Canary Wharf Bombing

The 1996 bombing at Canary Wharf in East London marked the end of an 18-month Irish Republican Army (IRA) cease-fire and jeopardized the peace process in Northern Ireland.

A conflict began in the late 1960s between Northern Ireland's Protestants, who wanted the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland's Roman Catholics, who wanted it to become part of the Republic of Ireland. On August 31, 1994, after months of secret talks with the British and Irish governments, the IRA, the largest paramilitary group on the Catholic side (also called the Nationalist, or Republican, side), announced a cease-fire. In October, the major Protestant (also called Loyalist or Unionist) paramilitary groups followed suit. After 30 years of guerrilla warfare and several previous failed attempts at negotiations, these mutual cease-fires represented the best opportunity up to that point to achieve a lasting peace.

The major parties to the negotiations were all deeply suspicious of the motives of their counterparts, however. Furthermore, the government of Britain's Conservative prime minister John Major depended on his party's slim majority in Parliament, and he could not afford to lose the support of the Unionist members of Parliament from Northern Ireland. To appease the Unionists and win some assurance of the IRA's commitment to peace, Major demanded that the IRA decommission some of its arms before commencing serious talks.

IRA leaders balked, seeing this request as a confirmation of their worst fear: that the British government was merely using the negotiations as a stalling tactic in order to diminish the IRA's military capabilities. Negotiations halted for 18 months, and frustrations grew. Various envoys, including former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, tried to achieve some form of compromise. On February 9, 1996, at around 5:40 p.m., a telephone call to Scotland Yard announced the end of the IRA cease-fire and the resumption of military operatis.

At 7:00 p.m., a bomb exploded at the Canary Wharf economic development site in East London's Docklands, killing two workers. The 81-acre site is home to Britain's largest office tower and is filled with offices, shops, and apartment complexes. The fertilizer-based bomb weighed several tons and was hidden in a truck. Despite the bomb's great size, fewer than 50 people were injured because police had cleared the area; property damage, however, totaled an estimated £140 million (U.S. $215 million).

Peace negotiations ceased, not to resume until 1997, when a new British prime minister, Tony Blair, took office. IRA member James McArdle was convicted for his part in the bombing and sentenced to 25 years in a 1998 trial. He has since been released, as have almost all paramilitary prisoners, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended formal hostilities in Northern Ireland in 1998.