Quotes
Magee, age thirty-two, blended in. Clean-shaven, neatly dressed, he could have been a tourist or a traveling salesman. He said and did nothing that would stand out. Anyone paying close attention might have noticed a missing fingertip on his right hand, and perhaps they would have sensed a wariness, a coiled tension in his manner—but no one was watching him.
For more than a decade he had been on the radar of security forces: the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, the British army, Ireland’s An Garda Síochána, London’s Metropolitan police, the British domestic intelligence agency MI5, the overseas intelligence agency MI6. Each had files on Patrick Joseph Magee, one of the best operatives in the Irish Republican Army.
For more than a decade he had been on the radar of security forces: the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland, the British army, Ireland’s An Garda Síochána, London’s Metropolitan police, the British domestic intelligence agency MI5, the overseas intelligence agency MI6. Each had files on Patrick Joseph Magee, one of the best operatives in the Irish Republican Army.
The problem was that 450,000 Catholics in Northern Ireland felt stuck on the wrong side of the new border. Northern Ireland was run by Protestants for Protestants. The Catholic minority got the worst jobs and housing, and the government in London shrugged. When Catholics marched for civil rights in the late 1960s, police beat them. Riots escalated into an insurgency led by a revived IRA.
The IRA considered its campaign of bombings and shootings a war of liberation to end British imperialism and to unite Ireland. The British and Irish governments called it terrorism by republican ideologues who ignored the wish of most people in Northern Ireland to remain in the UK. By 1984, the conflict had claimed more than 2,500 lives and gained a euphemism: the Troubles.
The IRA had become one of the world’s most effective guerrilla forces, capable of sustaining a bloody challenge to the combined might of British military, economic, and political power. But the organization was under pressure. Britain’s security forces had gotten smarter, adapted, recruited spies. Instead of retreating from Northern Ireland, the British were entrenching—fortifying police and army bases, wooing investors, building housing estates. Numbed to the violence, Britons found the Troubles dreary, even boring, and mercifully over there, across the Irish Sea.
Magee had come to Brighton to break the stalemate.
This was the one operation that could change the strategic calculus, even reorder history. To give birth, as the Irish writer William Butler Yeats put it, to a terrible beauty. Magee was tasked with wiping out Thatcher and her cabinet. He was to turn the Grand Hotel into a tomb.
It was the most audacious conspiracy against the British Crown since the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when English Catholics planted barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. In that instance, they were discovered and their heads ended up on spikes. Centuries later, the English still burned the plotters’ effigies on November 5, Bonfire Night, and kids still chanted the same rhyme:
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Such long memories for a bomb that didn’t even go off.
If Magee did his job right, the English would have a new date to remember. The most important fact, as Magee climbed the four steps leading to the Grand’s main entrance, was that he had evaded surveillance. Since the early 1970s, British security forces had linked him to dozens of bombings in Northern Ireland and England. For the risks he took they gave him a nickname: the Chancer. A poor choice because in truth he was meticulous. It was the reason he was still alive.
The IRA considered its campaign of bombings and shootings a war of liberation to end British imperialism and to unite Ireland. The British and Irish governments called it terrorism by republican ideologues who ignored the wish of most people in Northern Ireland to remain in the UK. By 1984, the conflict had claimed more than 2,500 lives and gained a euphemism: the Troubles.
The IRA had become one of the world’s most effective guerrilla forces, capable of sustaining a bloody challenge to the combined might of British military, economic, and political power. But the organization was under pressure. Britain’s security forces had gotten smarter, adapted, recruited spies. Instead of retreating from Northern Ireland, the British were entrenching—fortifying police and army bases, wooing investors, building housing estates. Numbed to the violence, Britons found the Troubles dreary, even boring, and mercifully over there, across the Irish Sea.
Magee had come to Brighton to break the stalemate.
This was the one operation that could change the strategic calculus, even reorder history. To give birth, as the Irish writer William Butler Yeats put it, to a terrible beauty. Magee was tasked with wiping out Thatcher and her cabinet. He was to turn the Grand Hotel into a tomb.
It was the most audacious conspiracy against the British Crown since the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when English Catholics planted barrels of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. In that instance, they were discovered and their heads ended up on spikes. Centuries later, the English still burned the plotters’ effigies on November 5, Bonfire Night, and kids still chanted the same rhyme:
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Such long memories for a bomb that didn’t even go off.
If Magee did his job right, the English would have a new date to remember. The most important fact, as Magee climbed the four steps leading to the Grand’s main entrance, was that he had evaded surveillance. Since the early 1970s, British security forces had linked him to dozens of bombings in Northern Ireland and England. For the risks he took they gave him a nickname: the Chancer. A poor choice because in truth he was meticulous. It was the reason he was still alive.
Not long after, in an effort to tame the especially rebellious northern province of Ulster, the English Crown confiscated Gael land and gave it to Protestant settlers, known as planters, from Scotland and England. The natives became outcasts, harried at the point of a sword from the land of their ancestors. When they fought back, massacring settlers, the English response was ferocious: Oliver Cromwell led an avenging army that slaughtered Catholics across Ireland and banished survivors to rocky, infertile soil, a campaign of ethnic cleansing that through violence and disease wiped out more than a fifth of the population. Others were banished overseas as indentured laborers. Some historians would later brand the whole enterprise genocide.
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