Bloody Friday

This programme contains very strong language and scenes which some viewers might find disturbing.

We held onto each other and just screamed at each other.

I'll never see anything as bad as what thon was...never.

SIRENS WAIL

People in Castle Street were cheering every time a bomb went off.

I thought we were going to be burnt alive.

These memories will always stay in my head.

It wasn't a tale somebody told you - you were there and witnessed it.

On the 21st July, 1972,

the IRA unleashed its biggest-ever day of bombing.

It was known as...

..Bloody Friday.

By the summer of 1972,

the Troubles had been raging for three years.

Somehow, normal life went on.

# And they called it

# Puppy lo-o-ve. #

Donny Osmond provided the soundtrack to the summer.

# Just because we're in our teens

# Tell them all, please tell them it isn't fair. #

There were only three TV channels...

..full of industrial strikes,

war...

..and political upheaval.

APPLAUSE

12-year-old Neil Reid was the youngest chart-topper in history.

# You gave to me. #

SIREN WAILS

Here, history had taken a darker turn.

You had security gates across that street.

You had dog handlers standing on the security gates.

You went to go into a shop,

you were searched, frisked, your handbag was opened.

The IRA were at their peak.

The introduction of internment

and the bloodshed on Bloody Sunday had recruits flooding in.

Unionists protested when Stormont was abolished in March -

it seemed like a victory for a confident Republican movement.

On the other side of the barricade,

loyalist paramilitary groups were growing, too.

The UDA now had 40,000 members

and dozens of sectarian murders to its name.

Everybody became a Troubles junkie.

Where was the next atrocity?

What was happening? Who was in it? Was it family, was it friends?

The IRA had a new weapon - the car bomb.

It was the perfect way to transport explosives.

When it went off,

it turned glass and metal into deadly shrapnel.

The bombers could park wherever and whenever they liked.

SIRENS WAIL

The only blessing was that the IRA seemed

to not want to go out laying bombs before lunchtime.

So we always knew it was likely to be quiet in the mornings

and it would kick off

in the afternoon and evenings.

With help from their deadly new weapon,

the IRA believed it would take just 'one last push' to get victory.

They started to plan an operation so big,

the government would have to take them seriously.

At the same time, a back channel had started secret talks.

And in June, they called a ceasefire.

They felt they had arrived.

Showing that they were big-shots,

that they were dealing at the top

and that they held real power.

In a community centre in Derry, the IRA's main players

held a press conference and spelled out their conditions for talks.

Martin McGuinness was there -

only 22, but already second-in-command in Derry.

Alongside him, Daithi O'Connell, overall number two,

Sean MacStiofain - chief of staff

and Seamus Twomey, Belfast commander.

They haven't beaten the IRA, they're not going to beat the IRA.

The only way to establish peace in Ireland

is to sit down and talk with the leadership of the IRA.

Seamus Twomey tried to claim the moral high ground.

If we really wanted to commit sectarian war,

we could start it in an hour, but we don't want to do that,

we've no wish, we wish to avoid this at all costs.

On the 7th July, the British Establishment met the IRA in secret.

The venue was a palatial private house at 96 Cheyne Walk,

beside the Thames in Chelsea.

The delegation included the leadership team at the news conference -

with a significant addition -

Gerry Adams.

At just 23, he was already a big enough player

to be released from internment for the talks.

There was no denial it was anything other than an IRA delegation.

All were IRA?

Yes, not Sinn Fein but IRA.

-All of them?

-Yes.

For several hours they sat face-to-face.

The IRA's key demand was for British withdrawal.

The IRA overplayed their hand

and the British government representatives

thought these guys are just preposterous.

The state of mind was totally negative and the meeting a non-event.

GUNFIRE

Two days later,

there was a gunbattle in Lenadoon.

It looked and sounded very much like the end of the ceasefire.

The army are up here in the middle of Lenadoon Avenue...

GUNFIRE DROWNS SPEECH

The ceasefire was over.

For now, plans for peace talks were on hold.

Plans for that spectacular day of bombing, back on the table.

They needed to show they hadn't gone away.

In a school in West Belfast, the leadership met

to organise the bombing.

The plan - to pack as many explosions

as possible into a single hour.

In the run up to Bloody Friday,

we knew that a lot of explosive

had been coming into the city.

The reason we knew is that

some of the vehicle control-point guys

had stopped old chaps

driving nice, new cars,

full of explosives. They'd been coming up from the south.

The timers came from parking meters in America.

They'd been posted to a safe house in West Belfast

and divided between bomb factories in the Markets,

New Lodge in North Belfast, and West Belfast.

The engineers started to assemble the bombs -

adding timers and detonators to packages of Nitrobenzene.

They were now ready to be driven to their targets.

I have two images that come to mind -

first was before the bomb, of a sunny summer's day,

of the waterworks was full of bubbling water and people laughing,

cars moving.

It was just a real typical,

lovely summer day. You know, really nice,

warm weather and nothing unreal about it or strange.

It was a fairly ordinary day,

until about lunch time, until about 12 o'clock.

It was the end of the Twelfth fortnight

and many families had holiday plans.

The boys were in Scotland with the Cubs,

and they were due back on the Saturday

and we were thinking of heading to Newcastle the following week.

Hugh O'Hare was an accountant with a thriving practice.

He and his wife, Margaret, had seven children.

I was speaking to Margaret that Friday morning,

and said I had a meeting in Dundalk

and not to bother about tea.

I'd be home sometime about eight or nine

and we'd make arrangements to head off at the beginning of the week.

She was really fantastic. She was very vivacious, very vibrant.

Loved children. Nothing was a problem.

Everybody loved her.

She was a fun, fun auntie.

Around lunchtime, a series of hoax bomb calls brought chaos

to the roads around Belfast,

making it hard for the police and army to move around.

It was all part of the plan.

A man driving a grey Ford Cortina

stopped at a pedestrian crossing at Oldpark Avenue.

Two men in their early 20s pointed a gun through the open window

and said they wanted "the loan" of his car.

The owner was forced to drive to Cliftonville Circus,

down the Oldpark Road to the opposite end of Oldpark Avenue.

In the Albert Street Mill on the Lower Falls,

soldier Stephen Cooper was on his lunch break when he rang his sister.

He was happy,

he wanted everyone to know that he got all his birthday cards early

because he was going to be 19 the next day.

And I think the lads were going to take him out,

and do something to celebrate his birthday.

Most of these entries

are very brief,

because there wasn't a hell of a lot of time to make notes.

There was no real respite,

other than you had a day when you were stood down.

Colin Tennant was on call with the bomb disposal team.

Around 1.30, they got their first call of the day.

Explosives had been attached to the pylons underneath the Albert Bridge.

While we were dealing with that, trying to clear it up,

the radio started really to crackle.

Then we started to get these calls in from Brigade,

saying here's another incident and another.

On Oldpark Avenue in North Belfast,

an IRA man took over the hijacked Ford Cortina.

He collected a bomb from a house in the New Lodge

and placed it on the back seat.

He covered it with brown tarpaulin

and drove it towards the Cavehill shops.

Around 2.15 he parked it outside the drapery shop

next door to the fruit shop.

TIMER TICKS

Just yards away,

milkman Richard Young had finished his round

and was having a cup of tea.

And when I came out,

I noticed there was a grey car sitting here,

and I wondered at the time what it was doing there.

As it was the end of the Twelfth fortnight,

the train and bus stations were jammed with traffic.

At Oxford Street,

15-year-old Billy Crothers had just done his first week as a parcel boy.

The only thing Billy was interested in was football.

That was his life. And Bob Bishop,

who ran the football training place.

And they were just like two old mates together.

After work that day,

Billy was due to go to a football camp

run by the Manchester United scout.

Mum wanted Billy to stay at school, and he said,

"No", he wanted to get a job, just to help mum.

Mum said he came home, proud as punch

for his lunch and he gave her all the wage packet.

A neighbour saw Billy running back to the depot

for his afternoon's work.

In the markets, a bakery worker noticed his car missing.

The blue Austin 1100 had been stolen

and the boot packed with a 100lb bomb.

At 2:20,

it was primed and began its journey from Stanfield Street

towards the bus station.

The 24-year-old man at the wheel

had never even passed a driving test.

That's horrific because that guy, carrying a fully-primed bomb

that's ticking down, that's shocking.

We had come from a youth camp on the Isle of Man by ferry.

Jackie Gibson was a bus driver

on his way back to Oxford Street.

Coming up to the far end

of the Castlereagh Road going out of town,

I can remember seeing an Ulsterbus sitting at a bus stop.

I looked twice and realised it was my father.

But it was a fleeting enough glance.

That was about 2:30.

The man driving the bomb found himself stuck in traffic

until a policeman waved him through.

He parked at the back of the bus station,

where the drivers paid in their takings.

With the bomb in place,

he went round the corner to Mooney's pub and ordered a whiskey.

12 minutes later,

a caller rang from a house in Cromac Street in the Markets,

and warned police there was a massive bomb at the bus station.

But the line to the depot was busy,

so the police rang the army who dispatched a patrol.

Among them - Stephen Cooper, who'd been on the phone to his sister.

I heard someone talking in the background and he asked me

to wait a minute because he got to talk to someone.

And then when he came back to the phone

he said his Sergeant needed him -

he had to go out on a call,

a hoax call, he thought,

and the last thing I said

was to keep your head down,

and he said, "Don't worry, I do. I'm not silly."

Philip Gault was from the New Lodge in North Belfast.

He was nine years old and was shopping with his mother

on the Limestone Road when they were moved away from a bomb scare.

They found themselves outside a bank.

TIMER TICKS

A vehicle was parked just about here.

I was walking up

and as all youngsters do... CAR BEEPS HORN

just basically leant against the vehicle.

EXPLOSION

Philip and his mother had been moved

towards a car that contained a 50lb bomb.

That was 2:40pm and the first explosion of the day.

There'd been no warning.

It was so close proximity

that when the bomb went off, I went off with it, basically.

Philip was blown ten feet into the air by the force of the blast.

I always remember looking at the Ulster Bank sign.

And all of a sudden, you're sitting on the ground

looking at a pool of blood

and seeing the aftermath, the wound.

Not knowing where my mother was at that stage,

not knowing where anybody was,

and just that sheer panic...

You know, it's probably the worst panic you'll ever come across.

Five minutes later, on Botanic Avenue in South Belfast,

a bomb in a bread van went off...

..and blew the leaves off the trees.

SIREN WAILS

I remember the ambulance going

at tremendous speed, as I thought as a nine-year-old,

through Belfast city centre,

various instructions and information coming through

from the different control areas

and you were hearing a bomb's gone off, sirens going everywhere.

Next was the Queen Elizabeth Bridge.

EXPLOSION

Two minutes later, the Gasworks on Ormeau Avenue.

Move back now!

In the midst of the chaos,

Jackie Gibson drove his bus into the depot at the end of his shift.

He parked and went to pay in his takings.

He came to the office window

and he told people within the office to be careful.

A bomb had exploded on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge.

We tried to get out there to see what we could do.

Couldn't get out, there were people running, panicking,

not surprisingly, in all directions,

and one way and another, it was just mayhem.

People were escaping from one bomb

only to become the target of another.

We were just running blind.

The next crack that came

among this cacophony of calamity that was exploding,

a necklace of bombs all around the city.

It was quite awful to see all that.

Particularly in Belfast, where usually people were very good,

they used to clear areas down quickly, move out of the way.

Not that day.

This area was filled en mass with people

and we all started to get pushed up towards the city hall.

Kevin Sheehy was a constable in the RUC.

The police were struggling to cope in the chaos.

People were streaming right and left

and all of a sudden,

there was this huge explosion

that seemed to be just behind the City Hall.

SIREN WAILS

So everyone started to stampede back.

It was like being in an amphitheatre with the gladiators coming at you

because it was just next, "Where's that, where's that, where's that?"

So far, six bombs had gone off.

In the city centre, there was terror and confusion.

On the Cavehill Road, just a short distance away,

the normal rhythms of a summer's day went on.

Margaret came up to the house

and she asked me, would I take her children to the shops?

Brenda and her friend Jackie were inseparable, so she went along too.

In total, five children headed towards the Cavehill shops.

From the town, we could hear the sounds of bombs going off

but we still kept walking...

-We met Mum and Dad as well, Brenda.

-Did we?

My mum and dad were shopping and they came past us in the park

and said, "Girls, don't be too long,

"there's a lot of things gone off in town."

Bridgetta Murray had finished her shopping for the weekend

but had a sweet tooth

and had called into Thompson's Bakery to buy cakes.

They had a wonderful lifestyle. They were wealthy

and lived in a quite... how can I say,

upper-class area within the Antrim Road.

Also at the Cavehill shops was schoolboy Stephen Parker.

He had a part-time job there.

He was 14, always cheerful and helpful.

Stephen was a complete extrovert,

full of life and fun and...

always playing jokes

I said, "You've got to go up the road to do your Friday afternoon job,"

which was washing a car

and getting messages for a lady who owned one of the shops up the road.

He said, "I haven't got to be there till half past three,"

and I said, "I think you ought to go early, she does like you early."

Around 3pm, a van bomb went off without warning

at an electricity sub-station in Salisbury Avenue, North Belfast.

York Street Railway Station was next.

A man and a woman left a bomb in a suitcase.

It was just chaos.

People screaming, people falling to the ground

and glass everywhere.

Just chaos.

Nobody knew what they were doing.

People were running about all...

I was the same, to tell you the truth.

The shock kept me going.

As the warning calls came in,

the police tried to clear each area in turn.

Bill McKnight was based in Andersonstown RUC station.

As a break from West Belfast,

his boss sent him on traffic duty for a day in the city centre.

My most vivid recollection

was of a young woman

with two or three kiddies

and they all were in absolute and total hysterics.

And I'm directing them down one street, and of course,

some policeman doing his job at the bottom of the street

turned them back up again.

I run into them two or three times,

and the terror in that young family's...

..eyes. They were screaming hysterically.

I remember working in this garage,

well, it was a garage then, Dick and Company, Donegall Street here.

John Linehan - better known as the entertainer May McFettridge -

was a mechanic working underneath a jacked-up car.

Two men left a bomb at Smithfield Bus Station.

As they ran off, they told two children to shout a warning.

We left, and I came out to just this spot.

The next thing, boom, the whole place shook.

I went back in, and the car I'd been working on had fallen off the jack.

There was no wheels on the back, it just hit the ground,

so if I hadn't been out being nosy,

God knows what would have happened.

The IRA man who left that bomb was Gerry Bradley.

He left another one at Eastwood Motors.

Historian Brian Feeney has written a book about him.

He actually had to kick one of the people in the garage

because when he came in with his bomb

shouting to people that this was a bomb,

they didn't react quickly enough.

He walked out with the driver.

And as they walked out, a military police jeep drew up

and parked about 20 feet away

and he said they just decided to keep cool

and keep walking and not running.

So they walked to the car and got in and drove away.

John Linehan and the other apprentices

were told to save the cars.

When you think about it now, "Get the cars out," you know,

"These are new cars." It doesn't matter about you!

"Plenty of apprentices on the brew, get the cars out."

At Oxford Street Station,

a seven-man patrol from the Welsh guards arrived.

The workers knew there was a bomb, but they didn't know where.

Tom Killops,

Billy Crothers

and Billy Irvine went to look.

The soldiers' driver was 18-year-old Stephen Cooper.

He dropped the others off

and parked the armoured vehicle at the back of the depot.

Manager Jack Campbell saw a suspicious car

and looked to see if it had a staff sticker.

My father saw a car that he didn't recognise

and he leaned across it.

TIMER TICKS

Stephen and his sergeant

were standing next to the car that the bomb was in.

EXPLOSION

The Oxford Street bomb went off just after 3pm.

The warning had given staff and soldiers just 20 minutes to find it.

Colin Tennant was still gridlocked on the Albert Bridge.

I remember the force of the explosion,

even though it was the other side of a wall

and thinking, "That was big".

We could hear people screaming from where we were.

Milkman Bernard McTasney was on his way home from his deliveries.

Turned into Oxford Street,

the lights was against us

and we were sitting there about two or three seconds

when the bombs went off

and every window in my car was shattered.

Richard Lennon, a student with a summer job at the depot,

was one of the first on the scene.

The thing that I noticed about it, it was so quiet.

You know, all this devastation around and there wasn't a sound.

Not a sound of a bird or anything.

In the aftermath, he found a workmate.

He was wandering around the office,

no shirt on and no shoes on.

And I said to him, "What happened to you?"

And he just looked at me, like he was gone.

An ambulance man come over and grabbed me.

He said, "Come on, you get into this ambulance."

I said, "I'm all right, there's nothing wrong with me."

He said, "Oh, yes there is,

"big piece of shrapnel behind your left ear."

I didn't even know, didn't even feel it going in.

Bomb after bomb had gone off with just a few minutes in-between.

The bombers found themselves caught up in the very chaos they'd created.

As the bombs started to go off

and road checks were mounted and chaos started to happen,

as they drove in, they're starting to run out of time.

They can't stop the bomb. They don't know how to do it.

In a couple of cases, they actually had to leave the car and run.

In just 32 minutes, 17 bombs had exploded across Belfast.

The Cavehill shops seemed to be outside the danger zone

but the timer on the 18th bomb was ticking down.

-We passed the car, which was outside this shop.

-The vets.

The five of us walked past, we would have been right up against this car,

we walked past it, and then, we heard a bomb go off down that way

and we went out to the edge and had a look down or whatever

and then we walked back up past the car.

-And into the sweet shop.

-And then into The Choc Box.

Stephen Parker had seen the bomb on the back seat of the car.

When the girls were in the sweet shop,

he was running from door to door shouting, "Bomb, bomb".

Margaret heard the explosions going off across the city.

She ran from her brother's house and drove off to find the children.

She parked, then ran towards the shop.

I thought I saw Margaret get out of the car.

I went to say to Brenda, "There's your aunt."

And of course, she walked across the pavement. The car was sitting there.

And off it went.

EXPLOSION

Suddenly, there was the most terrific blast

and I looked, I could see the smoke rising from the Cavehill Road

and I knew without any doubt it was there.

I could see the pencils falling down and rubbers

and, you know, little exercise books and things.

I just remember this deadly silence.

You know, deafened, I felt really deafened.

I felt I couldn't hear, but I knew we were screaming and panicking.

I think we held onto each other and screamed at each other.

-We didn't think we were going to get out.

-We didn't.

As nine-year-olds, we thought we were going to die in the shop.

I just ran as I was.

I remember running without my shoes

because they were these flip-flops that slip off your feet

and I took them off and ran because I knew he was there.

We tried to get out at the front, but the front was on fire.

We were trapped in. I mean, it was absolutely on fire,

there was no question of getting out of the front of the shop.

I thought we were going to be burned alive.

And, um, we were just screaming and holding on to each other.

Across the city, plumes of smoke scarred the skies.

At the bus station, the rescuers were starting to see the horror through the haze.

There was a military policeman standing in the middle of the street

and he was trying to hold people back and shouting at people,

trying to get to the dead and injured...

"Do you not understand English?!"

The full horror of Bloody Friday was beginning to sink in.

And there's soldiers just about to put a blanket,

what was left of a blanket, over one of their dead colleagues lying on the ground.

A bus cleaner came down with a shovel

and he started clearing up.

Now, he was clearing up glass and bits of brick and everything else,

among which, of course, were bodies.

The keening of the wounded,

and the distress of the people who went to help them...

And the heroes were the ambulance men, the policemen

who went in there, not knowing if there was another device.

A lot of blood and bodies,

bits of bodies lying all around the place.

One of those policemen was Jack Dale,

who was blown off his feet on his way to the bus station.

We found a woman's or a man's skull which had gone through railings.

Into the worst of it went the ambulance crews of Belfast.

It was just devastation, complete devastation.

Buses were burning and people were running about.

John Knox was a part-time fireman.

Well, there was obviously lots of smoke

and fire from the building. People seemed to be going in and out,

as if they were going in and out of clouds,

and it wasn't always possible to see the bodies on the ground clearly.

Andy Jenkins had been dealing with the Ormeau Avenue bomb

when Oxford Street went off.

We actually had a tarpaulin out

and most of the chaps that were there

were over and were looking, and it was absolutely horrendous.

I don't know whether there were mangled bodies and bits and pieces,

it was unbelievable.

Some of the crew were given plastic bags and a shovel

to go round collecting bits of bodies.

We got two or three different patients, as you would call them,

to take into the ambulance,

but they weren't really patients for us at that particular time.

When I saw the ambulance crew bringing one of the bodies

out of the bus station, there wasn't a stitch on him.

His body was just like a raw piece of meat.

You knew what you were handling and we knew it was somebody's loved one.

We were told to stand by

and that we would have to take these people to the Royal

to get them certified.

When we got to the Royal, one of them was so badly injured

that they had to get a special doctor down for to look at it

to try and make up his mind whether it was a male or female.

It wasn't just the mutilated bodies

that shocked the rescue workers that day.

There was a large group of people standing down at the markets area,

and every time a bomb went off they jeered and shouted and yelled...

as if they thought it was a good thing.

Jack Campbell, who'd been leaning on the car that exploded,

was blown onto the bus station roof.

By the standards of the day, he had a remarkable escape.

He was practically unrecognisable.

His teeth had been blown out, his arms were broken,

his legs were broken, his ribs were broken.

A lot of the skin on his body had been blown off,

the jelly in the back of his eyes had been shaken up.

When they looked, they did realise that it was him

and that he was just about alive.

In Cavehill, the five children aged from three to 11

had managed to get out of the sweet shop,

but had to step over the shop owner, Vera Boden.

Just in front of me, I remember this distinctly,

was this Boden sister.

Her clothes were torn to shreds and there were hacks out of her body

and I remember looking at this and I just couldn't take it in.

Vera Boden survived the bomb but was badly injured.

For the rest of her life, she needed constant care.

I remember, even as a nine-year-old, counting one, two, three, four, five,

and I said, "Oh, thank goodness, there's five of us".

You know, "That's OK, five's OK".

I went into the fruit shop and I seen a piece of hair and that,

and I went to pull it away...

and I seen a young fella, I just seen his face,

and he was blew to pieces.

Stephen Parker risked his own life

warning other people to get away from the bomb.

When it exploded, he was hit with the full force of the blast

and died instantly.

Then I went in to the bakers' shop and there was an old woman lying.

The woman was 68-year-old Bridgetta Murray.

It was a very safe, nice area,

you would go about your daily business and then,

all of a sudden, a massive explosion just removed her from this earth.

Then we came up here and there was some other woman lying here, she was dead.

Margaret O'Hare had parked her Mini right beside the car with the bomb.

As she ran to find her children, it exploded.

She died instantly. She was just 35.

18 bombs had exploded in less than an hour.

The final explosion of the day was at Great Victoria Street Station.

A bomb in a van went off at four o'clock.

The IRA had planted 23 bombs.

They had intended their bombing spree to be even bigger,

but two failed to go off and two were defused.

I remember wakening up in a hospital bed with my mother and father there,

and the first thing I seen was a cage over my legs,

and the fear, this total fear of, where are my legs?

I ended up in blind panic, as you can imagine, when I got home.

Pram sitting in the driveway, nobody there, empty house.

Within minutes, people seemed to emerge from everywhere...

Don't ask me, I don't really know where they came from.

They'd obviously been told and were waiting on my return.

I had to pass Limestone Road corner, where the bank was.

Then I had to pass Oxford Street bus station.

Milkman Richard Young, who had been in a cafe on the Cavehill Road

had a miraculous escape - he passed THREE of the explosions.

I heard all the bombs going off, obviously,

but no idea where they were till I got home.

Not everyone was so lucky.

Because I'd just had the conversation with him,

I heard the news but it didn't click because I had just spoke to him

so I thought, "It can't be him".

I can certainly remember, about 6:30pm, all getting a bit anxious

what might be happening.

We'd no word from my dad.

I think the whole thing got a bit of a blur from that point on.

I remember being put in front of the telly,

watching The Monkees...

# And people say we monkey around But we're too busy singing... #

'..being given these strawberries.'

Just sitting there staring at the TV and, I think, shell-shocked.

# ..to put anybody down... #

Even up to the last minute, the prospect of political talks had remained alive.

Three days before Bloody Friday,

an IRA delegation had a secret meeting

with the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson.

The man who set it up was Dr John O'Connell,

an elected member of the Irish Labour Party.

On the afternoon of Bloody Friday,

leading IRA man Joe Cahill arrived at a house in Dublin

to discuss a possible new ceasefire with him.

He went to the house at 4pm, but Joe Cahill was running late.

He'd been in Belfast and was on his way back.

Joe Cahill arrived at the house

but was very distracted

and didn't really give my grandfather his full attention

and was more concerned with hooking up an aerial

into a television in the house...

and he saw the images coming through of Bloody Friday.

He became upset with Cahill, saying, you know,

"How could you do this?" You know?

"Things were going so well,

"we were so close to a peace, how could you do this?"

Cahill, without even looking at him, and completely unapologetically,

said, "This is the way it has to be until they come to their senses."

And my grandfather says that as he watched the images on the television

he became physically sick and very, very upset.

He felt utterly betrayed.

Dr O'Connell wasn't alone in those feelings of revulsion.

My mother and I were sitting by the fireside watching

teatime television news.

We watched as they shovelled up the pieces.

Our telephone rang, and when we answered the call

we were told by my uncle that Tom had been killed.

Yes, his body was blown to pieces.

There was nothing - there was nothing to bring home.

Joan and her uncle were taken to Musgrave Street Police Station

to identify her cousin's personal items.

There were several boxes,

big cardboard boxes with all kinds of everything in there.

Handbags, shoes, bits of clothing, jewellery...

My uncle had told him that Tom had a ring,

a signet ring with his initials on it.

And so they produced the ring

and said that the only means they had

of identifying Tom was by his thumbprint.

And it was devastating to watch my little uncle as he took that ring.

18-year-old Billy Irvine had a tattoo on his right arm.

That was the only way his brother could recognise his body.

Billy Crothers - who had gone home at lunchtime with his wage packet -

could only be identified by his clothes.

It was lucky, because the guy across the road knew exactly

what Billy was wearing, and he had to go to the morgue

and he could only identify Billy's body by his jumper.

Stephen Parker's parents faced the ordeal of identifying his body.

My wife waited outside and his body was very badly...

His face, his head, was very badly, you know, well...disfigured,

and it wasn't possible to recognise him as my son.

I felt sorry for the man in the mortuary.

He came up and he said, "I don't think that's your son."

I said, "Look in the pockets."

And, of course, he pulled out a box of safety matches.

And, of course, Stephen had fooled me two nights before.

He was always buying these trick games and so on.

-They were joke matches?

-Joke matches, yes.

Stephen received a posthumous award for bravery

for warning people away from the bomb that killed him.

The scenes at the bus station were unimaginable.

It was hours before anyone could be sure who had lived and who had died.

There were six deaths.

Among them, the aspiring footballer 15-year-old Billy Crothers.

Billy Irvine, only working that day

because he'd swapped shifts with a colleague.

And Tom Killops, clerk in the parcels office.

The three bus workers died together,

searching for the car that contained the bomb.

Jackie Gibson, bus driver and father of five,

was struck by shrapnel as he paid in his day's takings.

Two soldiers from the Welsh Guards were killed.

Philip Price, 27, had been clearing the area around the bus station.

And Stephen Cooper, the driver, died the day before his 19th birthday.

It was the next morning.

My husband was away at the time,

so my parents wouldn't tell me when I was on my own. Em...

So it was the next morning that my father came down to tell me.

Afterwards, there were claims and counter-claims

about what telephone warnings were given.

None, said the police, that gave them time to act.

Because there weren't mobile phones in those days

and they had to rely on public telephones

or phones in the houses of supporters,

that was a precarious situation.

The IRA blamed the police and army,

saying THEY hadn't responded to the calls.

"The IRA set out to cause economic damage and gave warnings

"to avoid any civilian casualties.

"If the British authorities had acted as they should have

"there would not have been any casualties."

The truth was, in most cases the IRA HAD given warnings.

But in the chaos they had created, they were of little use.

Normally the IRA weren't bad at giving warnings in time,

but when you've got so many places where they've laid bombs,

you're going to get people moving from one bomb in to another.

The system couldn't possibly have coped with Bloody Friday,

the number of hoax bombs, the number of incidents.

Because the IRA brought the road system to a complete standstill,

they couldn't get through the traffic

to attend to these incidents.

That was the story of the Cavehill attack. There was a warning.

But the bomb sat for an hour in a street busy with shoppers

because the police couldn't get to it.

At first, the IRA thought Bloody Friday had been a big success.

Bradley told me that he and his commanding officer

had gone to the top of one of the high flats in the New Lodge

to watch the bombs going off.

And they could hear the crump and bang, and watch the black smoke.

It was only when they came down

they realised that there were so many casualties

and that it had been a complete mess.

The following Sunday, members of the Belfast IRA

met in a house in Beechmount Grove in West Belfast.

Some joked that the bombing would "toughen the bastards up."

But others said it was "a fuck-up and a bollocks."

I remember my Uncle Hugh clinging to the walls.

And, as a nine-year-old, it was just extraordinary.

The house was full of people,

and he was actually clinging onto the walls with grief.

I mean, his grief was unbelievable.

We buried her on our 12th wedding anniversary.

Billy Crothers had been waiting for a letter from the shipyard.

It came just after he died.

He got word to say they had an apprenticeship for him.

But...it was too late then.

We'd had the bomb at the bus station

and that was it.

I found it so hard.

I mean, Billy is with me every day.

It's just... Excuse me.

I'll never forget. Never, ever.

I mean, you don't expect to bury your brother when he's 15, do you?

Not in them sort of circumstances anyway.

For the Parker family, life was never the same.

Reverend Parker set up the anti- violence movement Witness for Peace

and detailed every death in the Troubles.

But eventually, worn down by the violence

and by their own memories, they emigrated to Canada.

Stephen lived every minute of his life.

This is the one thing - he never sat still for a moment.

Many's a time I said to him "Oh, for goodness' sake, sit still."

Now I just wish he was here, making all the noise again.

I could say, "Sit still, Stephen. Be quiet."

130 people were injured. Philip Gault was one of them

My leg was sliced round the back and then up to the knee.

The leg was basically hanging off then.

It had basically been cut open

with all the nerves and the muscles severed.

So the muscle has gone from here and here...

Philip has been left with one foot that hasn't grown since he was nine.

It's about a size four and a half.

These days, he's a health and safety officer, living with constant pain.

Because he has a job, he has to pay for his treatment himself.

You know, it's one thing having the pain in the first place.

It's another thing now being told,

"Well, now you have to pay to have the pain."

You're talking an average of maybe £60-70,000 spent over 40 years.

I'm actually financially paying for somebody else's criminal activity.

For Hugh, the strict rules of the compensation system

added to his grief.

Because Margaret had no income, she was deemed to be no loss.

She would have got compensation for injury.

But because she was killed, had no income - no compensation.

I just feel...

If you want to call it an insult to Margaret's memory,

that everybody just passed her by as if she had no meaning in life.

It wasn't pounds, shillings and pence,

it was just the sheer disregard for human life.

There was a compensation payment in the end.

I got paid for the Mini. It was blown to pieces.

Jack Campbell lived out the rest of his days

with shrapnel from the Oxford Street car bomb in his body.

It sometimes worked its way out.

And when it did that it caused great pain.

If he had a pain in his face and he rubbed it like that,

a bit of black shrapnel would come out.

The bomb had permanently damaged his lungs.

He eventually died from his injuries - 25 years later.

He just said his greatest wish would be for a new pair of bellows,

and that would have changed his life again.

He had been in Atlantic convoys during the war,

and he said if Hitler couldn't beat him,

he was pretty sure he wasn't going to let somebody destroy his life by being blown up at his day's work.

Family and housekeepers helped Hugh raise his seven children -

the youngest just a year old when their mother died.

I coped. I just said, "If I have to do this, I must do it." You know?

And I did.

I had to get up in the morning, get to work, try to organise things.

You can't sit back, as I say,

trailing the ball and chain behind you.

It's too much of a load, so you have to look for the children

and see what you can do, and get on with things.

The O'Hare children

grew into doctors, dentists and business executives,

making a success of the lives their mother never lived to share.

For all but the grieving families,

Bloody Friday was just a single thread

in the tapestry of the Troubles.

They felt they were the forgotten victims.

A lot of people feel that they don't have a hearing.

It just seemed to meld into history.

You didn't discuss it and wouldn't have been found discussing it.

It was nearly expected, you know, stiff upper lip,

get yourself together, get on with it.

It was a very cold, callous world.

But that's how people survived the Troubles back in the '70s.

Around 150 IRA members carried out the bombings that day.

Just three were convicted and only one served a jail term.

The IRA never attempted anything on the same scale again.

Shortly after Bloody Friday,

Seamus Twomey, the Belfast commander, left for Dublin.

On the 30th anniversary in 2002,

the IRA apologised for killing civilians on that day.

Last year, Gerry Adams was asked what role he played.

None.

I regret very much that we had a conflict.

I regret that so many people died in the course of that conflict,

most particularly innocent civilians,

people who had no role to play whatsoever,

were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And I think all of that is something that I'm very, very sorry about.

The day before Bloody Friday, Stephen Cooper wrote home.

He said he was enjoying himself in Belfast

and his work was interesting.

The biggest question with anyone that dies suddenly like that is why?

An innocent young man, gone.

Without, you know, living properly.

I don't really know what their thinking is

and I never could figure it out. Absolute mindless morons

who would plant a bomb outside a block of small shops.

Who are the customers going to be at 2pm on the Friday afternoon?

Women and children.

I would quote the American playwright

who said that there's no flag large enough

to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

And I think that's all I could say

because it was all done, I suppose, in the name of the flag.

It doesn't matter what the flag is, it was a shameful act.

The only question I'd ever ask is,

did they achieve anything by blowing me up?

I don't care what they say about the peace process.

Did they achieve anything by blowing me up in '72?

I was a nine-year-old child.

Explain how that achieved a goal,

because it's beyond me.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd