The La Mon bombing was a devastating 1978 attack on a restaurant in Belfast: a device containing a napalm-like substance killed a dozen people and horribly burned thirty more. In the book’s retrospective account, the bombing also marks a turning point in the life of Wee Pat McClure, head of the Unknowns. His arrest in its aftermath left him shaken and worried about how much the authorities knew about the republican organization.

The bombing and its immediate aftermath

The account gives the human scale of the attack in stark terms: twelve people were killed, and thirty were badly burned by the device’s napalm-like substance. It does not describe how the device was planted or identify its perpetrators. Instead, it follows one consequential aftermath through McClure, whom a later interviewee had seen shortly after the bombing.

McClure was arrested after the blast and held by police for a week. The experience unsettled him, particularly because he feared that the RUC Special Branch appeared to possess information about the Provos. The book records his response in a brief declaration: “I’m out.” In this account, the words register not simply as disillusionment but as a decision to withdraw from the danger of the organization’s exposed and scrutinized world.

McClure’s departure and later life

Not long after the bombing, McClure left Belfast with his wife and children. People who knew him had believed the family moved to Canada; the later investigation established that they had instead settled in the United States, in Connecticut. The correction matters because McClure’s disappearance from Belfast had become part of the mystery surrounding his fate.

McClure died in 1986. For the five years before his death, he had worked as a guard at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a high-security prison. When Hugh Feeney, a fellow Unknown, learned that McClure might have become “a screw,” he was quietly appalled. The contrast between McClure’s standing among his former comrades and his later prison work gives the bombing’s aftermath an unexpected coda: the man who had led the Unknowns had left the country, entered a different kind of institution, and remained absent from the republican world that had revered him.

Violence and the work of memory

The bombing appears in a narrative concerned not only with the violence of the conflict but with what could be known about it afterward. The author’s inquiry first encountered McClure through accounts of his arrest, fear, and departure; only later did the family’s actual destination and his prison employment come to light. The movement from rumor to correction illustrates how the history of the conflict survived in fragments, and how a person’s private life could remain hidden even from former comrades.

That uncertainty sits within a broader post-conflict landscape the book describes as unresolved. Belfast could present the Troubles as distant history through tourist tours of former flashpoints, even as political divisions and the authority of paramilitary hierarchies remained consequential. The La Mon bombing’s place in this account therefore extends beyond the casualties of 1978: its aftermath becomes one of the traces through which a concealed and contested past is recovered, without turning the recovered details into a complete explanation of the event.