The Burning of the British Embassy in Dublin was a protest action in February 1972, following the killing of thirteen people by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday. In the book’s account, it belongs to a chain of events in which the failure of peaceful protest appeared increasingly stark, republican anger intensified, and political life moved into a new phase.

Political setting and the immediate catalyst

The event followed years of Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland. Catholics were often excluded from good jobs and housing, while the devolved government at Stormont had, for half a century, never placed a Catholic in executive office. Against this background, students began a peaceful march from Belfast to Derry on 1 January 1969, protesting systemic discrimination. Some marchers believed peaceful action could expose injustice and help redraw the conflict’s divisions; they were prepared for the possibility of injury, but their hope was that change might come through protest rather than violence.

The book sets the embassy burning against the sharp reversal of that hope on Bloody Sunday. On a Sunday in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on a crowd in Derry, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen. The soldiers claimed they had been fired upon and had shot only people carrying weapons; neither claim proved true. The massacre became a galvanising event for Irish republicanism. Dolours and Marian Price were in Dundalk when they heard reports of it, and the news filled them with overpowering anger.

The burning and its immediate aftermath

In February, protesters set fire to the British Embassy in Dublin. The account presents the action as part of the public response to Bloody Sunday, not as an isolated episode: the sequence runs from the massacre, through the protesters’ anger and the embassy fire, to a further political rupture the following month. In March, the British government suspended Northern Ireland’s Unionist parliament and imposed direct rule from Westminster.

The book does not detach the embassy fire from the broader movement between street protest and armed struggle. The sisters’ anger arose in a setting where peaceful demonstrators had been shot, while their own earlier experiences had already brought them into the Provisional IRA. The massacre intensified an existing conflict; it did not, in their case, mark the beginning of their involvement.

A point in a longer political trajectory

The episode sits within a history that later moved beyond armed action as well as deeper into it. In March 1972, Dolours Price travelled to Milan to speak about the oppression of Catholics and the lack of civil rights. Years later, she adapted to electoral politics: she canvassed for Gerry Adams, supported his campaign for West Belfast, and ferried voters to polling stations. Placed beside the embassy burning, that later work makes visible the changing forms through which republican politics pursued influence, without suggesting that the fire itself caused the later shift.

Violence and the struggle over memory

The book’s epigraph frames war as something fought both on the battlefield and in memory. Its later account of Northern Ireland describes a conflict that ended without a clear victor or a formal process for deciding how it should be commemorated or understood. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he had been in the IRA, and Sinn Féin’s effort to discredit critics as dissidents or opponents of the peace process, form part of that unsettled legacy. The burning therefore appears not only in a chronology of escalation but within a larger account of how violence, political narratives, and silence continued to shape the public memory of the conflict.