Saturday 12 October marks 40 years since a bomb planted by the IRA exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton during Conservative Party conference – killing five people, injuring more than 30, and missing the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, by a matter of minutes. It’s an act of terrorism etched into modern British history, right down to Thatcher’s defiant conference speech hours after the blast, and the IRA’s chilling statement in response to the news their main target had survived: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
But that’s not the start of the story. And in this series of The History Podcast, writer Glenn Patterson takes us back. First to September 1984, when Patrick Magee checked in to the Grand Hotel to hide a device set to explode in three weeks, three days, six hours, and 36 minutes’ time. Then further back, to May 1981, when Bobby Sands died in prison after 66 days on hunger strike – a death for which the IRA blamed Thatcher personally, triggering the plan to assassinate her. Then further still, all the way to the mid 19th-century and the Irish republican movement’s first experiments with explosives.
Content from our partners
