Proper local journalism is being done tremendous good by Mill Media, with its stable of The Londoner, The Tribune
in Sheffield, The Post
in Liverpool, The Dispatch i
n Birmingham, The Bell
in Glasgow, The Exchange
in Leeds, and The Mill
in Manchester, in which, in between the superb coverage of the most consequential by-election ever, Toby Harnden, with Jack Dulhanty, writes:
We’re driving along a deserted road in the Republic of Ireland, just 300 yards away from the UK border, close to what’s known locally as Donaghy’s crossroads, when we see it on the left. A bomb factory. At least, that’s what it once was, according to an IRA man who in all likelihood mixed the explosives that decimated Manchester city centre in June 1996.
The large, corrugated iron barn with a galvanized roof is at the end of a long lane flanked by brambles, cow parsley and ivy-covered ash trees. “Let’s flip around and get a better look,” I tell our local guide, the driver, who is growing more nervous by the minute. “Time is limited, boys,” he informs us. “You’d be surprised how fucking quick things can change around here.”
A minute later, a red four-wheel drive vehicle appears and races past us. “Looks like we’ve got company,” our guide announces grimly. “Let’s go.”
I agree that it’s time to leave. I spent enough time in this area in the 1990s, in the final years of the Troubles, to know that strangers are not welcome here. No one wants outsiders prying into what has happened in these barns or along these roads, whether it’s smuggling or some kind of activity directed against the British state.
In any case, it’s time to knock on the doors of alleged suspects in the 1996 Manchester bombing, which injured 212 people, including 13 seriously, and caused £700 million of damage. Mancunians refer to the attack as the “IRA bomb” but no one has ever been charged with planning or carrying out the bombing and this visit is part of our quest to find out why.
When I left Northern Ireland in 1999, after three and a half years as a Belfast-based reporter for the Daily Telegraph, I vowed never to return to these borderlands, the killing fields of the Troubles. I’d just written a book, Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh, that unmasked a number of senior IRA figures. But the area encompassing the southern portion of County Armagh, one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, and the adjoining counties of Louth and Monaghan in the Irish Republic, has, to appropriate W.B.Yeats, a “terrible beauty”. It lures people back.
So, 30 years after the Manchester bombing, here I am again, at the behest of The Mill. On my itinerary are the homes of two men who I believe drove the bomb into the city centre and the former home of the man believed to have been the “quartermaster” who organised the operation and placed the coded warning calls.
When I interviewed a senior police officer in the late 1990s, he told me cryptically “there’s a lot known about Manchester”, and it turns out he was right. Many years later, I’ve been able to speak to a range of sources, including retired British intelligence officers, former IRA men and police on both sides of the border. They wouldn’t have been as candid in the past, if they’d spoken to me at all.
The result is that we can now tell the real story of what really happened in 1996: including naming most of those who were responsible and explaining how the politics of the “peace process” got in the way of suspects being prosecuted for an attack that blew Manchester’s city centre apart. We show that the plot was directed from the very top of the Irish republican movement and that it involved a powerful but shadowy figure in South Armagh who later built up a large property portfolio in Manchester. We also reveal, for the first time, that the IRA had a mysterious ‘inside man’ in Manchester, who helped to facilitate the bombing, according to detectives who questioned an IRA member who tried to strike a deal with the British state.
During our investigation, we found a document that was only recently declassified: a memo on behalf of then prime minister John Major from his private secretary John Holmes, written a few days after the attack. “We need to do everything possible to catch those responsible for the Manchester bomb,” Holmes told another senior official.
They were never caught — never officially named, never charged, never prosecuted. This week, counter-terror police announced that they had closed their investigation after exhausting new leads they said they had followed in recent years. But the failure of the authorities to bring to light what really happened doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do so ourselves.
The day of the bomb
For Barry Laycock, a British Rail manager at Victoria Station, the beautiful, sunny morning of 15 June 1996 was the start of just another day doing the job he loved. He’d driven to work from his new motor home in Fleetwood and was in a good mood because the journey had been a breeze in the weekend traffic — under 90 minutes. At 57, the plainspoken Yorkshireman had begun to contemplate retirement and the motor home was part of an emerging plan. But his role supervising all the train drivers at Victoria was something they’d have to prise away from him. In fact, there was no particular reason for him to be at work that day.
At 8.31am, around the time Laycock sat down at his desk in his first-floor office to catch up with paperwork, a Ford Cargo lorry, with two men inside, turned off the M6 at junction 21A and onto the M62 eastbound. So did a maroon Granada. The two vehicles were heading towards Manchester city centre, which was beginning to fill with shoppers, mixed with fans visiting for the next day’s Germany versus Russia game at Old Trafford in the Euro ’96 tournament. Security in the city was relatively light.
The IRA had ended its 17-month ceasefire in February, but political talks in Belfast had just begun. Manchester had been hit by the IRA before, including rush-hour bombs in Parsonage Gardens, behind Kendals, and near the Arndale Centre in December 1992. There was, however, no intelligence to indicate the city, with its large Irish population, would be targeted again. London, where Queen Elizabeth II was due to take the salute from the Irish Guards at the Trooping of the Colour, was surrounded by a ring of steel. The IRA had calculated, correctly, that Manchester would be a much softer target.
At 9.20am, the lorry, which had a red cab in front of a white box body with the words Jack Roberts Transport on the side, turned left from St. Mary’s Gate into Corporation Street. Two minutes later, it stopped just short of Cannon Street, leading into the Arndale Centre, and parked on double yellow lines outside Marks & Spencer.
It was the end of the journey for the two men, who had travelled from the borderlands of South Armagh, taking a circuitous route via London, Peterborough and Cheshire to reach their destination. Two days earlier, detectives concluded, they had finalised their target, close to a pedestrian overpass. They flipped a switch inside the cab to activate a timing device, which was connected by wires running from the dashboard to the box body behind them: 3,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, icing sugar and a Semtex booster charge.
The pair hopped out of the cab, leaving the hazard lights flashing. They wore cagoules and hooded sweatshirts, despite the warm weather, to disguise their body shapes. Baseball caps and sunglasses, along with the hoods, prevented their faces being caught on CCTV. They walked around the outside of Marks & Spencer and into Cathedral Street, where a third man was waiting in the Granada to pick them up.
Two calls were placed from the Granada to a house in the Republic of Ireland, just south of the border, at 9.25am and 9.26am, confirming that the bomb had been placed and primed. It was to be the biggest device detonated in Britain since the Second World War. Three minutes after the second call, a vigilant traffic warden slapped a parking ticket on the lorry’s windscreen.
Between 9.38am and 9.50am, a man with an Irish accent made warning calls to the Granada TV switchboard in Manchester, North Manchester General Hospital, Sky TV, and the Garda Siochana (Irish police) in Dublin. He gave the codeword Kerrygold, the same word used for the Docklands bomb in London four months earlier that ended the IRA’s 17-month ceasefire.
IRA warnings were often vague and deliberately deceptive, designed to sow confusion and increase the likelihood of a bomb going off. This one, however, was unusually precise, as the journalist Ray King outlined in his 2006 book Detonation: Rebirth of a City. The bomb had been placed at the corner of Cannon Street and Corporation Street, the caller said, and would explode in one hour.
Once Manchester police officers saw the lorry on CCTV they knew they were in a race against time. Fortunately, extra officers were on duty for the Euro ’96 game. Their presence meant there was a fighting chance of clearing the crowds of people from the immediate vicinity of the bomb. But the four-man Army bomb squad was based in Liverpool, at least an hour away. The team, already on standby, gathered their equipment at full speed and set off on the M62.
PC Gary Hartley, the first officer to reach the lorry on Corporation Street, saw the wires inside the cab and knew this was either the bomb or an elaborate IRA hoax. Hartley had the good sense not to try to get inside the cab. If he had done so, the bomb, probably fitted with an anti-handling device, might well have exploded. The police set about moving 80,000 people as far as possible away from the lorry. Initially, Mancunians were reluctant. WPC Wendy McCormick ran into Marks & Spencer and then evacuated other shops and restaurants. “I don’t want to die because someone wants to finish their pizza,” she thought.
Barry Laycock thought it was probably a false alarm. “You’d get bomb scares,” he recalled. “They’d happened on many, many occasions during the 12 years I worked there. The IRA just loved to disrupt the service.” But he and the rest of the Victoria staff ensured that every window and door in the train station was opened, to mitigate the effects of a blast. Victoria was an evacuation point from the Arndale Centre. Looking at the mass of people thronging the platforms, Laycock weighed up whether to suspend trains as a safety precaution. He went down from his office to help out but realised he’d left his mobile phone by his desk.
Manchester’s shoppers sensed the tension and urgency in the voices of the officers and began to move. Almost imperceptibly, the mood and momentum shifted. Soon, people were flooding out of buildings towards a cordon that police had established 450 yards away. In the time available, it was impossible to move people further. The cordon had a circumference of more than a mile and a half. Establishing it so quickly was an almost superhuman feat. A police helicopter used its Skyshout loudspeaker system to hurry along stragglers.
The hour the IRA had specified had already passed by the time the Army bomb squad arrived, taking up position near Sam’s Chop House, just off Cross Street, 200 yards from the lorry. They used a “Pigstick disrupter”— a type of gun, mounted on the 16-inch arm of a remote-controlled robot, that could fire bullets and explosive charges calibrated to disable a bomb. Once they were ready, a police officer announced: “For information, the EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal] are ready to start their operation. There will be two explosions, one small and one slightly larger.”
One of Manchester’s busiest pockets was now empty and eerily quiet. The teeming masses of Saturday shoppers were gone. It was down to the robot and the bomb. The operator watched footage from a video mounted on the robot. The first shot from the pigstick was barely audible, a crumpling sound as a round penetrated the metal skin of the box body. It would take just a few seconds for the operator, 200 yards away, to manoeuvre the robot into position for the second shot, intended to destroy the bomb’s primer and render it inert. In the police control room at Bootle Street station, the clock clicked to 11.17am as officers nervously monitored the CCTV screen that showed the lorry and robot. Four seconds later, the bomb detonated.
Barry Laycock had just got back to his office and was leaning down to pick up his phone from the floor, by his desk, when the lorry exploded. He was blown six feet across his office and into a wall. After a second or two of silence, every alarm across the city began shrieking. “It wasn’t a scare, it was the bloody real thing,” was Laycock’s first thought. Almost three decades later, he still thinks about what might have been that day. “If I hadn’t gone to work, things would have been different,” he told me. “If I hadn’t left my mobile phone in my office, I’d have been OK.”
After what Laycock described as “a few choice Yorkshire words”, he rolled over and sat up on the floor. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he remembers. “There was a dark mushroom cloud filling the sky and glass was flying down from all the tall buildings, like confetti.” He felt a pain in his back but managed to get up and stagger to the glassless window. “My God,” he thought, as he saw people running, some of them covered in blood, and lying on the grass. “There’s no way nobody’s dead.”
Victoria Station was built in 1844, more than a century before shatterproof glass was invented. Much of the roof had collapsed and there wasn’t a window pane left in the building. Some people wandered, dazed, with large shards of glass stuck in their flesh. The blast, heard 15 miles away, left a crater 18 yards wide. Miraculously, no one was killed, though store mannequins, some dismembered and lying in grotesque piles in shop windows, briefly conjured mass death. But 212 people were injured, including 13 seriously. Among them was Barry Laycock.
Son of Manchester
I grew up in Manchester, moving into Rusholme from Marple in Cheshire when I was 14. I went to a Catholic school, St. Bede’s in Whalley Range, where lots of boys had Irish parents. By the time the Manchester bomb went off, I’d been away for a dozen years, at university and then in the Royal Navy, in warships that sailed as far as Hong Kong and the West Indies.
In 1994, I had somehow been able to bluff my way into journalism and felt I’d found my calling when I landed a job at the Daily Telegraph. I was on the spot in Docklands one Friday evening in early 1996 when the IRA ended its ceasefire with a 3,000-pound bomb. Some people in the Telegraph newsroom, on the 11th floor of the One Canada Square skyscraper, flung themselves on the floor. The lifts were out, so we ran down the stairs and headed to the scene. Glass crunching underfoot, I spoke to dazed survivors and asked myself who could have done this. Yes, the IRA. But precisely who? Who had ordered it? Who had driven the lorry that delivered it? And why?
The following month, I was sent to Belfast to become the Telegraph’s Ireland correspondent. It was a dream job, especially — this is how news reporters have to think — because the IRA ceasefire was over. If it bleeds, it leads, goes the old saw. There was blood alright, but it was mixed with politics and the possibility of a political settlement. The “peace process” was the acceptable phrase, though I never liked it because it implied that if you questioned anything about it then you were anti-peace. And for Sinn Fein and the IRA — inextricably linked, and better described as the Irish republican movement — the “peace process” involved quite a lot of tactically advantageous bombs and bullets.
I was pottering around in my newly-rented house in leafy south Belfast when I heard there’d been a bomb in Manchester. I called home and spoke to my dad, who sounded a little shaken. He and my brother, who’d just turned nine, had been on their way into the city centre when the device had gone off. Half an hour later and they’d have been in the Arndale Centre.
I already had an inkling of the grouping behind the bomb. A week earlier, I’d visited South Armagh for the first time. I was returning from the Irish Republic, reporting on the IRA killing an Irish police officer during during a botched bank robbery in County Kerry, when I heard that there was a Metropolitan Police operation in Forkhill, South Armagh. I turned left off the main road as I crossed the border, heading north, and entered another world, part of the United Kingdom in name only.
Young British squaddies crouched in the hedgerows, camo paint on their faces, nervously pointing their rifles. London bobbies, dressed in white forensic coveralls, were collecting vehicle parts and other evidence from outbuildings. The massive security operation stunned locals, and many plainly resented it. South Armagh was a place apart, an IRA heartland where the Army flew equipment in and out using underslung loads suspended from helicopters rather than risk being blown up on the roads.
The name Thomas “Slab” Murphy, whose property straddled the border, had already been whispered to me. He was a farmer, and having a boundary between two countries running literally through the middle of his pig sheds was a boon to his second occupation: smuggler. Patrick, his late brother, was his partner in crime.
But Murphy’s third occupation had made him a notorious figure, to the security forces if not, at that stage, to the British public. He was the IRA’s chief of staff and the man in charge of its so-called England Department, responsible for bombing the likes of London and Manchester. And there was a reason why those British soldiers looked distinctly uneasy. An IRA sniper team had been picking off troops and Royal Ulster Constabulary officers one by one, using an American-made .50 calibre bolt action Barrett sniper rifle.
That day, 7 June 1996, planted the seed for what became my book. In it, I painstakingly laid out the details of the Docklands bomb operation and set it in the context of the talks that would lead to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. I explained how the bombs in England were central to a complex and cunning strategy by the republican movement to use violence tactically to achieve their ends.
According to the security services, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s double-act leaders, sat alongside Tom Murphy on the IRA’s ruling seven-man Army Council. Adams has always steadfastly denied he was even in the IRA. “To be clear, I had no involvement in or advance knowledge” of the bombings, Adams said in a 2026 witness statement. “These allegations are untrue. I was never a member of the IRA or its Army Council”. McGuinness, who died in 2017, admitted he was in the IRA but denied being on the council.
While I’d been able to answer nearly all the questions I had about the Docklands bomb, I hadn’t quite got there with Manchester. I covered it in the book, and named two prime suspects, going a step further than the Manchester Evening News, which had named one in 1999. For decades, however, it gnawed at me that I didn’t know who might have killed Barry Laycock, my father and brother and who knows how many other Mancunians on 15 June.
Digit 6
Manchester police immediately launched Operation Cannon — named after the street, now no longer in existence after the post-bomb rebuilding of the Arndale Centre. A recent advance in analysing data from the GSM network and cell towers meant that the police had new ways of tracking people. “It was a very powerful tool for establishing where a phone was at a certain time,” Stephen Curran, a phone network engineer who worked for an Irish mobile company in the border area in the 1990s, told me in a recent interview. “The IRA were concerned about fingerprints and forensics, but they were ignorant about the digital realm.”
By triangulating signals from cell towers, Manchester detectives identified an Irish mobile as the phone used to make the two calls from the Granada on Cathedral Street. They dubbed it Digit 6, after the last digit of its number. The 13-day lifespan of Digit 6, outlined in the police investigation report leaked to the Manchester Evening News in 1999, proved to be the key to the investigation.
It had been registered on an Eirecell contract by a Declan McCann at an address in Castleblayney, County Monaghan, just inside the Irish Republic, on 2 June, less than two weeks before the bombing. McCann, 31 at the time, also had a house in Crossmaglen, South Armagh, a few miles away, on the other side of the border in Northern Ireland.
One in six British soldiers killed during the Troubles died within three miles of Crossmaglen. Eight had met their end in the town’s square. The most recent of those was Guardsman Danny Blinco, killed in December 1993 by a single-shot sniper some 100 yards as the crow flies from McCann’s house. McCann, one of nine children, who was married with two young sons, had strong family ties to Manchester and had visited to watch United at Old Trafford.
Over the 13 days it was used, Digit 6 received 10 calls, seven of them from McCann’s house in Castleblayney. It made 26 calls, mainly to McCann relatives on either side of the border. Digit 6 had been in the Irish Republic until 10 June and in England from 12 June. On 13 June, two days before the explosion, Digit 6 was in Manchester for the suspected bomb reconnaissance trip, and was used to call Arthur Loveridge, a second-hand vehicle dealer in Peterborough.
Using the name “Tom Fox”, the caller arranged to buy the Ford Cargo lorry for £1,195. Fox had spoken to Loveridge two weeks earlier, from a landline, and agreed a price of £2,000 for another lorry. The money had been sent by registered post from a false address similar to that of the home of Terence Fitzsimons, a former ambulance driver, in Lisdoney, County Monaghan, just outside Castleblayney. Fox had also bought the Granada on 4 June.
The £2,000 for the first lorry had gone astray in the post and been returned to Ireland, where it was recovered by Irish police. This time, the money for the Ford Cargo would be hand-delivered to Loveridge. On 14 June, the day before the explosion, Digit 6 called Loveridge from Birmingham and Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. After receiving the cash from a taxi driver who’d been approached by an Irishman outside a Tesco, Loveridge left the lorry at a Peterborough parking area at 3pm. IRA men picked it up and drove it to London, where they loaded the bomb with explosives mixed in the border shed.
Since 1992, the South Armagh Brigade had become adept at moving explosives across the Irish Sea as unaccompanied freight, either from Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland or Dublin in the Irish Republic. By 7.40pm, Digit 6 was being driven north up the M1 accompanied by the Granada. The final two calls were made to the Fitzsimons home from the Granada, just after the bomb lorry had been left on Corporation Street.
Investigators suspected that Fitzsimons subsequently made the four coded bomb warning calls. Twelve days later, Declan McCann reported that someone had stolen the phone on 10 June. Even though a thief had supposedly been in possession of Digit 6, McCann paid the £66.40 bill for all calls and for the rental until August. He did not ask for a replacement phone.
Digit 6 helped connect the Manchester bomb to a six-man IRA team in London. The conspirators were plotting to blow up power stations, with the aim of inflicting massive financial damage by shutting down the City of London. On July 15, exactly a month after Manchester city centre was decimated, the Metropolitan Police arrested the six.
Banknotes discovered in the wardrobe of one of the men, Donal Gannon, had serial numbers that placed them in the same batch as the banknotes in the misdirected payment package for the first lorry. Gannon had been in contact with Fitzsimons by phone. A Rizla cigarette paper at the London flat of another conspirator had seven encrypted phone numbers written on it. One of the numbers was for a close relative of Declan McCann, at a Dublin address where McCann often stayed.
The Digit 6 phone records were a major breakthrough for the police — acting as a kind of map that could guide them towards the perpetrators of the Manchester bomb. But soon, something significant happened across the water in South Armagh: a high-stakes SAS raid on an IRA sniper team, and a call I received late that night that now points us to who was behind the bombing.
And:
Late one evening in Belfast in April 1997, I got a call from an Army intelligence officer about a high-stakes operation in Northern Ireland. The SAS had stormed a border farm where an IRA sniper team was preparing an attack, and the source was providing me with the names of the suspects who had been caught. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this conversation would later help me to work out who was behind the 1996 Manchester bombing.
As police continued to investigate the attack on Manchester, the IRA in South Armagh sought to step up its military campaign at home. Mock road signs in the area warned of a “Sniper at Work”, the red triangle framing the silhouette of a masked gunman waving a rifle. Between 1990 and 1997, there were 24 recorded single-shot attacks, believed to be from an American .50 calibre bolt-action Barrett and a Belgian 7.62 mm FN rifle, most of them involving a vehicle used as a mobile firing platform that could speed away once a shot was fired. Nine members of the security forces were killed.
The .50 calibre round was devastating. I remember looking at the autopsy photos of Guardsman Daniel Blinco, who was 6 ft 6 in tall, shot outside Murtagh’s Bar just off Crossmaglen Square. The bullet had entered the side of his torso and passed right through him, leaving an exit wound the size of a tennis ball. Blinco, 22, from Derbyshire, cried out “I’ve been shot” and remained conscious for about 20 seconds as the other soldiers frantically tried to revive him, shouting: “Keep your fucking eyes open, Danny”.
Young soldiers on foot patrol experienced an almost paralysing fear that at any moment a sniper might strike with a bullet so powerful they would have no chance of survival. That changed on 7 April 1997 when an IRA sniper team was tracked to a farm at Cregganduff Road, outside Crossmaglen. Information about the farm, which had been used for previous sniper attacks, had probably been supplied by an informer to intelligence officers, who had arranged for listening devices to be installed in outbuildings.
Around midday, 16 SAS troopers in two unmarked vans stormed the farm complex and subdued three IRA men — including Seamus McArdle and Bernard McGinn — with fists and rifle butts. A fourth man — the sniper — was apprehended as he ran along a hedgerow and disappeared into a gorse bush. The excited call I got was from an Army intelligence officer who had been involved in the SAS operation and wanted to pass me the names of the IRA men they’d caught. Two of them, McArdle and McGinn, are central to our story.
As it turned out, the IRA sniper team was linked to the Manchester and Docklands bombs. The Mazda 626 they planned to use for an attack that day had been stolen from Castleblayney, close to the home of Terence Fitzsimons, who acted as the suspected “quartermaster” for the Manchester operation. The car also carried licence plates registered to Declan McCann, a leading suspect in the Manchester attack. During the Docklands operation, a ferry journey had been booked in the name McCann, while “Mr. McCann of Castleblayney” was one of two men who bought a pair of cars at a Carlisle vehicle auction.
The police discovered that impressions from McArdle’s thumb matched those found on a Truck and Driver magazine on waste ground in Barking, an ashtray at a Carlisle truck stop and a ferry ticket stub at Stranraer. This evidence confirmed he had been the driver of the Docklands bomb. McArdle had been behind the wheel on at least one sniper attack.
Back in 1996, neither McArdle nor McCann had ever been arrested or fingerprinted, making them “clean skins” ideal for operations in England. They were close in age and lived a mile apart. The IRA tended to stick to what had worked before and to use people who had already shown they could get the job done. One British intelligence officer, speaking recently, theorised that McArdle and McCann had carried out the Docklands bomb together and then been tasked to do the same in Manchester four months later.
During our investigations this year, The Mill established that Manchester detectives questioned a man, whose similar name means they may have mistaken him for Seamus McArdle, in the weeks after the June 1996 bombing. It’s unclear whether this man was questioned because they were looking for McArdle, and Counter Terror Policing would not comment when we approached them.
The weak link in the sniper team was Bernard McGinn. Trying to seek a deal with Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detectives, McGinn, who died in 2013, described how he had been among the IRA men who mixed over five tons of explosives in a cattle shed near Donaghy’s crossroads one evening in January 1996, the shed we visited recently and wrote about in Part 1 of our investigation.
At one end of the cattle shed was a stack of sacks, each containing a hundredweight of ammonium nitrate agricultural fertiliser. As one man split the sacks, the others shovelled the contents into an electric barley crusher plugged into the power shaft of a tractor. The barley crusher, designed to break down animal feed, was used to grind the fertiliser granules into tiny particles.
The next day, the shed reverted to being a cattle byre; all that had been required to transform it into a bomb factory had been a friendly farmer and a watertight roof. Although McGinn was only told that there was about to be a bomb in London, the amount of material he mixed suggests it was almost certainly for Manchester too.
I learned in 1997, from information supplied by McGinn, that the IRA had planned to bomb Birmingham after Manchester but called off the operation when they believed its operators were being followed.
Given that the IRA’s sniper team had probably been compromised by an informer, it stands to reason that its England Department — run from South Armagh — was also penetrated. Indeed, John Crawley, a member of the IRA team that plotted to blow up the power grid, codenamed Operation Airlines by the Metropolitan Police, told me that questions put to him by police interrogators in 1996 indicated that an informer had compromised his unit.
What I did not know until my recent reporting for The Mill was that McGinn, according to detectives close to the case, had named a man living in the Manchester area as an IRA supporter who had facilitated the June 1996 bombing. This “inside man” had allegedly provided logistical assistance and perhaps helped select the Arndale Centre as the target and devised the route for the bomb lorry.
Remarkably, McGinn said that the South Armagh IRA was contemplating bombing Manchester a second time. The name of the inside man was passed to RUC Special Branch. This information may have prevented a follow-on IRA attack and saved Mancunian lives. The man’s name has never been revealed. No prosecution was contemplated, probably because MI5’s ability to track him to gain intelligence about future attacks was judged to be more valuable than any conviction.
McArdle was twice tried in London. At his first trial, members of the jury — whom lawyers suspected had been threatened — failed to reach a verdict. During his second trial, he admitted to driving the Docklands bomb lorry but claimed he did not know it contained explosives and he was simply doing a job for a man he called “the Boss”, an apparent reference to Thomas “Slab” Murphy, the South Armagh farmer and smuggler who was the IRA’s chief of staff and the man in charge of its so-called England Department, responsible for bombing the likes of London and Manchester.
Sentencing McArdle to 25 years in June 1998, the judge described him as a “trusted and manipulative” member of the IRA. But the Good Friday Agreement, reached two months earlier, meant that all paramilitary prisoners were being released and McArdle would only serve two years — he was freed in 2000 using the Queen’s royal prerogative at the request of Peter Mandelson, then Northern Ireland secretary.
It’s important to remember the political context at the time of the Manchester bomb. The IRA had ended its ceasefire with the Docklands bomb to exert pressure on the British government. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s leaders, argued that they should be admitted into talks to prevent further IRA bombs. The week before Manchester, Sinn Fein had been excluded from political talks at Stormont in Belfast.
Recently released government documents, viewed by my Mill colleague Jack Dulhanty, show that aides to prime minister John Major — Tony Blair was 11 months away from being elected — were wedded to keeping Sinn Fein on board. John Holmes, Major’s principal private secretary, stated in a memo on behalf of the then prime minister a few days after the attack that “obviously we need to do everything possible to catch those responsible for the Manchester bomb.”
Sinn Fein sought to portray the Manchester bomb as the work of hardliners who were opposed to the “peace process”. In fact, we now know that, according to four separate security sources on either side of the Irish Sea, it was approved by the IRA’s Army Council.
This month, I met a former RUC Special Branch officer, who once specialised in electronic intercepts and worked extensively in South Armagh, in an east Belfast working men’s club, where we discussed the oversight of the operation. “It was an Army Council decision,” he said, citing signals intelligence and information from informers. “They entrusted Murphy with making it happen. It was a very deliberate ploy to exert pressure on the British government, because they had figured out, quite accurately, that if they had spectaculars in England, that put the British government under immense pressure to solve the problem.”
No Manchester arrest
When I interviewed John Grieve, the Metropolitan Police’s anti-terrorism chief, in early 1998, he made clear that his job was one of the most politically sensitive in Britain. He spoke of “brinkmanship over Docklands” and “an element of political will” when the Attorney General decided whether to prosecute. He also told me that “there's a lot known about Manchester” and “they did an absolutely brilliant job, Manchester police”.
By 1999, however, it was apparent to Manchester detectives that there would be no arrest of the prime suspect, Declan McCann, despite there being what the police regarded as “compelling evidence” against him. Remarkably, the leaked investigation report revealed that Special Branch detectives had twice tailed McCann as he returned to Manchester. At 11.20pm on 14 December 1997, they watched as he walked, alone, to the scene of the bombing. Manchester police, dismayed by a lack of cooperation from the Garda, travelled to Ireland to make secret inquiries, and even tried to eavesdrop on conversations in a Castleblayney pub that Fitzsimons was known to frequent.
In April 1999, Steve Panter, crime reporter of the Manchester Evening News, published a bombshell story naming McCann. Two days later, his solicitor, Gerard Trainor, said the allegations against McCann were false and could endanger his life. “My client was not in Manchester in 1996,” he told the newspaper. “He is a man with a young family who has never been in trouble with the police.” By that time, the Crown Prosecution Service had stated that there was no realistic chance of McCann being convicted.
Former RUC and Army intelligence officers are convinced that political considerations played a key role in the decision. Certainly, the bombings in England added urgency to the political talks, just as Adams and the IRA had hoped. Blair’s adviser Alastair Campbell said in a recent podcast that “things like the Manchester bomb almost became like an impetus to do more”.
According to multiple security sources, the Blair government apparently believed that a Manchester prosecution could alienate the South Armagh Brigade, which had reluctantly backed the Adams strategy. The threat of a resumption of violence was always in the background. Rather than taking McCann into custody, Manchester police arrested one of their own, Detective Inspector Gordon Mutch, who was accused of leaking the investigation report to Panter.
Mutch was prosecuted but acquitted, leading some to remark ruefully that the case against McCann was far stronger. Now retired and spending much of his time on canal boats, Panter, 72, is convinced that politics played the key role in the McCann case. “The peace process was the big thing at the time,” he told The Mill. “That was the bigger picture.” He added that the lack of fatalities in Manchester — two were killed by the Docklands bomb — probably also played a part. “I believe to this day that if somebody had been killed, they would have made an arrest.”
Back to South Armagh
Before visiting the shed near Donaghy’s crossroads, I drove to Clones, County Monaghan, an hour or so away, to see John Crawley, who was part of the IRA power stations team that was arrested a month after the Manchester bomb. Now 69, Crawley is retired and recently wrote a book, The Yank: My Life as a Former US Marine in the IRA. He grew up in Chicago and trained in demolitions during his four years in uniform before returning to Ireland, where he’d moved as a teenager.
We sat at his dining table, where his wife served us tea and cakes. Crawley, a genial and inquisitive man — he completed an Open University degree in political science while in prison — now believes he and the other IRA men sent to England were “pawns” duped into settling for much less than the united Irish republic they fought for. “I realise that we were over there as part of negotiating capital with the British, to potentially do something that would worry them enough to bring Sinn Fein into talks.” Perhaps ironically, his view echoes the analysis of the former RUC Special Branch man in east Belfast.
The veteran IRA man is an admirer of Patrick O’Callaghan, Murphy’s number two, who died in 2021 aged 70. In my book, I was only able to refer to O'Callaghan as the Undertaker, but we can now use his name. O’Callaghan broke with Murphy over the Good Friday Agreement, a schism in South Armagh that led to a bitter feud and contributed to the death of Paul Quinn, who was beaten to death by alleged IRA members at a farm coincidentally very close to the former home of Terence Fitzsimons. Crawley suggested that O’Callaghan, as the British authorities suspect, played a command-level role in the Docklands and Manchester bombs.
“I don't know specifically what he would have done in England, but I'm sure he knew a good bit about what was going on here, where stuff was being mixed in sheds and that.” Crawley pointed out there was no amnesty for IRA offences so he could only talk about things he had been convicted of, but he insisted he was not involved in bombing Manchester. “The truth is, the first I knew about Manchester was when I saw it on the news that night,” he said.
Crawley approved of the bombing, if not of the part it played, in hindsight, in the Sinn Fein strategy. What did he think about the Manchester attack at the time? “My reaction would probably have been, ‘That's a good operation, a lot of economic damage to the British state’” he told me, adding that it was “a good propaganda thing and nobody killed, so, a good day.”
The men involved
My reporting for The Mill in recent months has given me a much clearer picture of who bombed Manchester – not just the bombers themselves but the IRA command structure that stood behind them. By speaking to retired British intelligence officers, former IRA men, ex-soldiers, and police on both sides of the border, we can fit most of the jigsaw together, even in the absence of prosecutions by the state.
We can now be confident that the bombing was ordered by the IRA’s Army Council and was not the work of a rogue element or hardliners who opposed the “peace process.” Below the Army Council, the IRA’s chain of command was Murphy, O’Callaghan and then the man who, according to McGinn, led the mixing team. For legal reasons I was unable to name this figure in Bandit Country, so I referred to him as the Surgeon. In 2001, lawyers representing a South Armagh man named Sean Gerard Hughes, who is now 64, said he was the Surgeon and claimed Hughes could not get a fair trial on fraud charges because of my book.
Another key figure was Michael “Micksey” Martin, once convicted of buying Stinger missiles in Florida. Seamus McArdle, Michael Caraher – the sniper apprehended in the gorse bush – and Frank McCabe all mixed the England bombs. The most likely scenario based on the available facts is that Fitzsimons acted as quartermaster, McCann and McArdle drove the lorry, and another person, perhaps the mysterious ‘inside man’ in Manchester described by McGinn, drove the Granada.
Crawley lives in a modest semi-detached house. In contrast, many of the IRA men who stayed loyal to Adams and Sinn Fein own palatial properties. The IRA has long been involved in smuggling and racketeering in South Armagh and has recently made extensive inroads into the drugs trade. “These days, IRA members are no longer involved in terrorism,” a former Garda officer who works near the border told me. “They’re using their previous titles to live off pure criminality.”
Some South Armagh republicans have branched out into what they insist are legitimate business activities. In 2016, the Sunday World reported that Declan McCann and his older brother John owned around 50 apartments in Dublin’s north inner city, an area riven by gangland feuds. McCann had bought property, the newspaper claimed, from an alleged crime boss known as the Monk. In 2013, a member of McCann’s extended family was a suspect in a botched robbery in Dundalk in which a Garda officer was shot dead.
At some point after the Manchester bomb, Murphy diversified into property, and by 2005 he owned an estimated £30 million housing portfolio in the same city the IRA had bombed. “Somebody in the republican movement must have enjoyed the joke,” an RUC officer remarked at the time. “After blowing up Manchester, Murphy has decided to take a slice of it for himself.” In 2013, Murphy agreed to hand over nine houses in Greater Manchester to Irish and British revenue officers.
The houses, worth £445,000 and mainly in Trafford and Stretford, were part of nearly £1m of criminal assets that Murphy and his brothers surrendered. In 2016, Murphy was convicted — Al Capone style — on nine charges of tax evasion and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Now 76, Murphy still lives quietly on his border farm, which betrays few of the trappings of his immense wealth. Gerry Adams has described him as a “good republican”.
Seamus McArdle, now 58, lives in a sumptuous, heavily fortified white stucco house, with a slate roof and a stained glass window featuring a peacock, on the Ballsmill Road outside Crossmaglen. There were people at home when I called but there was no answer on the video intercom. I left a message and my number. I heard nothing back.
On the Ard Ross estate in Crossmaglen, the house owned by Declan McCann, now 61, appeared unoccupied. A three-minute walk from McCann’s house, a large strike mark from the .50 calibre bullet that killed Guardsman Blinco is still visible on the corner wall outside Murtagh’s bar, carefully preserved for more than 32 years. Local sources told me that McCann lives at a secret location south of the border. Gerard Trainor, the solicitor who spoke for McCann in the late 1990s, did not respond to questions we sent him on Thursday evening.
In September 2022, a Manchester bombing suspect was arrested as he arrived at Birmingham airport. According to a former Northern Ireland intelligence officer, the suspect was McCann, who was stopped because he had an “arrest on sight” notation on his personal record. He was questioned by Manchester detectives and released without charge. A spokesperson from Counter Terrorism Policing declined to comment when we contacted them linking the arrest to McCann.
In Lisdoney, close to Castleblayney, just south of the border, there was no trace of Terence Fitzsimons, 75. His ex-wife Mary answered the door and said she hadn’t been in touch with her husband for 30 years and neither she nor any of their 10 children knew where he was, though she believed he was still alive. She had never heard allegations he had been involved in the Manchester bomb, she insisted.
Fitzsimons was an early example of the crossover between the IRA and drugs. He was arrested in 1995 in connection with the seizure of £2 million worth of Ecstasy tablets and chemicals as part of an operation run by the notorious drug baron known as the Penguin, who hailed from the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh, where Fitzsimons also grew up. Fitzsimons was on bail at the time of the Manchester bomb and was later jailed for 10 years for the drug offences.
A trauma
There has never been any indication of remorse from the IRA or anyone involved in the Manchester bomb. Recently, however, Barry Laycock got his day in court with Gerry Adams. After the Saturday blast, Laycock did not go to hospital but instead drove home. He stopped at a service station on the M60 near Preston and was seized by pain. He stayed in bed all day Sunday and was later diagnosed with spine compression and leg injuries. He had to retire from British Rail and never worked again.
Now 87 and widowed, he still experiences spasms in his spine that can send him tumbling. He was diagnosed with PTSD, had two nervous breakdowns and can get around only with the aid of painkillers and a walking stick. “I think about the bomb every day of my life,” he told me. “It took everything away from us.”
In March, Laycock was part of a civil trial brought against Adams in London by victims of the England bombings. Days before the Manchester blast, Adams had visited Crossmaglen, doubtless to speak to members of the IRA’s South Armagh Brigade. At the time, all Adams spoke about was the scenery, telling a New York Times reporter about the “very majestic” mountains.
In court, Adams, wearing a shamrock and a Palestine flag lapel pin, insisted: “I was never in the IRA”. His witness statement said he “had no involvement or advance knowledge of” the Manchester bombing. Laycock was unimpressed. “I was sat not maybe 10 feet away from Adams for two weeks,” he said. “I kept looking at him. I dead-eyed him, but he never turned once to look at me.” The trial collapsed on its final day when the judge ruled that Laycock and the other claimants might be liable for costs if Adams prevailed. The former railwayman took it as a cruel blow.
“I feel very bitter that they can walk the streets,” he said, referring to the bombers. “On that particular day, nearly 30 years ago, they came to Manchester with the intention of murdering people." The worst thing, he feels, is that the bomb worked. A little over a year later, the IRA had called another ceasefire and were back in talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. “The British government were blackmailed into accepting that peace agreement on the IRA's terms,” Laycock said. “It was a case of either accept or they’d be back on the streets with violence and bombs.”
On Thursday evening, as we were making the final edits to this piece, Counter Terrorism Policing North West announced that the investigation into the 1996 bombing is “no longer active”. A review following the 20th anniversary of the attack had identified “some new, albeit limited, investigative opportunities”, but these have now been exhausted too. The statement mentioned the arrest at Birmingham Airport in 2022, which we believe was McCann. It also referred to a second man who “would have been arrested and interviewed”, adding, somewhat pathetically, “however he died whilst preparations were underway to arrest him.”
That is, very likely, the end of efforts to bring anyone to justice for the largest bombing in Britain since the Second World War. Tomorrow, just after 11am, will mark 30 years since the bomb ripped through the city centre. A memorial service will be held at Manchester Cathedral this afternoon, but even among the Mancunians who remember that day, many have moved on. Subsequent events have reframed our collective memory of this particular trauma, not least the fact that some local leaders now cite the bomb as a moment of renewal for Manchester – an opportunity, even, to attract government investment and upgrade the urban core.
But trauma it was. Not just for those like Laycock who were thrown across rooms by the blast, or left injured or disfigured. But for the hundreds of people who lost their food stalls and shops over which they had taken pride, or the thousands of us who wondered — for minutes or hours — whether the people we most love had been caught in its blast zone.
Three decades on, the chapter is closing. But I take some satisfaction from having returned to this story after so many years. As someone who anguished about the fate of my father and brother, I know — and the public can now know — the real story of how terror came to Manchester on that early summer’s day.
