seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

The 1992 Manchester Bombing

Leave a comment

The 1992 Manchester bombing is an attack by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on Thursday, December 3, 1992. Two 2 lb. (0.9 kg) bombs explode in the center of Manchester, one close to Kendals department store, which now operates as House of Fraser, the other near Manchester Cathedral, wounding 65 people and damaging several buildings.

The first bomb to explode is inside a car that is parked at Parsonage Gardens in the commercial district of the city. The car bomb is behind a Kendals department store and explodes at 8:31 a.m., injuring six people.

The second bomb explodes on Cateaton Street between a market and Manchester Cathedral at 10:09 a.m., wounding 58 people and damaging many buildings. The impact smashes the face of the cathedral clock and its stained glass windows. The cathedral provides refuge to hundreds of people who move out of Deansgate. The total wounded in the two blasts was sixty-five.

A phone call is made after the bombings, claiming more devices are in the city, forcing the police to evacuate the entire city centre of shoppers and tell others to remain indoors. No other bombs are found. The damage is estimated to have been to the value of £10 million (equivalent to about £19 million in 2017).

The day after the bombing, the Provisional IRA claims responsibility for the act, which is part of their wider bombing campaign throughout the 1990s in England. Four years later, they detonate another, much more powerful bomb in Manchester.

Advertisement

Author: Jim Doyle

As a descendant of Joshua Doyle (b. 1775, Dublin, Ireland), I have a strong interest in Irish culture and history, which is the primary focus of this site. I am a Network Engineer at The Computer Hut, LLC, which is my salaried job. I am a member of the Irish Cultural Society of Arkansas, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (2010-Present, President 2011-2017) and a commissioner on the City of Little Rock Arts+Culture Commission (2015-2020, 2021-Present, Chairman 2017-2018).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s