Mother who lost teenage son in IRA Mountbatten boat bomb speaks out ahead of terror victims' day: 'The only thing worse than having your child murdered would be having your child become a murderer'

Mary Hornsey’s middle child Paul Maxwell was one of those on Lord Mountbatten’s fishing boat when the IRA blew it up off the coast of Co Sligo in 1979, with five other people on board.

She was speaking to the News Letter on Monday night ahead of an annual gathering at Stormont of people bereaved in the Troubles, to mark ‘European Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism’.

Now aged in her 80s and based in Helen’s Bay, on the eastern outskirts of Belfast, she recalls being in the village of Mullaghmore on the day of the bombing itself, and hearing the detonation.

Paul was a crew member on the boat (called Shadow V), and she was sitting on the patio of a cottage on what was an “absolutely beautiful day” when “we heard this enormous bang”.

She said: “I knew immediately – I knew – that Paul was dead.

"I said to my husband: Paul’s dead. He said: Don’t be silly. I said: He is!

"My husband, he went down to investigate, and came back and said: Yeah – he is dead.”

Mary thinks she must have passed out, because she awakened some time later in a friend’s house.

Then she and the family – her then-husband, and their two daughters – packed up and headed back home to Enniskillen, through checkpoints the police had set up to try and find the bombers.

"Five of us had come down to Mullaghmore,” said Mary.

“Only four of us went back.”

Along with Paul and Lord Mountbatten himself, one of the royal’s relatives, 83-year-old Doreen Knatchbull, along with her 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, were also killed. The two others somehow survived the blast and the sinking.

Mary recalls taunts at the time about how the IRA had “got” Mountbatten.

"I just wondered about the people who had done that,” she said.

“They go back to their family. Do they boast to their sons: We killed two teenage boys today?

"What do you say to your family?

"It’s awful, the most dreadful thing on Earth, to be the mother of a murdered boy.

"But it must be even worse to be the mother of someone who actually murdered.”

European Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism is a yearly commemoration, originally started by terror victims and the EU to mourn the loss of 193 people to Islamic extremists in Madrid on March 11, 2004.

Though she had never been to one of the commemorations before, Mary feels “it will make people realise what grief is like and what it does”.

"I think getting together will let people see how awful it is, really,” she said.

Sponsored by the TUV’s Jim Allister, and backed by all of the main parties except Sinn Fein, the 2023 Belfast event will be held tomorrow [Tuesday] at 11am.

It will include contributions from Tanya Williams-Powell and Paul Wilson.

Ms Williams-Powell is one of the granddaughters of Thomas Niedermayer, the German businessman who was “disappeared” by the IRA in 1973, aged 44, and found buried in a heap of rubbish years later (his wife Ingeborg, daughters Gabi and Renate, and Gabi’s husband Robin, later went on to kill themselves).

Mr Wilson is son of Paddy Wilson, a 39-year-old Belfast-born leading light in the SDLP, who was stabbed to death by the UDA along with his secretary Irene Andrews, 29, also in 1973.

Since the last annual victims’ day, regional Sinn Fein leader Michelle O’Neill infamously remarked that there had been “no alternative” to the Troubles.

Specifically, Ms O’Neill had been asked by the BBC’s Mark Carruthers: “Do you still feel that it was right at that time, for members of your family and others, to engage in violent resistance to British rule here?”

And she had replied: “I think at the time there was no alternative, but now thankfully we have an alternative to conflict...”

Mary told the News Letter: “There’s always an alternative. I think that’s the easy way out, to say there’s no alternative.

"We could say that about everything, couldn’t we? To say there’s no alternative is simplistic.”

In her own case, there was “just so much malice in what was done; obviously it was well-planned-out and thought about”.

She also said she does not tend to view herself as a “victim”, but rather a “survivor” who has managed to live through the trauma of losing Paul.

Asked if she had a message for the people responsible today, she said: “That is a very, very hard question.

"I think I probably would say: hatred can make people do unimaginable things.

"They can say it’s because of a cause, or this, that, or the other.

"But human life is sacred. It’s very sacred. And it’s not up to others to take it.

"I think I’d also mention: If someone did that to your child, how would you feel?”

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