Claudy bombing 50 years on: Survivor says ‘I’m angry – and even now I’m still afraid’

Marjorie Leslie, a retired social worker who suffered serious injuries when the bomb outside the Beaufort Hotel exploded in the village on July 31, 1972, said she believes there are still people who could offer answers to the questions the victims and survivors have been asking for the past five decades.

Speaking to the News Letter ahead of the anniversary, she said: “It is an emotional time, and I have become angry. I am angry at the fact that no one who was responsible was ever brought to justice.

“I am angry at the failure of the people who could have given families the answers to their questions to ever come forward.

“I am angry at the fact that there are people who have taken their secrets to their graves.”

The former senior IRA figure Martin McGuinness, who went on to become Deputy First Minister, died in March 2017 without having ever met with families to address claims the bombing of Claudy had been ordered by the ‘Derry City Brigade’ of the IRA.

The Catholic priest Father James Chesney, whose suspected involvement in the bombing was found in a 2010 report by Police Ombudsman to have been covered up in a “collusive act” by the Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Office, died in 1980 without having been questioned by police about his alleged role in the atrocity.

Marjorie Leslie, meanwhile, said: “I still believe there are people out there who know about what happened in Claudy, who aren’t coming forward

“They may never come forward to give people the answers they deserve. What I want to know is: Why?”

“The blame lies solely, and firmly, with the IRA. But it was afterwards that the British government and the Catholic Church let us down badly.

“I am angry at the minute because the whole thing is all very fresh.

“You had to live with it. You had to work with it. I was petrified of bombs. Every family in Claudy was left behind. It’s very difficult for everybody. I was just so glad that I had my life, that I was spared.

“The thing that sticks so clearly in my memory was the fear. That sticks with you.”

Mrs Leslie described the immediate aftermath of the Beaufort Hotel blast on Church Street: “I thought no one is going to survive this day, we are all going to be dead.

“Obviously, panic set in. I ran. As I ran down, the garage at the health centre door was open because that’s where I ended up. It was sheer black.

“I really thought ‘this is the end’. In the garage I couldn’t see, and I thought the end of the world is here, this is it.

“But I sort of got myself gathered up, and then I could see light at the garage door.”

She made her way to the local health centre with the help of a neighbour, and was taken in the back of a van from the Desmond’s factory in Claudy to Altnagelvin hospital where she was treated for her injuries.

But it is the mental scars that feature most prominently in Mrs Leslie’s thoughts, 50 years later.

“I couldn’t get into a lift after it,” she said.

“I never went over the bridge in the city for four years after it. The thought of having to go through that again petrified me. I am still afraid.”