News Letter bomb: A 1972 terrorist attack which failed to silence this newspaper

We often remind readers of the News Letter’s long history, dating back to 1737.

We are very proud to be the oldest English language daily newspaper in the world.

But today we remember one of the darkest days in our long history — the 1972 IRA bomb outside our then Belfast offices.

The blast in Donegall Street was the first major car bomb of the Troubles.

No News Letter staff were killed, but seven people lost their lives — three refuge collectors, two police officers, a van driver and a French polisher.

The distinguished journalist, Jim McDowell, then a News Letter reporter who would go on over his career to become a scourge of loyalist and republican terrorists, remembers the day vividly.

It was, he says in our supplement in the middle of this newspaper, an attack “on the home of the unwavering unionist newspaper, the Belfast News Letter”.

The IRA failed to silence this newspaper then, as it was always going to fail, just as it failed in its other terror attacks on other newspapers including the Belfast Telegraph.

But it succeeded in ending the lives of seven human beings who were in a busy civilian area, and it maimed others.

The horror of the Donegall Street atrocity did not lead to a rethink of IRA tactics. On the contrary the car bomb strategy, coming just after the former method of leaving devices in bags (as at the Abercorn restaurant earlier in March 1972), became a favoured one.

The 1972 assault on the News Letter is barely known by the general public today. This is because it was one of many terror massacres, and also because many such victims choose – entirely understandably – not to emphasise their loss.

So today, above all, we remember Ernest McAllister, Bernard O’Neill, Ernest Dougan, Samuel Trainor, James Macklin, Sydney Bell and Henry Miller.

• See Monday’s News Letter for the supplement

News Letter marks 50th anniversary of attack on its office building that claimed seven lives

Victims’ group: There has been no justice, accountability or truth over the atrocity in Donegall Street in 1972

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