30 years on: Remember the victims of the Shankill bombing
Posted by admin978 on October 23, 2023 · Leave a Comment
Thirty years ago today, IRA terrorists killed nine local residents, including two children, by exploding a bomb inside Frizzell’s fish shop on Shankill Road, Belfast.
Frizzell’s was one of those family-owned shops that are fast disappearing from the UK’s high streets (where it’s now unusual to find a specialist fishmonger, or indeed any store owned by a local family rather than by a big chain or immigrants).
Opened by Alan Frizzell in 1966, it was at the heart of the Shankill community for 27 years until it was destroyed by the IRA bomb, which was partly intended to murder senior officers of the Loyalist UDA who regularly met in a room above the shop. (They failed in this intention because the bomb exploded prematurely.)
By bombing Frizzell’s, the IRA also knew that they would kill and maim large numbers of civilians, including children, just as they had done eight months earlier when they exploded a bomb outside a McDonald’s in Warrington, Cheshire, killing two young children. The Warrington bombing (like the bombing of the Harrods department store in London) was almost certainly carried out in cooperation with the IRA’s militant left-wing allies in England, who organised ‘Anti-Fascist Action’.
Today we remember the victims of the Shankill bombing and all the Ulstermen and Britons who were killed by the IRA and other republican murderers.
And in remembering, we also resolve that we shall never surrender to the IRA’s subversive agenda of breaking up the United Kingdom. Quis separabit.
