Rory Carroll

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.

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.

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.

An underclass in their own land, scorned for their language and religion, the Irish still periodically rebelled. On occasion, Protestant radicals joined these doomed enterprises, but mostly they were Catholic affairs. All ended with hangings. Anglo-Irish nobles who sided with the Crown, meanwhile, were rewarded with large estates.

When potato crops failed in the 1840s, more than a million peasants died of starvation and disease in what became known as the Great Famine. Another million emigrated in so-called coffin ships. The historian A. J. P. Taylor, writing a century later, evoked a death camp: “All Ireland was a Belsen.”

Queen Victoria’s government limited food aid, lest charity foster idleness and other vices in what was deemed an inferior race, as if evolution had taken a wrong turn with these backward Celts in contrast to the eminently superior Anglo-Saxons. English publications caricatured the Irish as apelike brawlers, drinkers, and layabouts, a race predisposed to superstition, savagery, and indolence.

“The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,” said Charles Trevelyan, a Treasury mandarin in charge of famine relief. “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

Some saw opportunity. Agents for Lord Palmerston, a British statesman who owned ten thousand acres around Mullaghmore, hustled two thousand unwanted tenants onto ships. They landed in Canada, malnourished and half-naked, and many froze to death. Palmerston, oblivious, built Classiebawn Castle and erased a village, Mullach Gearr, to enhance the view. He put no markers to indicate a burial ground. According to legend, stepping on such grass condemned you to ravenous, insatiable hunger. It was feár gortach—Irish for “hungry grass”—but the language itself withered as survivors left rural areas and adopted English, the victor’s tongue.

The catastrophe traumatized and embittered the natives. Small underground groups such as the Fenians and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) vowed to end British rule and create an independent Irish republic. They staged bombings and assassinations between the 1860s and the 1890s, to little effect. By now, the British empire straddled the globe and was not going to bow, as authorities saw it, to hooligans and terrorists. Peaceful political agitation proved more successful. By the outbreak of the First World War, moderate Irish nationalists who played the parliamentary game had extracted a promise from London for self-governance after the war.

For the revolutionaries, though, that was too little too late. In April 1916 they launched an insurrection in Dublin, Ireland’s capital, and proclaimed an Irish republic. The Easter Rising was a military shambles with little popular support. British soldiers squelched it within a week, leaving the center of Dublin a smoking ruin. But then the authorities made a fateful blunder. They introduced martial law and executed rebel leaders, sixteen in all. These were seen as martyrs, and public sentiment radicalized. William Butler Yeats, who grew up near Classiebawn, immortalized the transformation in his poem “Easter, 1916.”

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Self-governance was no longer enough. The Irish wanted revolution. They rallied to Sinn Féin, a political party whose name meant “We Ourselves.” Outside Protestant areas in the north, it swept the December 1918 election. Instead of taking its seats in the British Parliament at Westminster, the party proclaimed an Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. Weeks later, a guerrilla force began ambushing police and soldiers around Ireland. Its name was the Irish Republican Army.

IRA units trained and hid arms within sight of Classiebawn Castle, by then owned by Wilfrid Ashley, a British aristocrat and Conservative member of Parliament. Sensing a turning tide, his family, including his daughter Edwina, Mountbatten’s future wife, stopped visiting their summer home. By 1920, the ambushes had escalated into a war of independence. Under Michael Collins, a charismatic leader known as the “big fella,” the IRA burned police stations. The rebels also destroyed the grand homes of aristocrats. Classiebawn was mined with explosives, but the local IRA decided to keep it intact to billet guerrillas and hold hostages.

Winston Churchill, then the British secretary of state for war, tried to regain control with an auxiliary force dubbed the “Black and Tans” for its dark and khaki uniforms. It acquired a reputation for atrocity. In response, the IRA escalated its own brutality. From 1919 to 1921, more than two thousand people died in the fighting. With neither side able to score a knockout blow, they agreed to a truce. Collins led a delegation to London and signed a treaty that created an Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion of the British empire, a status similar to Canada. British forces withdrew from twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. The remaining six northeastern counties formed a new entity, Northern Ireland, which could opt out of the Irish Free State.

orthern Ireland, which could opt out of the Irish Free State.

It was a stunning achievement. Ragtag rebels had taken on the world’s mightiest empire and won de facto independence. The Irish tricolor—green, white, and orange—would fly over Dublin. But some rejected the treaty. It would oblige Irish leaders to swear an oath to the Crown and risked partitioning the island. Where was the republic? The IRA split into pro- and anti-treaty factions and waged a bitter civil war. On August 22, 1922, a convoy carrying Collins was ambushed at a rural crossroads known as Béal na Bláth, Mouth of Flowers. The big fella tumbled to the road, shot dead by a republican purist. Weeks later his side executed and dumped the corpses of six anti-treaty IRA men on the slopes of Benbulben. The pro-treaty side eventually prevailed, formed an elected government, and later declared a republic.

Northern Ireland, however, remained part of the United Kingdom. Function followed form: the British drew the boundary so that Protestants, a minority on the island, outnumbered Catholics in the six counties. The Protestants considered themselves British, loyal subjects of the Crown, and refused to be absorbed into an independent Ireland dominated by Catholics. The UK now consisted of Great Britain—the island comprising England, Scotland, and Wales—and Northern Ireland. The descendants of the seventeeth-century planters took comfort in the border posts that mushroomed along the 310-mile border, separating them from the rebels, traitors, and papists to the south. Their provincial capital, Belfast, thrummed with industry, shipbuilding, and linen mills, and over it flew the Union Jack.

In 1976, the battle lines shifted. The IRA extended their campaign across the border by detonating a huge land mine under the car of the British ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, in Dublin. It was a shocking assassination. In a classified military intelligence report called “Future Terrorist Trends,” a brigadier named James Glover warned: “The mature terrorists, including, for instance, the leading bomb makers, are sufficiently cunning to avoid arrest. They are continually learning from mistakes and developing their expertise.” It was a gloomy assessment—and not only accurate but prescient.

The Chicago Tribune would later observe that “No single family in recorded history, including the Borgias and the Cosa Nostra families of Sicily, Chicago and New York, was more susceptible to violent death among its members than the family of Queen Victoria and her descendants.”