plotted a bombing campaign targeting more seaside towns.

When he was finally jailed, he gave a clenched fist salute as he was led away to start his sentence.

The Northern Echo: Patrick Magee
Brighton Bomber Patrick Magee is let out of the Maze Prison for Christmas 1999. Later he was freed for good under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement

Under the Good Friday Agreement, Magee was released from prison in June 2000 after serving only 14 years behind bars.