Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

by David McKittrick

December brought an incident with one of the highest civilian death tolls in the troubles: a small Catholic bar in north Belfast, McGurk’s, was blown up with the loss of fifteen lives. A powerful explosion caused the old building to collapse, reducing it to smouldering rubble. Local people, members of the security forces and emergency crews pulled away the debris with their bare hands. The attack was the work of the UVF which, together with the UDA, was growing in strength in areas such as the Shankill as loyalists became more and more anxious about the army’s evident inability to defeat or even contain the IRA. UVF involvement was confirmed years later when a member of the organisation confessed and was jailed for life. At the time, however, both Stormont government and army sources flatly denied that loyalists were responsible, claiming that both forensic and intelligence evidence showed that the IRA was to blame. They alleged the bombing was not an attack on the pub but the premature explosion of a device which was being stored inside it. These false claims, disputed at the time by the IRA and nationalist representatives, fuelled nationalist alienation from the authorities, who had of course argued that no loyalists were dangerous enough to be interned.