We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

by Fintan O'Toole

A month before the pope’s visit, on 7 August 1979, the IRA had what it would always regard as its best day. At Mullaghmore, on the Sligo coast, it murdered a seventy-nine-year-old man, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and an eighty-three-year-old woman. The ground for these executions (the word the IRA itself used) was that the old man, Louis Mountbatten, was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. Later that day, at Warrenpoint, the IRA set off two massive 800-pound bombs, the first killing six British soldiers, the second killing a dozen more. Most of the dead were from the hated Parachute Regiment, which had inflicted the equally murderous violence of Bloody Sunday in Derry. The graffiti declared the triumph of revenge: ‘Thirteen dead but not forgotten / We got 18 and Mountbatten.’ They did not mention the schoolboys or the old woman.