There Will Be Fire

The book is based chiefly on original research encompassing dozens of interviews and reporting trips around Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain. However, I was able to chart the narrative framework from the vast trove of Troubles literature.

The opening chapter relied on Timothy Knatchbull’s From a Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb. Later chapters drew on Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA and Voices from the Grave, J. Bowyer Bell’s The Secret Army, Toby Harnden’s Bandit Country, Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie’s The Provisional IRA, Richard English’s Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, Kevin Toolis’s Rebel Hearts, Sean O’Callaghan’s The Informer, and Gary McGladdery’s The Provisional IRA in England. This list could go on and on, but here I will add only Liam Clarke’s Broadening the Battlefield: H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Fein, and Chris Ryder’s A Special Kind of Courage: 321 EOD Squadron, and name the rest in the endnotes.

Several TV documentaries proved valuable: ITV’s The Brighton Bomber (1986), Channel 4’s The Brighton Bomb (2003), and three from the BBC: To Kill the Cabinet (1986), and Peter Taylor’s twin documentaries in 2004.

Patrick Magee’s memoir, Where Grieving Begins, was a rich source about his early life, less so about his activities in the IRA. One of his first commanders partly remedied that gap in the memoir Insider: Gerry Bradley’s Life in the IRA, cowritten with Brian Feeney.

Gerry Adams declined to speak to me, so I drew on his numerous autobiographical writings and portraits by others, including Malachi O’Doherty’s excellent biography, and David Beresford’s unsurpassed book on the hunger strikes, Ten Men Dead.

My portrait of Margaret Thatcher funneled her memoirs, Charles Moore’s magisterial three-volume biography, Jonathan Aitken’s Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Brenda Maddox’s Maggie: The First Lady, and letters, cabinet papers, engagement diaries, and other documents on her foundation’s website, margaretthatcher.org.

For the bomb and aftermath I repeatedly thumbed Steve Ramsey’s Something Has Gone Wrong. David Briffett’s Sussex Murders and Kieran Hughes’s Terror Attack Brighton: Blowing up the Iron Lady (2014), which developed from an undergraduate dissertation, were also instructive.

Several books provided context to the police hunt for the bombers: Peter Gurney’s memoir, Braver Men Walk Away, Robert Fleming and Hugh Miller’s Scotland Yard: The True Life Story of the Metropolitan Police, Ray Wilson and Ian Adams’s Metropolitan Special Branch: A History, 1883–2006, and Thomas Leahy’s The Intelligence War Against the IRA. The remarkable career and tragic end of Ian Phoenix is chronicled in Phoenix: Policing the Shadows by Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix.

Of all that I read, the passage that struck me most was not in a book or diary or official document. It was on a poster in the dilapidated, crumbling Dublin home of Michael Hayes, the former deputy head of the IRA’s England Department and a planner of the Brighton operation. He chain-smoked roll-ups and looked older than his seventy-four years, but blazed defiance. He would do it all again, for Irish freedom, he said. Hayes pointed his cigarette at the poster on his living room wall. It was a jail cell poem, “The Rhythm of Time,” by the hunger striker Bobby Sands. It starts as a lyrical exhortation to resist oppression, then concludes with a declaration of righteousness, a bold, implacable certainty that could justify almost anything.

It lights the dark of this prison cell,

It thunders forth its might,

It is “the undauntable thought,” my friend,

That thought that says “I’m right!”

However one weighs the damage and grief, a great irony hangs over the IRA attempt to assassinate Thatcher. Because they failed to kill her, it gave her years to turn ever more hostile toward European integration, seeding in the Conservative Party a radical idea that would take time to bloom: quit the European Union. The UK voted to leave—“Brexit,” the withdrawal was dubbed—in 2016. There are monumental consequences for Northern Ireland, which finds its borders, its inhabitants’ allegiances, its very existence, all in question. There is perhaps no better illustration of the complexity of the Troubles: in the end it may be Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, not IRA bombs, that delivers a united Ireland.

In 2021, he published a memoir, Where Grieving Begins: Building Bridges after the Brighton Bomb, with a foreword by Berry and an endorsement by Gerry Adams. It veiled the Brighton operation—Magee disclosed nothing about planning or execution—but the final section attempted to answer Berry’s question, and to give some sort of accounting for his role in the Troubles.

“I am satisfied that we prevailed,” he wrote. “But at terrible cost.”