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The Bloody Friday, Less Remembered but Not Less Bloody
Or how a key moment in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland is often overshadowed by the Bloody Sunday
The 13 (young and unarmed) victims of had been mourned for less than six months when the Provisional IRA responded with Bloody Friday. On July 21, a total of 20 bombs exploded in different parts of Belfast, the largest and most important city in Northern Ireland, between 2.10 pm and 3.15 pm, damaging houses, canteens, shops, taxi depots, cars, buses, and railway stations. The first ceasefire since the start of the conflict in 1969 — commonly known as the Troubles — had ended only two weeks earlier.
Nearly 500 people died in Troubles-related violence in 1972 alone. The year before, the death toll had been at 180. Of the 257 civilians killed in 1972, 176 were Catholic, and 74 were Protestant. Fourteen were killed by British paratroopers in Derry on Bloody Sunday; nine died six months later on the streets of Belfast on July 21, as plumes of smoke rose into the darkened sky. The day after the attack, the Belfast Telegraph headlined: “This city has not experienced such a day of death and destruction since the German blitz of 1941.”
