Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Product Information

Killing Thatcher is even-handed, never shying away from the conditions and deprivations that led young men like the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee to sign up to kill. The target narrowly missed being injured, if not killed, when the bomb went off on the sixth floor and sent all manner of debris cascading through the hotel.

Alongside a history of the Troubles, is the life story of Patrick Magee and others involved in the IRA, as well as the Hunger Strikes, which ended in 1981. For the most part, though, he concentrates on the period after 1979 – the year in which Thatcher was elected and the IRA assassinated Lord Mountbatten (a great-grandson of Queen Victoria who had been viceroy of India) with a bomb placed on his fishing boat, which also killed three other people, two of them children. One intriguing question echoes throughout Carroll’s book: what would have ensued had the IRA succeeded in killing Margaret Thatcher on that fateful night?The bomb also fractured irreparably the bond between Thatcher and her closest cabinet colleague (and, at the time, most likely successor), Norman Tebbitt. The members of the IRA gang that fired that rocket, and a second mortar bomb, from a Ford Transit van parked in nearby Whitehall on February 7th, 1991, have never been identified or apprehended. She came to power in 1979, a few months after her confidant, Airy Neave, had been killed when a bomb exploded under his car in the House of Commons. Magee and his comrades described the high-security units in which they were imprisoned as ‘submarines’, because they were so cut off from contact with the outside world. On one side, an elite IRA team aided by a renegade priest, US-raised funds and Libya’s Qaddafi and on the other, intelligence officers, police detectives, informers and bomb disposal officers.

Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.Apart from Magee and Thatcher, the person who looms largest in this book is former Sinn Féin president, TD and abstentionist MP Gerry Adams.