BRIGHTON BOMBER Patrick Magee, who has expressed sorrow to the daughter of one of the victims of the Grand Hotel attack in 1984, last night refused to do the same to others injured or killed.
Mr Magee and Jo Berry, whose Tory MP father, Anthony, was one of five killed in the attack, both spoke at an event in the House of Commons hosted by an all-party conflict resolution committee.
Lord Norman Tebbit, who was injured in the attack and whose wife was left paralysed, condemned Mr Magee’s presence in the Commons on the 25th anniversary of the bombing.
In a letter to the Forgiveness Project, which helped bring Mr Magee and Ms Berry together, Mr Tebbit, who attend the unveiling of a plaque in the hotel this week, accused the group of “rewarding and encouraging murder”.
Saying that he came to the Commons “with as much humility as I can muster”, Mr Magee said he believed he had no choice other than to join the IRA when he did.
“In my conscience I look back to those days and I don’t think that I would have made another choice,” he said, adding that his small nationalist community had “lived under oppression”.
Lord Bernard Donoghue, who is married to Ms Berry’s step-mother, said he had been “very impressed by the sincerity” of Mr Magee, and said he did not believe it “realistic” to ask Mr Magee “to repent”.
However, he said Mr Magee had apologised and expressed sorrow to Ms Berry for killing her father, and he wondered if Mr Magee could now do the same for those others hurt, killed, or bereaved in the Brighton attack.
Mr Magee refused two opportunities to do so, saying he had begun a dialogue years ago with Ms Berry that had resulted in his expressing sorrow to her for killing her father. “However, I come from a community that has suffered much and suffered at the hands of those who abused their power and who have never expressed sorrow,” he told Lord Donoghue.
Some, he said, were trying to “create a hierarchy of guilt”, but he would not descend into “glib expressions of sorrow” when others were not willing to express their sorrow “for their culpability”.
Ms Berry said that returning to Westminster “feels like coming home” to the place where she spent so much of her childhood with her father.
“Pat lives with the reality that he killed a wonderful man.
“He knows my pain. He knows my daughters’ pain. From being a faceless enemy, he knows my dad as a human being,” said Ms Berry, who has met Mr Magee almost 60 times. Mr Magee was sentenced to eight life sentences in 1986. However, he was freed in 1999 under the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
The Brighton Bomb
FIVE PEOPLE were killed and 34 injured on October 12th, 1984, when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative Party was holding its annual conference.
Former Tory cabinet minister Lord Tebbit's wife Margaret was paralysed in the bombing.
Afterwards the IRA issued a statement claiming it had placed a 100lb bomb in the hotel. It read: "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war."
The bomb went off at 2.54am when the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher was still working on her speech. She insisted the conference opened on schedule at 9.30am and told the conference: "This attack has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail."
The bomb had been planted by Patrick Magee when he checked into the hotel under a false name, a few weeks earlier. He was caught and sentenced to a minimum of 35 years, but was released in 1999 under the Belfast Agreement.
ALISON HEALY