It was a Tuesday afternoon, the kind of bright early-summer day when shoppers fill a small Ulster market town. At three o'clock on 12 June 1973, a Ford Cortina parked outside the Coleraine Wine Market on Railway Road exploded. The wine shop was engulfed in flames within seconds. The blast left a deep crater in the road, blew out windows for streets in every direction, and killed six people. Their names were Elizabeth Craigmile, Robert Scott, Dinah Campbell, Francis Campbell, Nan Davis and Elizabeth Palmer. All six were Protestant pensioners. The Provisional IRA later said the warning call had given the wrong location. Thirty-three other people were injured, several of them so badly that they lost limbs. The academic Gordon Gillespie has called the attack 'a forgotten massacre' of the Troubles. This is what is sometimes meant by that word.
Elizabeth Craigmile was seventy-six. Robert Scott was seventy-two. Dinah Campbell was seventy-two; her husband Francis was seventy, with two grown children, in town that day from Belfast. Nan Davis was sixty, a widow from Linden Avenue in Coleraine. Elizabeth Palmer was sixty, an employee of the Coleraine Wine Market, inside the shop when the bomb went off. These were not soldiers or politicians. They were pensioners on a market-day errand - women buying bread, a couple visiting from out of town, a shopworker behind the counter. Several of the 33 injured were schoolchildren. The bomb contained between 45 and 68 kilograms of explosive packed into the saloon car. The wine shop owner Bob Scilley and his son Stephen had stepped a short distance away and were unhurt. Elizabeth Palmer, who worked for them, did not survive.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, the South Derry Active Service Unit of the Provisional IRA telephoned the Coleraine Telephone Exchange with two warnings. One named a bomb in Hanover Place. The other named a bomb on Society Street - a location that turned out to be a hoax. No warning was given for the bomb on Railway Road. The IRA later claimed it had given the wrong location for the Railway Road device, but Gordon Gillespie, examining the chronology, has argued that the absence of any genuine warning - combined with the hoax call drawing people deeper into the town centre - suggests an intention 'to draw people towards the bomb in Railway Road and inflict as many casualties as possible'. The second bomb went off five minutes after the first, at the forecourt of Stuart's Garage in Hanover Place, adding to the panic. It caused no injuries because the warning for it had been clear.
The first emergency responders described what they found as 'utter confusion'. Bodies lay among fallen masonry. Survivors wandered through the wreckage in shock. The mangled remains of the Ford Cortina sat in the middle of Railway Road. Shards of glass from blown-out windows covered the pavements. Schoolchildren who had been walking home stumbled out of the smoke; some had limbs that could not be saved. Coleraine is a Protestant-majority market town and the killed were all Protestant pensioners, and the immediate sectarian arithmetic of the atrocity made what followed depressingly predictable. Two weeks later, on 26 June, loyalist paramilitaries of the Ulster Freedom Fighters abducted Senator Paddy Wilson, an SDLP politician and a Catholic, and his Protestant friend Irene Andrews. They were stabbed dozens of times at a quarry near Cavehill. The UFF founder John White was later convicted of those murders. The cycle the bombings began continued for years.
The man who planted the Railway Road bomb was eighteen years old. His name was Sean McGlinchey, younger brother of Dominic McGlinchey, who would later become Chief of Staff of the Irish National Liberation Army. Sean was arrested, tried, and sentenced to eighteen years in the Maze Prison for six counts of murder. After his release he became a Sinn Fein councillor and, in 2011, was elected Mayor of Limavady Borough Council. He has repeatedly said he deeply regrets the killings. 'If I had known innocent people would be killed I would never have done it,' he told the BBC. 'I regret the deaths and I have apologised.' Shortly after becoming mayor, McGlinchey met Jean Jefferson, whose aunt had been killed in the bomb and whose father was horribly disfigured. Their meeting was not a reconciliation in any easy sense - the dead remained dead - but Jefferson afterwards spoke about the encounter with a generosity that the moment did not require. 'I was very impressed,' she said, 'with somebody who at 18 had made the wrong choice... and who is now spending his life putting back into the community more than what he ever got out of it.'
The Coleraine bombings do not appear in most narratives of the Troubles. They lack the iconic photographs of Bloody Sunday, the public-policy aftermath of Bloody Friday, the political weight of Enniskillen. Six elderly civilians, killed in a market town that most people outside Ulster have never visited - the event slipped quickly out of the collective national memory. Gillespie's book *Years of Darkness: The Troubles Remembered* gave them the chapter title 'a forgotten massacre'. The wine shop is no longer there. Railway Road has been rebuilt. Coleraine has rebuilt itself many times - by the IRA again in 1992, when a 1,000-pound van bomb destroyed much of the town centre and the Town Hall remained closed until 1995. But the dead from 1973 have their names, even if the country has misplaced them: Elizabeth Craigmile, Robert Scott, Dinah Campbell, Francis Campbell, Nan Davis, Elizabeth Palmer. Six pensioners. One ordinary Tuesday.
The site of the bombings is in central Coleraine, at 55.13°N, 6.67°W, near the present-day train station and the curve where Railway Road meets the town centre. From altitude, Coleraine sits at the lowest crossing point of the Lower Bann, with the river curving past the town on its way to the Atlantic four miles north at Portstewart's Barmouth. Nearest airports: City of Derry (EGAE) about 12 nm west, Belfast International (EGAA) about 33 nm southeast. The Causeway Coast lies just to the north. The bombings happened in the kind of small Ulster town where every shop on the main street was known by name to every shopper - a context that made the murder of pensioners on a market day feel, to local people, like an attack on the texture of ordinary life itself.