Qualla: Claudy bombing

Claudy bombing: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. A nine-year-old girl named Kathryn Eakin was cleaning the front window of her father's grocery shop on Main Street in Claudy when the first car bomb went off about ten yards from where she stood. She died there on the pavement. The village pub next door, McElhinney's, was blown apart at almost the same instant. Within minutes a second bomb tore through Main Street and a third bomb destroyed Church Street as people fled toward what they had thought was safer ground. Nine people were dead by mid-morning, thirty more were wounded, and a small market village of barely a thousand people had been turned into one of the worst single atrocities of the Troubles. Claudy locals call it Bloody Monday. The bombers tried to phone in a warning. The telephones were out of order because of an earlier bomb.

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Image: Bjmullan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Claudy bombing: Operation Motorman

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Earlier the same day, at four o'clock in the morning, the British Army had launched Operation Motorman to retake the no-go areas of Belfast and Derry that had been controlled by the IRA since the previous summer. Bulldozers cleared barricades. Soldiers occupied the Bogside and th...

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Image: Bjmullan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Claudy bombing: The Nine

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three of those killed at Claudy were children. Kathryn Eakin, nine, killed by the first bomb outside her father's shop. Patrick Connolly, fifteen. William Temple, sixteen. Six adults died with them: Joseph McCloskey, James McClelland, Elizabeth McElhinney, Rose McLaughlin, David ...

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Image: Bjmullan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Claudy bombing: A Priest Under Suspicion

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Within days of the bombing, the RUC began to suspect that a Roman Catholic priest, Father James Chesney, parish priest at Bellaghy in County Londonderry, was the IRA's quartermaster and director of operations for South Derry. The investigation became a problem for the British sta...

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Claudy bombing: A Deal in the Dark

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. What happened next, the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland confirmed in a report published on 24 August 2010, was a deliberate cover-up by police, government, and the Catholic Church. Senior politicians, briefed on the suspicions against Chesney, decided that arresting a Catho...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Claudy bombing: What the Village Holds

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bjmullan, CC BY-SA 3.0. Claudy is still a small village in the lee of the Sperrin Mountains, with a Main Street and a Church Street and shops along both. A memorial statue, The Hand of Friendship, was unveiled to mark the dead in 2000; vandals knocked it from its plinth in 2006, and it was restored. On ...

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Image: Bjmullan | CC BY-SA 3.0