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.

Mr Magee already had a minor criminal record in Norwich as a youth. He described it on the BBC 1 TV documentary, The Hunt for the Bomber.

He booked into the Grand Hotel on September 17 under the name of Roy Walsh, an IRA terrorist who was already in prison.

He paid £180 in cash in advance for a three-night stay. He was allocated room 629 “because it was a nice room facing the sea”.

Magee placed a 20lb-30lb gelignite bomb (possibly a much bigger one) and a timer made from a VCR clock, behind a panel in his bathroom. It was primed to go off 24 days, six hours and 36 minutes later.

He rightly guessed that Margaret Thatcher would be accommodated immediately below.

For all his expertise, Mr Magee committed a blunder which the British Crown described at his trial as so elementary as “to shame any second-rate burglar”. He left his fingerprints on the hotel registration card which were compared with those taken from him when he was convicted of three offences as a juvenile. They matched.

He was sentenced in September 1986 to eight life sentences.

The judge recommended that he serve at least 35 years. In fact he was freed after 13 years, in 1999, as a result of the Good Friday agreement.

Magee has shown little remorse and has said in an interview with She magazine: “I stand behind my actions.”