Irish Examiner view: Memories of Bloody Friday can’t be forgotten

Writing in 1996, Gerry Adams said the 'IRA made a mistake in putting out so many bombs' adding civilian casualties were 'a matter of deep regret'

Lynda Van Cuylenburg, daughter of bus driver Jackie Gibson, hugs her brother Robert Gibson, at an event with some of their father's former colleagues in Ulsterbus and current drivers to unveil a plaque at the depot in Ballygowan where he began his journey on Bloody Friday. Jackie was killed in the bomb that detonated at the Oxford Street bus station on July 21 1972. Picture: Brian Lawless

It was, according to the IRA “a mistake,” but the bombing blitz of Belfast on Friday, July 21, 1972, when twenty car bombs were detonated in barely more than an hour, killing nine people and injuring 130, was one of the bloodiest atrocities of the troubles.

Having discovered the potential of car bombs by chance, after the death in December 1971 of the IRA’s quartermaster general Jack McCabe in an accident at his home in Dublin while he was mixing an experimental fertilizer-based homemade combination, the organisation’s GHQ warned that “the black stuff” was too dangerous to handle.