By 1993, Harrods had become unhappily accustomed to its place on the IRA target list. Two fire bombs in August 1973 had caused minor damage. The Balcombe Street unit set off an incendiary in 1974 that gutted a clothes department inside the store. The car bomb of December 1983 had killed six people — three civilians and three Metropolitan Police officers — and injured ninety. Compared to that, the bomb of January 1993 was a small thing, more a statement than a strategy. But it landed in the middle of a renewed campaign. A month earlier, on 10 December 1992, two devices in litter bins outside Wood Green Shopping City had injured four officers and seven civilians. On 17 December, more bombs went off at Oxford Street and Cavendish Square. The London winter felt like 1974 again.

When detectives finally identified the bombers, the puzzle deepened. Jan Taylor was 51, a former corporal who had served in the British Army Royal Signals Corps. Patrick Hayes was 41, a computer programmer of Irish descent with a business studies degree from the Polytechnic of Central London. Both were English. Both belonged to the small far-left group Red Action. As Stewart Tendler of The Times observed at the trial, neither had any meaningful link to Ireland — not family, not residence, not history — beyond what the court described as their "unswerving support for the IRA." They were, in the language of intelligence officers at the time, the wrong sort of bombers: the sort no profile predicted, who had attached themselves to a foreign conflict for ideological reasons of their own.

Hayes and Taylor were each sentenced to thirty years for the Harrods bombing and for a separate attack on a train a month later which caused extensive damage but no casualties. Hayes received additional convictions for conspiracy to cause three further explosions during 1992. From the dock, neither man expressed regret. They were what the Independent called "proud bombers," and they puzzled the officers who interrogated them. The police never quite resolved the question of how two Englishmen with no Irish roots had decided to plant bombs in London on behalf of a foreign organisation. The honest answer is that men sometimes choose causes the way they choose anything else — by reading, by anger, by company kept — and the rest is consequence.

Hayes and Taylor served six years before being released in 1999 under the early release provisions of the Good Friday Agreement, the same provisions that freed hundreds of other paramilitary prisoners on both sides. For their victims, that was its own difficult news to absorb. Peace agreements, as the families of the Brighton bombing and the Birmingham pub bombings and Omagh all came to learn, often required the release of the people who had planted the bombs. Walking past Harrods today, the side entrance off Hans Road shows no sign of either the 1983 car bomb or the 1993 litter-bin device. The store keeps its doors open and its tradition of refusing to be defined by what was done to it. Outside, the city has moved on into a different century, with different anxieties, and the bombers and the law that finally let them out have both passed into history.