This deftly constructed account of the IRA’s 1984 attempt to kill the prime minister leaves us with one insistent question: what would have happened if they had succeeded?
t 2.54am on 12 October 1984, a bomb, which had been concealed in room 629 of the Grand hotel in Brighton several weeks earlier, detonated with such force that it toppled one of the hotel’s five-ton Victorian chimney stacks. “Like a monstrous guillotine, it sliced through concrete, steel and wood, all the way to the ground floor,” writes Rory Carroll in, his meticulously rendered account of the IRA’s most audacious terrorist operation.
Magee’s ability to slip unnoticed in and out of England, despite being on the radar of British security forces, brought him inevitably to the Grand hotel on the morning of Saturday 15 September 1984. He checked in as Roy Walsh, later insisting he was unaware that it was the name of another IRA volunteer who had carried out a bombing in London in 1973, and paid in cash for a three-night stay in room 629, which afforded him an expansive view of the promenade and the sea.
Elsewhere, Carroll’s prose possesses the steady, accumulative thrust of a police procedural drama, particularly as the investigation into the bombing gathers pace and the search for the perpetrator intensifies. Magee was caught after a frantic pursuit through Glasgow and served 14 years in prison before being released under the terms of the Good Friday agreement. In an interview in 2002, he said: “I regret that people were killed; I don’t regret the fact that I was involved in a struggle.
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