The IRA’s Birmingham Pub Bombings by Kevin Mallon, IRA Director of Operations for England

If you’re not already familiar with me and my IRA past, let me give you the shortest bio possible – I was sworn into the IRA in Derry/Londonderry in September of 1970 when I was 15 years old at the suggestion of and along with one of my childhood best friends, Paul O’Connor – also 15 years old and most recently the deceitful Director of the Pat Finucane Centre which purports to be a Human Rights organisation.

Paul O’Connor had hidden his IRA past during many years of Finucane Centre activism until I outed him in a blog post a few years ago.

I quickly became a 15 year old IRA bomber and by the age of 18 I had invented the IRA’s letter bombs, one of which blew up in my hands injuring me and causing me to be brought to Dublin in June of 1973 for some medical checks for eye and hand damage.

At that point, IRA leader Martin McGuinness was beginning to funnel young IRA Volunteers from Derry into the IRA’s England bombing campaign – he was funneling them into the control of the IRA’s then most powerful leader behind the scenes – the IRA’s GHQ Director of Operations, Kevin Mallon – an IRA veteran of the failed 1956-1962 Border Campaign during which he had beaten the rap on the booby-trap bomb murder of a 43 years old police sergeant Arthur J. Ovens but had been sentenced to 14 years for possession of arms and explosives.

Kevin Mallon was released early in 1963 when the Stormont Government of Northern Ireland granted an “administrative” amnesty [early releases] to the IRA which had communicated that its “war” was entirely over.

But back to the IRA’s Birmingham Pub Bombings of November 21, 1974…

In Dublin and while I had a few medical checks for my eye and hand, Martin McGuinness introduced me to the IRA’s GHQ Director of Operations, Kevin Mallon – responsible for among other things all England bombings.

The IRA gang then known as “the Belfast 10” – including the Price sisters – had been arrested three months earlier immediately after planting their bombs in London at the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard – their arrests at Heathrow Airport had been a huge embarrassment to the IRA and the IRA wanted to show that it was still operational in London after such a catastrophic loss of IRA Volunteers.

Although I was still healing from injuries, Mallon ordered me to fly to London alone and let loose a number of letter bombs [and small time bombs] to make the IRA look good – I was not aware then that the IRA’s anxiety to be seen to recover quickly from the arrest of the Belfast 10 was actually more to do with the IRA’s recently established relationship with Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi who was promising to supply cash, weapons and explosives if the IRA could bomb England, and preferably London.

The arrest of the Belfast 10 at Heathrow airport within hours of their London bombings looked bad in Tripoli and something had to be done and done quickly at any cost.

So why didn’t Kevin Mallon just have some of the London home-grown IRA units travel to Ireland for explosives’ training and return to wreak havoc – why send me over there?

Indeed, why send the Belfast 10 over to London to bomb it [some of whose members told that they had been funneled from the Belfast Brigade of the IRA to Kevin Mallon by none other than cuddly Gerry Adams]?

Why send IRA volunteers from Northern Ireland over to England who were unfamiliar with the locations – when there were home-grown IRA units already in place for many years?

The answer is that Kevin Mallon believed and stated that the home-grown English IRA units were “riddled with informers” and that’s why the Belfast 10 were sent over [and quickly got captured] and why I was then sent over alone with no plan to return, no plan to get out, no plan even to offer warnings for any of my bombs – very little planning beyond wreak havoc [to satisfy that far off Libyan dictator and new IRA benefactor].

I was as expendable as the Belfast 10 had been.

I duly bombed London alone in the summer of 1973 with letter bombs and small time bombs – small because I didn’t have a large cache of explosives – some of the news reports of my efforts claimed initially that there were car bombs in London when in fact I had placed cigarette packet devices on the petrol caps of expensive cars in Chelsea giving rise to the grander reports.

When I ran out of explosives and money, I returned to Dublin by myself – and the then Chief of Staff of the IRA, Seamus Twomey, asked to meet me personally to congratulate me on my solo bomb run that had grabbed world headlines with the letter bomb attacks that involved both 10 Downing Street and the former British Conservative Home Secretary on Bloody Sunday, Reginald Maudling.

After my first attempted bomb attack in Oxford Street – the bomb had failed to detonate properly – I discovered that when I rang the police to give a bomb warning, the copper who answered the phone hung up before I could give any details.

I suddenly realised that across a city the size of London the police might be receiving dozens of hoax bomb calls – so I had to re-think how to communicate real bomb warnings to differentiate them from hoax calls.

I set up a code word with the Press Association and proved that I was no hoaxer by predicting two small bomb explosions that very evening – this was enough to verify the new IRA code word and warning system – the code word was “Double X” and it became a closely-guarded secret within the hierarchy of the IRA back in Dublin.

When I returned to Dublin, Kevin Mallon had challenged me about the bomb warnings – I replied that in Derry city we always gave bomb warnings to try to avoid civilian casualties when we planted bombs in the city centre – particularly among our own supporters.

I could see that Mallon was not impressed by this – he was all for action without warnings and he would prove this a few months later.

Mallon was arrested by police within a few days in September 1973 and was immediately sentenced to 12 months in prison for IRA membership – he escaped by helicopter [along with two other IRA leaders] six weeks later and returned to his duties as the IRA’s GHQ Director of Operations.

In order to impress Gadaffi all the more, Mallon had decided on a two-strand bombing campaign in England – he would continue to send bombers from Ireland [who might be totally unknown to British police and thereby last longer] while also giving the home-grown England-based IRA units the green light to bomb away without regard to his earlier belief that they were riddled with informers. Who cares if they were captured? At least they would contribute actions to the Libyan confidence in the Provisional IRA.

[IRA Volunteer and London Tube bomber Vincent Donnelly in early 1974 murdered alleged Luton informer Kenneth Lennon in Surrey – read about Donnelly’s exploits here.]

By means of this double-whammy of bomb teams, Tripoli might be more impressed and supply more ‘gear’.

Without telling me, Mallon had made arrangements for a number of units to travel from Ireland to London and give no bomb warnings whatsoever – one of these IRA units became known by the street name where it was captured after a siege – the Balcombe Street Siege Four.

Members of this unit threw bombs into what they believed were upper class restaurants, shot dead Guinness Book of Records founder Ross McWhirter at his front door [he had offered a reward for information leading to the unit’s capture], killed a leading cancer specialist Gordon Hamilton-Fairley with a bomb meant for Sir Hugh Fraser and many other jobs – all of which perfectly expressed Kevin Mallon’s way of doing things without pussyfooty warnings.

Another of Mallon’s ASU’s [Active Service Units] sent over from Ireland was composed of Irish Guards deserter Kieran McMorrow and Derry IRA volunteer Marlene Coyle [funneled to Kevin Mallon from Derry by Martin McGuinness] – these two went ballistic and were the first persons to be publicly named in the press along with their photographs as wanted terrorists after being identified by various methods.

One of their exploits was the M62 Coach Bomb in February 1974 which killed a number of British soldiers, but also a young mother and her two baby children – a motorway driver who happened upon the coach bombing moments after it occurred told of body parts strewn over the motorway and a child with its legs blown off.

Once Marlene Coyle and Kieran McMorrow had fled back to the haven of the Irish Republic, no serious attempt was ever made to locate or extradite them.

Martin McGuinness and Kevin Mallon celebrated these kinds of bombing operations in England.

Mallon was captured at a hotel dance by Special Branch police in Portlaoise in December only six weeks after his helicopter escape from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin city centre and it would not be for another 8 months that he would blast his way out of Portlaoise Prison along with 18 other IRA escapees.

Mallon was replaced in December by a guy I had thought was his car driver – another Tyrone IRA volunteer named Kevin McKenna [who would later become a long-serving IRA Chief of Staff].

He and I had a difference of opinion early in 1974 about the no-warning bombs and after that I was no longer involved in England operations, and later returned to the Derry Brigade of the IRA as its Brigade E.O. [Explosives Officer] until my arrest in May of 1975 during the IRA/British Government ceasefire/truce.

Mallon and 18 other IRA volunteers escaped from Portlaoise Prison on the 18th of August, 1974 and he once more took over as IRA GHQ Director of Operations some three months before the November 21st Birmingham Pub Bombinhgs.

The home-grown Birmingham IRA unit(s) had been active for some time and – just as Kevin Mallon had expressed the previous year to me – included one self-confessed Agent/Informer who pleaded his case later at the trial of the Birmingham Six and was released after declaring that he had changed his name to infiltrate the IRA’s Birmingham unit(s).

This was Protestant British Army deserter James Kelly aka James Woods – to walk free from a trial where 21 persons had been bombed to bits was hardly credible. Kelly/Woods was sentenced to one year for possession of explosives and, with time served on remand, was released the following Saturday to – as the Judge requested – a safe place.

The actual Birmingham Pub Bombers were a home-grown IRA unit that was under the command and control of the IRA’s GHQ Director of Operations back in Dublin – Kevin Mallon.

In their delibrately delayed phone warning(s), the Birmingham Pub Bombers used the very codeword that I had set up 15 months earlier – Double X – and had communicated only to Kevin Mallon.

That use of the secret IRA codeword alone signalled that the job was fully authorised beforehand by Kevin Mallon, by the IRA’s GHQ Staff in Dublin and – ultimately – by the IRA’s then Army Council who oversaw these operations and whose membership included Mallon.

The Birmingham Pub Bombings were never a “rogue operation” as some claimed and the IRA’s fudged denial of the bombing was its usual response to any job that caused public outcry – there was a long list of false IRA denials which you can peruse here.

There was never any such thing as an IRA “court of inquiry” with a potential death sentence for IRA bombers on jobs gone wrong or even right – this was all nonsense for the press to report to gullible members of the public.

Then IRA leader David O’Connell/Daithi O’Conaill made these claims when he knew they were total rubbish.

David (or ‘Daithi’) O’Connell, a married man, had been literally caught with his pants down in October 1971 when he brought a very young IRA woman, Maria McGuire, around Europe on an arms’ buying trip for the IRA.

After newspapers named him and reported his activities in Amsterdam, he escaped back to Dublin with McGuire and faced allegations that he was having an affair with her.

Over a year later, Maria McGuire fled to London and wrote a tell-all book about O’Connell and the IRA after she became disaffected by the horror of mass-casualty IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and in particular by the ‘Bloody Friday’ bombings in Belfast.

Republicans claimed that she had been a British agent all along and that O’Connell had embarrassingly fallen for a British Intelligence ‘honey trap’.

As a result, O’Connell’s IRA military influence dimmed very rapidly and although he was kept on as a Scarlet Pimpernel political figurehead who appeared under the noses of police and soldiers at various republican demonstrations in Northern Ireland – and who drank copious amounts of whiskey in John Hume’s house in West End Park in Derry where he often stayed – his knowledge of the military side of the IRA was in decline.

He was good for making authorised statements to the Press, however.

O’Connell gave an interview to journalist Mary Holland on London Weekend Television on 17^th November, 1974, three days after IRA man James McDade had blown himself up with his own bomb at Coventry Telephone Exchange and four days before the Birmingham Pub Bombings, and a part of the transcript is shown below:

Text of Image:

David O’Connell: As regards military targets – there are no warnings, there will be no warnings. Because let me make this point, for five years the British Government has had its forces waging a campaign of terror – not just on the IRA, but on the people of Ireland. For five years. Kitson’s theory of leaning on the people, of squeezing the people has been done in the North of Ireland.

What have we got from the British public, what have we got from the British people? Total indifference. They have been washing their hands.

We said last week in a statement that the British Government and the British people must realise that because of the terrible war waged in Ireland, they will suffer the consequences.

Mary Holland: Will you escalate that campaign?

David O’Connell: We will.

Sandwiched between McDade’s death and the Birmingham Pub Bombings, O’Connell’s rare television interview would have had clearance by the entire IRA Army Council and O’Connell was evidently briefed to give dire warnings aimed at the British government but in reality aimed at the British public who were more accessible to the IRA than government ministers.

Now was evidently the time to blow up Brit civilians to greater concentrate the British government’s mind on Ireland.

Above all, IRA volunteers in England would have watched or read about this interview by their [nominal] Chief of Staff and taken the hint about escalation, even if orders had not already been communicated to them by IRA GHQ back in Dublin to escalate the campaign. [I said ‘nominal’ because Kevin Mallon was really running things.]

However, proof that O’Connell’s militarist colleagues on the IRA Army Council were not telling him what was actually going on came to light when O’Connell released a statement to the press on December 2, 1974 – a week or so after the Birmingham bombings – claiming that the IRA’s London letter-bomb campaign was NOT the work of the IRA and that he was uncertain about who carried out the Birmingham Bombings.

Meanwhile, IRA Army Council militarists were briefing journalists that the letter-bomb campaign and all of the other associated bombs in London, Bristol and elsewhere WERE INDEED the work of the IRA.

For many years journalists have been seeking to identify the actual low-level IRA Birmingham Pub Bombers – while the IRA leaders who were orchestrating, directing and authorising all of the IRA’s England operations have been in full view but just not prosecuted.

Kevin Mallon’s activities in the early 1970s were well known and well reported in the press at the time by journalists who had excellent sources in the IRA both in Belfast and in Dublin. Leading members of the IRA were briefing selected journalists as part of the IRA’s propaganda war, while other IRA persons were briefing in a totally unauthorised manner over drinks in bars and hotels, chief among them the Belfast Brigade’s Gerry O’Hare, husband of the IRA’s leading woman militarist at the time Rita O’Hare.

Kevin Mallon loved not only to be photographed in IRA garb and holding a weapon – he liked to be in the news for his daring exploits.

He or people close to him could not help themselves when it came to blabbing to journalists. On December 19, 1973, The Guardian’s Derek Brown reported:

Mallon was so well-publicised during this period that shortly after the Birmingham Pub Bombings he was rumoured to be in London and The Guardian reported the scare on December 20, 1974:

In August, 1974, Mallon had been named in the press as the man in charge of the bombing campaign in England:

It’s not as though British governments didn’t know the IRA’s leaders – Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath authorised an initially secret meeting with selected members of the IRA’s leadership in Chelsea in March of 1972 at Cheyne Walk – as Martin McGuinness repeatedly told me, he and the other IRA leaders [including Gerry Adams] carried their personal protection weapons during the entire Royal Air Force ride from Derry to London and right into the ministerial meeting in Cheyne Walk with Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw and MI6 spook Frank Steele and Philip Woodfield.

So with all of the British government’s high level informers and agents close to and actually in the IRA’s sernior leadership over many many years – not forgetting the security services’ own acquired information and the details secured by police interrogations when many IRA volunteers entirely broke down and blabbed everything they knew – why didn’t the British government ever seek to prosecute a single member of the IRA’s leadership for directing terrorism over 30 years?

Why not ever seek the extradition of one or more of the IRA’s kingpin Directors of Terrorism in England for horrible atrocities such as the Birmingham Pub Bombings?

Instead, British governments in general – and most specifically the government of Tony Blair – decided to engage with the IRA’s Army Council members over the years sometimes by ‘back channels’ and later directly face to face to bring them to the table, and the single most important opener for such talks and negotiations was a grant of immunity from prosecution for that IRA leadership that was engaging seriously to end the IRA’s campaign of terrorism and actually wind up the IRA entirely – which is what has happened.

I believe the IRA secured that grant of immunity in 1990 when Martin McGuinness signalled that the “war” was over and only the details of how to bring it all to a conclusion were outstanding – a signal that was backed up by an IRA Christmas ceasefire in December of 1990 as a good will signal to the Brits.

And it fell to Tony Blair to welcome IRA leaders to 10 Downing Street – now in the new Sinn Féin garb of Armani suits – and negotiate the secret grant of “Letters of Comfort” [amnesty letters] to nearly 300 wanted IRA terrorists against the advice of the Attorney General of the time.

But don’t just blame Tony Blair – it was Ireland’s most venal and corrupt Prime Minister/Taoiseach in decades who started the secret amnesty ball rolling – Bertie “Brown Envelopes” Ahern who announced to Blair in 1990 that he was going ahead with a secret administrative amnesty for the entire IRA and would Tony not join in?

Tony DID join in!

You can read about corrupt Bertie Ahern and his secret amnesty for the IRA here.

If you don’t recall Bertie Ahern, he was Ireland’s Prime Minister who was willing to accept “donations” of wads of cash from “friends” while claiming that he – the Prime Minister of Ireland – didn’t have a bank account at that time so there were no detailed records of brown envelopes received – but only those that Berite would remember…

How did Bertie Ahern satisfy himself fully that monies he was receiving in brown envelopes which were not being recorded in any bank account – how did he satisfy himself that these monies did not originate with either the IRA or with persons close to the IRA or with persons seeking to influence him on behalf of the IRA?

Ireland’s Attorney General at the time – Michael McDowell – who often posed as the hard man facing down the IRA – in fact rolled over for Bertie Ahern and became the secret IRA amnesty’s eager beaver facilitator – you can read about Michael ‘Secret IRA Amnesty’ McDowell here.

So while there are still IRA leaders around and about in public and political life – immune from any prosecutions in either the Irish Republic or in the UK as a result of negotiating an end to the IRA and its campaign of terrorism – Kevin Mallon is still alive and living in a wonderful home in the salubrious peninsula/island of Howth just north of Dublin city.

Some years ago, the Sun newspaper confronted Mallon outside a betting shop – Mallon kept and raced greyhounds – this time with regard to another botched IRA money-raising operation – the kidnapping of Shergar – but not about the Birmingham Pub Bombings or any of the many other bomb atrocities he directed in England.

Armed with the knowledge of the amnesty deal agreed between the IRA’s leadership and the British security services and British governments, Mallon could thumb his nose at the press and at anyone else.

You can see Mallon in the below video as he and Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams try to wrest a wanted IRA bomber – Evelyn Glenholmes – from Irish police as she is released and re-arrested in relation to extradition proceedings [which later failed] in Dublin city centre.

Mallon is the burly character in the red shirt.

The crowning achievement of the British security service personnel who operated contacts with the IRA’s leadership was the two-fold carrot and stick approach in 1990 – get aboard the Peace Train and get rid of the IRA and you get into democratic politics with an Amnesty and lot of cash incentives for you and for your disbanded terrorists – or else face the rest of your natural lives in prison for directing terrorism that caused over 1,700 murders…

The crowning achievement is displayed nowhere better than when IRA Chief of Staff Martin McGuinness was paraded beside the Police Service of Nothern Ireland Chief Constable, Hugh Orde – also representing MI5 – calling his former IRA comrades “traitors” and overseeing their imprisonment in Maghaberry Prison in Northern Ireland – I mean, what more could MI5 ever have wished for?

So if the outcome of the disbandment of the IRA and the clothing of its leadership in a secret administrative Amnesty [and in Armani suits and oodles of Peace Dividend cash] involved the dumping of among many others the victims and relatives of the Birmingham Pub Bombings – and the erasure from memory of the 21 murdered British citizens and maiming of some 200 others – and the denial of a public inquiry into the Birmingham Pub Bombings – does anyone really care?

Doesn’t a Prime Minister – whether Bertie ‘Brown Envelopes’ Ahern or Tony Blair – have the right to grant a secret amnesty to a terrorist organisation responsible for 1,700 murders and wipe its record of human rights atrocities completely clean – and tell victims to buckle up and pay the price of peace?