Qualla: 1973 Coleraine bombings

1973 Coleraine bombings: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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1973 Coleraine bombings: The Six

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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1973 Coleraine bombings: The Warnings That Were Not Enough

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wa...

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1973 Coleraine bombings: Rescue Workers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cove...

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1973 Coleraine bombings: Sean McGlinchey and Jean Jefferson

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Maz...

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1973 Coleraine bombings: Forgotten

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 U...

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