page_title: The Troubles
section_title: 1980s
hierarchical_section_title: The Troubles / 1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: The Grand Hotel in Brighton following the IRA bomb attack. The photo was taken on the morning of October 12 1984, some hours after the blast.
context_page_description: The Troubles was an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it is sometimes described as an "irregular war" or "low-level war". The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Although the Troubles primarily took place in Northern Ireland, at times the violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
  The conflict was primarily political and nationalistic, fuelled by historical events. It also had an ethnic or sectarian dimension, but despite the use of the terms "Protestant" and "Catholic" to refer to the two sides, it was not a religious conflict. A key issue was the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. Unionists, who were mostly Ulster Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists, who were mostly Irish Catholics, wanted Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and join a united Ireland.
context_section_description: In the 1981 Irish hunger strike, ten republican prisoners (seven from the Provisional IRA and three from the INLA) died of starvation. The first hunger striker to die, Bobby Sands, was elected to Parliament on an Anti-H-Block ticket, as was his election agent Owen Carron following Sands' death. The hunger strikes resonated among many nationalists; over 100,000 people attended Sands' funeral mass in West Belfast and thousands attended those of the other hunger strikers. From an Irish republican perspective, the significance of these events was to demonstrate potential for a political and electoral strategy.
  In the wake of the hunger strikes, Sinn Féin, which had become the Provisional IRA's political wing, began to contest elections for the first time in both Northern Ireland (as abstentionists) and in the Republic. In 1986, Sinn Féin recognised the legitimacy of the Irish Dáil, which caused a small group of members to break away and form Republican Sinn Féin.
  The IRA's "Long War" was boosted by large donations of arms from Libya in the 1980s (see Provisional IRA arms importation) due to Muammar Gaddafi's anger at British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher's government for assisting the Reagan government's bombing of Tripoli, which had allegedly killed one of Gaddafi's children. Additionally, it received funding from supporters in the United States and elsewhere throughout the Irish diaspora.
  In 1982, the IRA bombed military ceremonies in London's Hyde Park and Regent's Park, killing four soldiers, seven bandsmen and seven horses. The INLA was highly active in the early and mid-1980s. In 1982, it bombed a disco frequented by off-duty British soldiers, killing 11 soldiers and six civilians. One of the IRA's most high-profile actions in this period was the Brighton hotel bombing on 12 October 1984, when it set off a 100-pound bomb in the Grand Brighton Hotel in Brighton, where politicians including Thatcher, were staying for the Conservative Party conference. The bomb, which exploded in the early hours of the morning, killed five people, including Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, and injured thirty-four others.
  On 28 February 1985 in Newry, nine RUC officers were killed in a mortar attack on the police station. It was planned by the IRA's South Armagh Brigade and an IRA unit in Newry. Nine shells were fired from a mark 10 mortar which was bolted onto the back of a hijacked Ford van in Crossmaglen. Eight shells overshot the station; the ninth hit a portable cabin which was being used as a canteen. It was the RUC's largest loss of life during the Troubles. On 8 May 1987, eight IRA members attacked an RUC station in Loughgall, County Armagh, using a bomb and guns. All were killed by the SAS - the most IRA members killed in a single incident in the Troubles. On 8 November 1987, in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, a Provisional IRA time bomb exploded during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony for UK Commonwealth war casualties. The bomb went off by a cenotaph which was at the heart of the parade. Eleven people (ten civilians, including a pregnant woman, and one serving member of the RUC) were killed and 63 were injured. Former school headmaster Ronnie Hill was seriously injured in the bombing and slipped into a coma two days later, remaining in this condition for more than a decade before his death in December 2000. The IRA eventually apologised for what it claimed had been a mistake and that its target had been the British soldiers parading to the memorial. The unit that carried out the bombing was disbanded. Loyalist paramilitaries responded to the bombing with revenge attacks on Catholics, mostly civilians. Another bomb had been planted at nearby Tullyhommon at a parallel Remembrance Day commemoration but failed to detonate.
  In March 1988, three IRA volunteers who were planning a bombing were shot dead by the SAS at a Shell petrol station on Winston Churchill Avenue in Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory attached to the south of Spain. This became known as Operation Flavius. Their funeral at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast was at
caption: Grand Brighton Hotel after the IRA bomb attack in October 1984
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