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Tag Archives: National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children


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The Second Warrington Bombing Attack

The second of two bombing attacks in early 1993 in Warrington, Cheshire, England, takes place on March 20, 1993. The first attack takes place on February 26, when a bomb explodes at a gas storage facility. This explosion causes extensive damage, but no injuries. In the March 20 attack, two smaller bombs explode in litter bins outside shops and businesses on Bridge Street. Two children are killed and 56 people are injured.

The attacks are carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). From the early 1970s, the IRA had been carrying out attacks in both Northern Ireland and England with the stated goal of putting pressure on the UK Government to withdraw from Northern Ireland. The IRA is designated a terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom.

Shortly before midday on Saturday, March 20, 1993, the Samaritans in Liverpool receive a bomb warning by telephone. According to police, the caller says only that a bomb has been planted outside a Boots shop. Merseyside Police send officers to branches of Boots in Liverpool and warn the Cheshire Constabulary, who patrols nearby Warrington. About 30 minutes later, at about 12:25 p.m., two bombs explode on Bridge Street in Warrington, about 100 yards apart. The blasts happen within a minute of each other. One explodes outside Boots and McDonald’s, and the other outside the Argos catalogue store. The area is crowded with shoppers. Witnesses say that shoppers flee from the first explosion into the path of the second. It is later found that the bombs had been placed inside cast iron litter bins, causing large amounts of shrapnel. Buses are organised to ferry people away from the scene and twenty paramedics and crews from seventeen ambulances are sent to deal with the aftermath.

Three-year-old Johnathan Ball dies at the scene. He had been in town with his babysitter, shopping for a Mother’s Day card. The second victim, 12-year-old Tim Parry, is gravely wounded. He dies on March 25, 1993, when his life support machine is switched off, after tests find only minimal brain activity. Another 54 people are injured, four of them seriously. One of the survivors, 32-year-old Bronwen Vickers, the mother of two young daughters, has to have a leg amputated, and dies just over a year later from cancer.

The Provisional IRA issues a statement the day after the bombing, acknowledging its involvement but saying:

“Responsibility for the tragic and deeply regrettable death and injuries caused in Warrington yesterday lies squarely at the door of those in the British authorities who deliberately failed to act on precise and adequate warnings.”

A day later, an IRA spokesman says that “two precise warnings” had been given “in adequate time,” one to the Samaritans and one to Merseyside Police. He adds, “You don’t provide warnings if it is your intention to kill.” Cheshire’s assistant chief constable denies there had been a second warning and says, “Yes, a warning was given half-an-hour before, but no mention was made of Warrington. If the IRA think they can pass on their responsibility for this terrible act by issuing such a nonsensical statement, they have sadly underestimated the understanding of the British public.”

The deaths of two young children ensures that the March 20 bombings receive major coverage in the media and cause widespread public anger. Shortly after the bombings, a group called “Peace ’93” is set up in Dublin. The main organiser is Susan McHugh, a Dublin housewife and mother. On March 25, 1993, thousands hold a peace rally in Dublin. They sign a condolence book outside the General Post Office and lay bouquets and wreaths, with messages of sorrow and apology, to be taken to Warrington for the boys’ funerals. Some criticise Peace ’93 for focusing only on IRA violence and for not responding to the deaths of children in Northern Ireland.

On April 1, 1993, the Irish Government announces measures designed to make extradition easier from the Republic of Ireland to the United Kingdom.

On September 19, 1994, Irish rock band The Cranberries release the song “Zombie,” which is written in protest of the bombings. The song goes on to become their biggest hit.

On November 14, 1996, the Duchess of Kent officially inaugurates a memorial called The River of Life, depicting “a symbol of hope for future generations,” in Bridge Street. It is developed in the aftermath of the bomb attack and commissioned by the Warrington Borough Council. The project, consisting of a symbolic water sculpture that features a commemorative plaque, is designed by the local primary school and Stephen Broadbent.

The parents of Tim Parry set up the Tim Parry Trust Fund to promote greater understanding between Great Britain and Ireland. The Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace works jointly with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) to develop The Peace Centre, close to Warrington town centre, which opens on the seventh anniversary of the attack in 2000. Its purpose is to promote peace and understanding amongst all communities affected by conflict and violence. The centre hosts an annual peace lecture, as well as being home to the local NSPCC and is the home of Warrington Youth Club until 2022.

The bombings receive further attention in 2019 after the Brexit Party selects former Living Marxism writer Claire Fox as their lead candidate in the North West England constituency for the 2019 European Parliament election. The Revolutionary Communist Party, of which Fox is a leading member in 1993, defends the IRA’s bombing in their party newsletter. Despite the controversy, which sees another Brexit Party candidate resign from the party list in protest at the comments, Fox and the Brexit Party top the poll in several areas of the North West, including in Warrington.

The killing of Ball and Parry is still on Cheshire Police’s list of unsolved murders.

A piece on BBC North West‘s Inside Out programme in September 2013 speculates that the bombing may have been the work of a “rogue” IRA unit, which was supported by the IRA but operated independently and who used operatives who were from England to avoid suspicion. The programme also examines a possible link between the attack and British leftist political group Red Action, though nothing is ever proven.

(Pictured: Army bomb disposal at the Warrington Bomb scene in March 1993, photo credit: Walker Howard)


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Birth of Noël Christopher Browne, Irish politician

Noël Christopher Browne, Irish politician who serves as Minister for Health from 1948 to 1951 and Leader of the National Progressive Democrats from 1958 to 1963, is born at Bath Street in Waterford, County Waterford, on December 20, 1915. He holds the distinction of being one of only seven TDs to be appointed to the cabinet on the start of their first term in the Dáil.

Browne grows up in the Bogside area of Derry. The Browne family also lives in Athlone and Ballinrobe for a period of time. His mother Mary Therese (née Cooney) is born in 1885 in Hollymount, County Mayo. His father Joseph Brown, an Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) sergeant, later works as an inspector for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and, partly as a result of this work, all of the Browne family becomes infected with tuberculosis. Both parents die of the disease during the 1920s. His father is the first to die, leaving only £100 behind to support a wife and seven children. Fearing that if she and the children remain in Ireland they will be forced into a workhouse, Mary sells all their possessions and takes the family to London. Within two days of their arrival, Mary is dead, later buried in a pauper’s grave. Of her seven children, six contract tuberculosis. Noël is only one of two Browne children to survive into adulthood after those bouts with TB.

In 1929, Browne is admitted free of charge to St. Anthony’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne, England. He then wins a scholarship to Beaumont College, the Jesuit public school near Old Windsor, Berkshire, where he befriends Neville Chance, a wealthy boy from Dublin. Neville’s father, the eminent surgeon Arthur Chance, subsequently pays Browne’s way through medical school at Trinity College Dublin.

In 1940, while still a student, Browne suffers a serious relapse of tuberculosis. His treatment at a sanatorium in Midhurst, Sussex is paid for by the Chance family. He recovers, passes his medical exams in 1942, and starts his career as a medical intern at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin, where he works under Bethel Solomons. He subsequently works in numerous sanatoria throughout Ireland and England, witnessing the ravages of the disease. He soon concludes that politics is the only way in which he can make an attack on the scourge of tuberculosis.

The poverty and tragedy that had shaped Browne’s childhood deeply affects him. He considers both his survival and his level of education a complete fluke, a stroke of random chance that saved him when he was seemingly destined to die unknown and in poverty like the rest of his family. He finds this completely distasteful and is moved to enter politics as a means to ensure no one else would suffer the same fate that had befallen his family.

Browne joins the new Irish republican party Clann na Poblachta and is elected to Dáil Éireann for the Dublin South-East constituency at the 1948 Irish general election. To the surprise of many, party leader, Seán MacBride, chooses him to be one of the party’s two ministers in the new government. He becomes one of the few TDs appointed a Minister on their first day in Dáil Éireann, when he is appointed Minister for Health.

A ‘White Paper’ on proposed healthcare reforms had been prepared by the previous government, and results in the 1947 Health Act. In February 1948, Browne becomes Minister for Health and starts the reforms advocated by the Paper and introduced by the Act.

The health reforms coincide with the development of a new vaccine and of new drugs (e.g., BCG and penicillin) that help to treat a previously untreatable group of medical conditions. Browne introduces mass free screening for tuberculosis sufferers and launches a huge construction program to build new hospitals and sanitoria, financed by the income and accumulated investments from the Department of Health-controlled Hospital Sweeps funds. This, along with the introduction of Streptomycin, helps dramatically reduce the incidence of tuberculosis in Ireland.

As Minister for Health Browne comes into conflict with the bishops of the Catholic Church and the medical profession over the Mother and Child Scheme. This plan, also introduced by the 1947 Health Act, provides for free state-funded healthcare for all mothers and children aged under 16, with no means test, a move which is regarded as radical at the time in Ireland, but not in the rest of Europe. Virtually all doctors in private practice oppose the scheme, because it would undermine the “fee for service” model on which their income depended.

The Church hierarchy, which controls many hospitals, vigorously opposes the expansion of “socialised medicine” in the Irish republic. They claim that the Mother and Child Scheme interferes with parental rights, and fear that the provision of non-religious medical advice to mothers will lead to birth control contrary to Catholic teaching. They greatly dislike Browne, seeing him as a “Trinity Catholic,” one who has defied the Church’s ruling that the faithful should not attend Trinity College Dublin, which had been founded by Protestants and for many years did not allow Catholics to study there.

Under pressure from bishops, the coalition government backs away from the Mother and Child Scheme and forces Browne’s resignation as Minister for Health. Following his departure from government, he embarrasses his opponents by arranging for The Irish Times to publish Taoiseach John A. Costello‘s and MacBride’s correspondence with the Catholic hierarchy, which details their capitulation to the bishops.

The controversy over the Mother and Child Scheme leads to the fall of the coalition government in which Browne had served as a Minister. But Church opposition to socialised medicine continues under the subsequent Fianna Fáil-led government. The hierarchy does not accept a no-means-test mother-and-infant scheme even when Fianna Fáil reduces the age limit from sixteen years to six weeks, and the government again backs down.

After his resignation as Minister for Health, Browne leaves Clann na Poblachta, but is re-elected to the Dáil as an Independent TD from Dublin South-East in the subsequent election.

Browne joins Fianna Fáil in 1953, but loses his Dáil seat at the 1954 Irish general election. He fails to be selected as a candidate for the 1957 Irish general election and he resigns from the party. He is re-elected at that election for Dublin South-East as an Independent TD.

In 1958, Browne founds the National Progressive Democrats with Jack McQuillan. He holds onto his seat at the 1961 Irish general election, but in 1963, he and McQuillan join the Labour Party, disbanding the National Progressive Democrats. However, he losess his seat at the 1965 Irish general election.

Browne is re-elected as a Labour Party TD at the 1969 Irish general election, again for Dublin South-East. He does not seek a nomination by the Labour Party for the 1973 Irish general election, but instead wins a seat in Seanad Éireann for Dublin University. He remains in the Seanad until the 1977 Irish general election, when he gains the Dublin Artane seat as an Independent Labour TD, having again failed to get the Party nomination.

In 1977 Browne is the first Irish parliamentarian to call for law reforms in regards to homosexuality, which is illegal at the time, and in 1979 is one of the few Irish politicians to attend the opening of the Hirschfeld Centre, Dublin’s first full-time LGBT community space.

Upon its formation, Browne joins the new Socialist Labour Party and is briefly its only TD, securing election for Dublin North-Central at the 1981 Irish general election. He retires from politics at the February 1982 Irish general election.

In 1990, a number of left-wing representatives within the Labour Party, led by Michael D. Higgins, approach Browne and suggest that he should be the party’s candidate in the presidential election due later that year. Though in failing health, Browne agrees. However, the offer horrifies party leader Dick Spring and his close associates for two reasons. Firstly, the leadership had secretly decided to run Mary Robinson, a barrister and former senator. Secondly, many around Spring are “appalled” at the idea of running Browne, believing he has “little or no respect for the party” and is “likely in any event to self-destruct as a candidate.” When Spring informs Browne by telephone that the party’s Administrative Council has chosen Robinson over him, Browne hangs up the telephone.

Browne spends the remaining seven years of his life constantly criticising Robinson who had gone on to win the election, thus becoming the seventh President of Ireland, and who is considered highly popular during her term. During the campaign he also indicates support for the rival Fine Gael candidate, Austin Currie.

After retiring from politics, Browne moves with his wife Phyllis to Baile na hAbhann, County Galway. He dies at the age of 81 in the Regional Hospital, Galway, on May 21, 1997. He is buried in a small graveyard near Baile na hAbhann.