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.”

Patrick Magee’s release in 1999, after serving fourteen years, less than half the judge’s recommended sentence, was controversial. Tony Blair’s Labour government called it “very hard to stomach.” Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator and a friend of Margaret Thatcher, chimed in: “My God! Him too?” Norman Tebbit rued a missed opportunity for revenge. “If I’d known when he was coming out I’d have gone there and shot him myself.”

In prison, Magee had rediscovered books and obtained an Open University degree (first class honors), which led to a PhD dissertation on fictional literary depictions of republicans. He and Eileen eventually divorced. Magee’s correspondence with an American writer, Barbara Byar, led to a prison wedding in 1997, and a son.

His post-prison life took several twists.

Walking down the Falls Road in Belfast one day, Magee encountered a crumpled-looking figure selling raffle tickets for republican prisoners.

“Pat!” the man called out.

It was Roy Walsh. The Old Bailey bomber had been released in 1994, after serving twenty-one years. He was a prematurely aged grandfather. “Pat,” he repeated, “give me a pound.”

It was a strange encounter, the two men recognizing but barely knowing each other. Walsh did not ask about the use of his name at Brighton, and Magee did not volunteer an explanation, in keeping with Provo operational etiquette. Magee handed over a pound. Walsh gave him a ticket and asked what name he should write on the stub. Magee smiled. “Care of Roy Walsh?”

To this day, Walsh says he does not know why Magee used his name. He jokingly refers to Magee as “Pat the Imposter.”

A publisher turned Magee’s thesis into a quasi-academic book, Gangsters or Guerrillas? Representations of Irish Republicans in “Troubles Fiction.” But Magee struggled for employment. Notoriety trumped his doctorate—no university would touch him—so hopes of an academic career fizzled. He worked as a laborer on building sites.

EPILOGUE
Margaret Thatcher won a third consecutive term in 1987, an extraordinary feat, and then succumbed to hubris. She introduced an unpopular tax, humiliated ministers, lost touch with her MPs, but carried on as if it were the same adoring party that had acclaimed her after the bomb. Colleagues forced her to resign in 1990.

In retirement, Thatcher lost caution and perspective. She poured vitriol on her successors and railed at European allies and their desire to integrate into the European Union, which ultimately took shape—despite her objections—in 1993. She became disillusioned about the Anglo-Irish Agreement, her own landmark achievement, fearing she had conceded too much. That it paved the way for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland, brought no comfort.

Thatcher and Tebbit met for lunches to relive old times. Tebbit remained devoted to his own Margaret, cutting up her food, wheeling her around on rare public outings. She made the best of it. Her husband never disguised his contempt for Magee and expressed hope he would end up in a particularly hot corner of hell.

Thatcher died of a stroke in 2013, age eighty-seven. In her final years, though frail and sometimes muddled, she kept up public engagements. At a dinner for retired Metropolitan Police detectives, Paul Gibbon—the officer who had compared finding Magee’s crossword to scoring at Twickenham—told her he had been part of the Brighton investigation. She placed her hands on his and said in a quiet voice, “We got them in the end, didn’t we, my dear?”

That was not quite true. Magee’s support team was never caught. And he was freed early, along with other convicted terrorists, in 1999. It was the price of IRA and loyalist paramilitary support for the Good Friday Agreement. This agreement was a collective leap of faith: republicans agreed to join unionists in governing Northern Ireland, which remained in the UK, while peacefully campaigning for a united Ireland.

Magee’s comrades had mixed fortunes. Ella O’Dwyer tried in vain to forge an academic career. Martina Anderson married Paul Kavanagh—Ken Howorth’s killer—and was elected to the European Parliament for Sinn Féin. Gerard “Blute” McDonnell returned to a low-key life in Belfast. Peter Sherry became a counselor at an addiction clinic. Donal Craig, the group’s troubled fixer, died of cancer in 2009.

Gerry Adams transitioned to statesman—Prince Charles shook his hand—and stepped down as the Sinn Féin leader in 2018, an éminence grise revered by the movement. He continues to deny ever having been a member of the IRA.

Sinn Féin, meanwhile, has become a mainstream political force. In 2022 it became the biggest party in Northern Ireland. It is the main opposition party in the Dublin parliament and is expected to lead a future Irish government.

The police officers who hunted the IRA’s England Department operators had varied fates. Peter Gurney survived more encounters with IRA bombs and wrote a memoir. Jack Reece became chairman of the National Federation of Sea Anglers and set a European record by landing a 1,069-pound six-gilled shark dubbed the “Monster of Monteiros.” He died in 2015, age eighty-six. David Tadd finished his career as head of forensic investigation and operations for all of Scotland Yard, and still plays football. Ian Phoenix, the RUC’s Captain Chaos, died in 1994 when a helicopter carrying intelligence officers crashed in fog in Scotland, killing all twenty-nine aboard.

Magee faced seven charges, including five of murder, for Brighton. He was also charged with the other four defendants with conspiracy to bomb in relation to the so-called seaside blitz. All pleaded not guilty. Magee’s lawyer was Richard Ferguson, a skilled barrister and former Ulster Unionist MP. Despite the political gulf between them, Magee respected Ferguson and assented to his strategy. Magee stayed mute, not testifying, while Ferguson accused police of framing his client. In polished tones, he accused detectives of using the bomb timer found in rubble to nominate room 629 as the seat of the explosion and then planted Magee’s fingerprints on the Roy Walsh registration card, with Scotland Yard’s handwriting expert conveniently chiming in about the distinctive E.

A canoodling couple occupied a nearby bench. The man stroked the woman’s hair and murmured into her ear. She smiled and murmured back. They appeared besotted, but really they were Met Special Branch officers.
The woman’s hair concealed a microphone linked to the team’s radio system. Colleagues staked spots farther away. Others were parked outside. Sherry could detect anomalies in the County Tyrone landscape, an open gate that should be shut, a car parked at an odd angle, but sensed nothing out of place in this English train station. He stayed where he was. Minutes slid by. Shortly before 3:00 p.m., a small man with stubble and a mustache emerged from the throng and greeted Sherry. The speakers boomed as they conversed.
The surveillance officers with a direct view of the scene unfolding outside the W. H. Smith may have felt their mouths go dry with the first tingle of adrenaline. They had an obscured view of the stranger, whom they called the UK, or Unknown. They assumed this was Sherry’s contact. Such a moment dissolved the job’s tribulations—the weeks cooped in a van, pissing in bottles, missing family events—and made the heart thump. The couple on the bench still appeared to have eyes only for each other, but cast surreptitious glances, trying for a proper look at Sherry’s interlocutor. They had studied dozens, possibly hundreds, of images of IRA suspects overnight.

On the morning of Saturday, June 22, London shivered under the wet chill blanketing the British Isles. It was a day for dodging puddles and lamenting the absent summer. No one paid any notice to the small, compact man with a mustache and stubble who made his way to Euston train station. He collected a ticket and strode to a platform, bound for the north.
Two decades earlier, the direction of travel had been in reverse, a troubled teen from Norwich sent to a young offenders hostel in the capital. Desperate to belong, he had joined older boys in joyriding. “Just the sort of stunt that might convince you that you could get away with anything if you only kept your nerve,” Patrick Magee later reflected. With the IRA, the rebel had found his cause, taking one risk after another, and gotten away with it. Perhaps Magee still believed it was a matter of nerve.
He found his carriage and settled into his seat. At 11:45 a.m. the train jolted into motion. It was an Inter-City 125, so-called because the engine’s wedge-shaped nose cone reached 125 miles per hour. It was 260 miles to Carlisle.

In early June, a Portadown-based E4A unit that covered towns and rural areas south of Belfast received a separate tip: Peter Sherry, a commander of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade, was apparently preparing to relocate. Where, when, and for what purpose was unclear, but it was presumed to be for an important operation outside Tyrone. The RUC had a thick file on the enigmatic Sherry. Age twenty-nine, a former law clerk, soft-spoken, with a slight build but a fearsome reputation, Sherry was the so-called Armalite Kid. After hijacking vehicles, he was jailed in the early 1970s, shared a cage with Gerry Adams, and upon release graduated to alleged shootings. He canvassed with the family of Bobby Sands when Sands ran for Parliament during the hunger strike, then was jailed from 1982 to 1983 on the word of a supergrass. When the supergrass lost his nerve, Sherry was released without charge and allegedly resumed attacks on security forces in Tyrone. They masked their fear by calling him “Little Peter.” Adams canvassed for Sherry in March 1984 when he stood for Sinn Féin in a council by-election, embodying the Armalite and ballot box strategy. He lost the election but won mystique among Provos seven months later for surviving the SAS ambush.