Bloody Friday

Yeah.

And be- and j- during that period when he was ri- radicalized, Bloody Friday would probably have had a-

Yeah, that was-

... an influence there

... that, uh, uh, if, if Bloody Sunday was the, sort of the, uh, the touch paper, lit the touch paper on the Republican side-

Mm-hmm

... vice versa on the, on the loyalist side, it would've been Bloody Friday, which was, um, a coordinated series of explosions by the IRA in Belfast City Centre.

And he, he said he remember watching it on, um, a, uh, from a bar called Clancy's Tavern, and you could see the smoke rising up all over-

Strangely, the reaction in the Irish Republic was not directed at loyalists but focused on condemnation of the IRA.

Liam Cosgrove, the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, amid the refusal to hold a National Day of Mourning, which they had in the wake of the Bloody Friday atrocity in Belfast out of solidarity, stated, The blood of the innocent victims of last Friday's outrage and the victims of similar outrages in the North and in England is on the hands of every man who has fired a gun or discharged a bomb in the furtherance of the present campaign of violence in these islands.

just as plainly as it is on the hands of those who parked the cars and set the charges last Friday.

In our times, violence cannot be contained in neat compartments and justified on one case but not in another.

Well, listen, this was a very, very violent time.

After Bloody Sunday came Bloody Friday, an IRA response, nine people killed, 130 injured, when 26 IRA bombs were detonated across Belfast.

Some of the filming is yours, some other cameras that were out that day.

BELL RINGS I mean, this is sort of a horrific level of violence and I presume chaos.

Well, ju- just, you may m- m- maybe this doubled up, but I was just remembering that the, the bomb in '76, but when we were working there all those years, there were bombs everywhere, and there were some terrible days.

I remember the, the Bloody Friday afternoon where the bombs, we sat there, and it was boom, boom, boom all over Belfast, and we all kind of fled in, you know, in disarray very quickly.

Around the corner from us in Donegall Street, I think there was a bomb where several bin men died.

So our bomb, so-called, in, in '76 was part of a, a, a dreadful period which at the time as a reporter, much younger, it was part of the job, and you were reporting or writing about it.