Qualla: Remembrance Day bombing

Remembrance Day bombing: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Gordon Wilson lay in the rubble holding his daughter Marie's hand. Marie was twenty years old, a student nurse home for Remembrance Sunday with her father. She squeezed his fingers four times. She told him she loved him. She died there, in the dust on Belmore Street, before the ambulances could reach them. That evening, from his hospital bed, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asked Gordon Wilson what he felt towards the people who had planted the bomb. Wilson paused, breathing carefully through broken ribs, and said: 'I bear no ill will. I bear no grudge. Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life. She was a great wee lassie. She loved her profession. She was a pet. She's dead. She's in heaven, and we shall meet again. I will pray for those men tonight and every night.' Within hours those words were on every news service in the English-speaking world. The Troubles had thirty years of horror in them by then. They had never produced anything quite like this.

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Remembrance Day bombing: The Morning Itself

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. It was a Sunday, 8 November 1987, the morning of the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the County Fermanagh War Memorial on Belmore Street in Enniskillen. The town was wreathed for the eleven o'clock silence. A parade of Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers was approaching the cen...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Remembrance Day bombing: The Eleven and the One

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Their names are not statistics. Wesley Armstrong, aged 62, and his wife Bertha, 55. Kit Johnston, 71, and his wife Jessie, 62. William Mullan, 74, and his wife Agnes, 73. John Megaw, 67. Alberta Quinton, 72. Samuel Gault, 49, an off-duty RUC reservist. Edward Armstrong, 52, no re...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Remembrance Day bombing: What Gordon Wilson Did

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Gordon Wilson was a draper from Cooper Crescent in Enniskillen. He had taken Marie to the service that morning because she was home from Belfast and they wanted to go together. After his BBC interview that evening, condolences arrived from heads of state and from people who had n...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Remembrance Day bombing: What the Bombing Did to the Bombers

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. The bombing destroyed support for the IRA in ways that no British army operation had managed in fifteen years. Sinn Fein's electoral support collapsed across the Republic of Ireland and did not return to its 1985 levels until 2001. The Republic's parliament passed the Extradition...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0

Remembrance Day bombing: After Enniskillen

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dean Molyneaux, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two weeks after the bombing, the Remembrance Sunday service was held again in Enniskillen, this time with 5,000 people in attendance and Margaret Thatcher among them. U2 had played a concert in Denver, Colorado, on the day of the bombing, and during their song Sunday Bloody Sunda...

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Image: Dean Molyneaux | CC BY-SA 2.0