IRA Verified Manchester Bomb Alert with Dairy Brand Codeword
The Provisional IRA used the word 'Kerrygold' to authenticate its telephone warning before detonating a massive device in Manchester city centre in June 1996.
IRA Verified Manchester Bomb Alert with Dairy Brand Codeword
Three decades after the event, it has become public that the verification term the Provisional IRA employed for its telephone warning ahead of the 1996 Manchester explosion was the name of an Irish butter brand.
On 15 June 1996, a device weighing approximately 1.5 tonnes ripped through Corporation Street in Manchester's shopping district. The blast remains the biggest explosion on British soil since the aerial bombardments of the Second World War. Remarkably, the attack claimed no lives, largely because shoppers and workers had been cleared from the area after a credible warning was received and acted upon.
The timing appeared deliberately chosen to maximise chaos. The Euro 96 football tournament was under way across England, with Manchester due to stage a fixture between Germany and Russia the next afternoon. Additionally, the date fell shortly before Father's Day, meaning retail outlets were packed with customers.
How the security services knew the threat was genuine has now been explained: the caller used an agreed password. According to TheJournal.ie, that password on this occasion was "Kerrygold".
The use of passwords to confirm the authenticity of bomb warnings was pioneered by the IRA and later copied by militant groups elsewhere. The practice is credited to Shane Paul O'Doherty, a member active in the 1970s. Dissatisfied with how law enforcement handled his alerts about a device on Oxford Street in London, he reasoned that police switchboards were drowning in fake calls. He approached the Press Association and proposed a solution: future genuine warnings would include a specific identifier. To prove he was not bluffing, he described two minor devices set to explode imminently. The identifier he chose was "Double X", a phrase he later admitted was selected purely for its theatrical sound.
O'Doherty reported the identifier to the IRA's leadership body, but uptake was slow. Some operational units feared that possessing knowledge of the secret term could be treated as evidence of membership, making volunteers wary of adopting the system.
Over time, England developed protocols for refreshing these identifiers. Northern Ireland presented greater difficulties. The proliferation of armed factions, together with the danger of bogus warnings or attacks staged by rival Loyalist groups to implicate republicans, undermined the reliability of the system there.
A 1997 report in the UK Independent outlined the chain of communication: an IRA representative would pass the current identifier to Irish police in Dublin, who relayed it to the Royal Ulster Constabulary's Special Branch in Belfast. From there it was circulated discreetly to interested parties on both sides of the Irish Sea, including news organisations. Usually a single IRA identifier was active at any moment, though splinter groups might operate separate ones. Any paramilitary outfit requesting to register an identifier was granted an initial hearing without prejudice.
American newspaper the Los Angeles Times once claimed the IRA preferred identifiers loaded with nationalist resonance, offering "Easter Rising", "Michael Collins" and "Shamrock" as examples. The choice of a commercial food product for the Manchester operation sits oddly with that theory, prompting speculation about whether marketplace imagery was displacing traditional republican iconography by the mid-1990s.
Technological change also affected the system. Mobile telephony was still nascent in 1996; Eircell's 088 network ran on bulky Motorola handsets. Contrary to what might be expected, cellular calls were more traceable than fixed-line ones at that stage, and tracing yielded richer data. Manchester detectives established that the warning call originated from an Irish mobile number. This improved traceability arguably made secret identifiers less critical as a safeguard against hoaxes.
The physical destruction in Manchester was immense. Buildings were demolished, glass rained down across a vast radius, and the bill for reconstruction stretched into nine figures in sterling. The episode stands among the most destructive republican operations ever carried out in mainland Britain.
That a household dairy brand served as the key to a warning about such devastation captures the peculiar contradictions of the Troubles, where lethal violence and everyday commercial references became intertwined in unexpected ways.
Source: TheJournal.ie