Bloody Thursday In Birmingham

During a recent television interview, David O'Connell, chief of staff of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, issued a grim warning. Because of the "total indifference" of the British public to the "terrible war in Ireland," he said, the British "will suffer the consequences." O'Connell sanctimoniously promised that the Provisional I.R.A. would strike only at "economic, military, political and judicial targets." Last week the Irish militants made good their threat, but tragically they chose a target of a different and more innocuous sort.

On Thursday evening, two I.R.A. bombs exploded inside pubs in Birmingham, England's second largest city, leaving 19 people dead and 184 injured. It was the worst single bloodletting since the present agony in Northern Ireland began--costlier than even "Bloody Friday," July 21, 1972, when twelve people were slaughtered and 130 injured in a series of bombings in Belfast.

Shock Waves. The first warning of the impending tragedy came at 8:11 p.m., when an Irish-accented male voice telephoned the Birmingham Post: "There is a bomb planted at the rotunda [a 17-story office block]; there is a bomb planted in New Street in the tax office." The warning was instantly passed on to the police, and patrol cars raced to the area. A quick check at the tax office revealed nothing. Moments later, at 8:20 p.m., a vicious explosion ripped through the Mulberry Bush, a pub beneath the rotunda that was jammed mostly with young people, turning it into a nightmare of burned and dismembered bodies, moans of pain and screams of panic.

Two minutes later, a second bomb blast transformed the nearby Tavern in the Town into an even grislier scene. The shock waves of the explosion rebounded between the walls of the underground pub, turning flying debris into deadly missiles. Water poured onto the floor and the ceiling fell, as frantic survivors stumbled toward the exit over the bodies of the dead and maimed. Susan Edkin, 18, and her fiance were celebrating their engagement. "People were shouting and screaming," she said later. "I remember there was a man lying on the floor who couldn't see because his eyes had gone."

There was little doubt about the reason for the Birmingham atrocity. Two weeks ago, an I.R.A. terrorist named James McDaid, 28, blew himself to bits while planting a bomb in Coventry, 15 miles east of Birmingham. On Thursday, McDaid's body was to be flown from Birmingham to Belfast for a "military funeral" and burial. The Shin Fein, the I.R.A.'s political whig, planned to turn the moving of his body from a Coventry mortuary to a Birmingham airport into a defiant and inflammatory hero's farewell. Some 1,500 police were on hand to enforce a government ban on the demonstration. The Birmingham bombs were apparently set off in cruel revenge for the ban.

The explosions were also clearly part of a larger I.R.A. effort--inaugurated in March of last year with a bomb blast at the Old Bailey in London --to bring more of Ulster's terror to Britain. Although there are still doubts within the I.R.A. councils about the wisdom of this policy, it has given new exposure to the Provisional' campaign, which is lagging and stalemated at home. Their supporters are much less likely to criticize the Proves for bloodiness in Birmingham than they are for terror in Ulster.

Besides, while the British army is still rounding up I.R.A. terrorists in Ulster, English police have so far failed to crack any of the tiny "active service units" that have brought the bloody civil war across the Irish Sea to England. In London, Home Secretary Roy Jenkins at week's end pledged "emergency legislation" to combat the terrorists.

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