The 1993 IRA bomb that killed two young boys in Warrington was “the closest I ever came to giving up” on peace in Northern Ireland, said former British prime minister John Major during an event to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the atrocity.
Mr Major was joined at the commemoration in Warrington, England, on Monday by Heather Humphreys, the Minister for Social Protection, Martin Fraser, Ireland’s Ambassador to Britain, and the families of Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball, the two children who died in the attack.
A public ceremony was held at noon in the centre of the town, a couple of hundred yards from where two bombs exploded on Bridge Street, killing three-year-old Johnathan Ball on the day. Twelve-year-old Tim Parry died from his injuries five days later, while 56 people were injured.
Speaking at the event, Mr Major said the then-nascent peace process was almost derailed by the attack, which came following a vague IRA warning to police. The bombs exploded on a Saturday afternoon, the day before Mother’s Day, as crowds thronged Warrington’s shopping streets.
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“But I couldn’t give up [on peace],” said Mr Major who is, along with former taoisigh Albert Reynolds and John Bruton, widely acknowledged as having laid much of the groundwork for the peace process that ultimately led to the Belfast Agreement in 1998, the year after he left office.
“I realised that if we did [give up], there would be even more bombs, more grieving families,” said Mr Major.
Nine months after the bomb, the British and Irish governments made a joint statement known as the Downing Street Declaration, which laid out the principles of a peace deal.
In his speech Mr Major lauded the campaigning work of Tim Parry’s parents, Colin and Wendy Parry, who two years after the death of their son founded the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Peace Foundation, which operates a peace centre in Warrington.
Schoolchildren from Seamount College in Kinvara, Co Galway, are in the foundation’s centre this week, doing peace workshops with children from Belfast and Warrington.
At a gathering in the peace centre following the commemoration in the town, Ms Humphreys also paid tribute to the foundation.
“It’s not until you come and see places like this as a minister that you realise how important they are,” she said.
Ms Humphreys said she believes the Warrington attack “changed Ireland” in 1993, and also impacted upon the course of the Troubles due to the level of public revulsion at the killing of two children.
“It changed people in Ireland. I feel that that atrocity led in to what became the Good Friday Agreement,” said the Minister.
“It refocused minds on the importance of peace and how we needed to work it so that it didn’t happen again. We all see things through the prism of our own families.
“As I sat there today [at the commemoration], I thought about my little grandson. He’s just short of three years old, the age Johnathan Ball was when he lost his life. We all could have been in that place.”
Colin Parry said the IRA turned his “family of five into a family of four”. But “good came from evil”, he said.
Mr Parry highlighted Harriett Vickers, who was two weeks old on the day of the bomb and was in the town that day with her mother, Bronwen Vickers, who lost her leg in the attack. Harriett Vickers has worked for Mr Parry’s peace foundation for the last eight years, he revealed.
