IRA’s explosives expert committed ‘shameful blunder’

PATRICK MAGEE was the IRA’s most experienced explosives expert.

He was the most obvious choice - he almost certainly volunteered for the job - to undertake the IRA’s most audacious, and potentially most politically cataclysmic, of all their operations.

The plan was to kill Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet colleagues. It failed in its objective, but it caused death and havoc.