Musgrave Park Hospital bombing

Paramilitary attacks in hospital grounds were not unknown during The Troubles in Northern Ireland; for example, in May 1976 a British soldier, member of a liaison team from the Royal Anglian Regiment, was seriously injured when an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) gunman opened fire in a corridor in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. One of the five shots fired also hit a male nurse.[1] On 28 October 1976, Ulster Freedom Fighters (UUF) militants shot and killed former Sinn Féin vice-president Máire Drumm at Mater Hospital in Belfast, while recovering from an eye operation. A former British soldier working as security guard colluded with the killers.[2] However, the 2 November 1991 attack was believed to be the first time a hospital had been bombed, rather than a shooting incident involving a specific target.[3]

On 2 November 1991, a Provisional IRA active service unit infiltrated a service tunnel connecting the Withers block, containing orthopaedic and children's wards and the Military Wing, and planted a device containing 20 lb (9.1 kg) of Semtex against steel security doors. The bomb exploded in the afternoon as several patients were watching a rugby game in a recreation area in the Military Wing, located directly beneath an operating theatre. The blast caused extensive damage to the building with walls buckled outwards and part of a staircase collapsing. Several small fires were also ignited. At first it was thought there had been a gas leak. Two soldiers were killed (Phil Cross, Royal Army Medical Corps, Craig Pantry, Royal Corps of Transport) and 11 other people were injured, among them a five-year-old girl and a baby of four months.[4] The dead and injured were watching a rugby match on television in the Military Wing's social club. The children's ward and a creche were within a hundred yards of the military complex and children had to be evacuated after broken glass made their ward uninhabitable.[5][6]

As well as the deaths and injuries, the blast from the explosion caused severe damage to both the Military Wing and the newly refurbished children's ward in the Withers block. At least 97 operations due to have been performed that week were cancelled, 80 out of the 200 patient beds in the hospital were rendered unusable and damage totalling at least £250,000 was caused.[7]

The bombing was widely condemned and intensified growing calls for the re-introduction of internment without trial from Unionist politicians and some senior figures of the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland.[7][8] Northern Ireland's Deputy Chief Ambulance officer Tom McKee called the attack "deplorable". The Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs Gerry Collins said of the bombing: "An attack against a hospital must be regarded as a particularly heinous violation of the most basic standards of human decency."[9]

• Chronology of Provisional Irish Republican Army actions (1990–99)
• Crumlin Road Prison bombing
• Teebane bombing
• Glenanne barracks bombing