I’m seeing threads from people justifiably worried about recent terrorist attacks and…

[CurlewKate]

..it made me wonder about the time when there were frequent IRA bomb threats and actual bombs in mainland UK. I was working in central London during those years, and I seem to remember us just accepting it as a fact of life-almost an inconvenience. That’s really weird, isn’t it? Was I just young and insensitive and feeling immortal? Or am I misremembering?

No we all just got on with it. But I think people today do the same thing. I don’t see anyone ch going their behaviour due to worrying about this.

There wasn’t 24 hour rolling news or social media updates to scaremonger and terrify everyone, so mostly you just forgot about it and carried on with your life.

Yes news cycle, camera phones, social media all amplify things enormously and whip people into a frenzy

Did you see the news item last week about people in Kentucky who had assumed they could vote in the NYC mayoral election because of how much media attention it was getting?

I was telling my adult children about regularly being evacuated from underground trains because of bomb scares and my prominent thought being “Shit-I’ll be late!”

Earlier this year we had the Manchester synagogue attack - has there been other attacks this year?

Late 1990’s I remember getting off the DLR and walking from Bank to Holborn for work. I lived in Canary Wharf but grew up in another country. It was very, very surreal to walk past all the armed police and car barricades in the City and CW. I’d never seen anything like it.

edited to add - and yes, you just got in with it and worried about being late

I was working around Westminster and I remember the concrete barriers and guards all around, also on a train once and there was a bomb scare, It stopped at a station for a while and I leapt off to use a phone box to say I was stuck and just managed to jump back on as it started off again (why did I get back on? Who knows). I was a bit nervous when we were working close to potential targets, but the actual attacks were mainly pretty ransom.

I think the main differences were that IRA attacks generally happened after a bomb threat was called through so there was a chance to evacuate people whereas now there is no warning at all. Also, many were targeted at political figures or events as opposed to just civilians carrying out normal day to day activities. Appreciate this wasn't always the case, for example the Omagh bombing, but this is why people were so shocked and horrified at that one. It was an attack on civilians on the street, with no warning for the area - much more similar to what happens now sadly.

I came close to being in 2 bomb attacks, Earls Court and City of London. An ex boyfriend lost friends in the Birmingham pub bombings. At work we had regular bomb scares and had to be evacuated.

There were lots of procedures introduced - litter bins were removed and eventually shrapnel free ones were introduced.

We started signing in and out of buildings. I had an American boyfriend at the time and he’d arrived here sympathetic to the IRA. As he gradually realised the various impacts we took for granted, he got quite bolshy in the other direction.

We were warned not to approach our stolen car if we saw it, in case it had been boobytrapped.

I think a bomb feels more like an act of nature/god/bad luck than a man with a knife or gun wantonly stabbing/shooting people. That feels very personal, somehow.

As others have said, the main difference was that the IRA warned in advance, which caused huge disruption but not actual death all that often.

Islamist terrorists have so such scruples. They just want to kill us. No interest in compromise or a solution that allows people to live alongside each other.

And constant news doesn’t help.

Yes, I grew up in Liverpool in the 1960s/70s and remember frequent bomb scares.

My school even had bomb drills-I don't remember us thinking it was much different to a fire drill.
As other posters said we didn't have rolling 24 hour news and social media whipping people up to a state of fear.

In the 1980s we were all preparing for nuclear war.
I remember the winter of discontent, three day weeks and power blackouts.
There is a tendency to hark back to some seemingly golden time when the sun shone all day and life was simple and sweet.
For most people those days didn't exist and we just got on with life.

Bomb scares became quite prevalent, idiots prank calling from telephone boxes. The IRA had known code words so most hoax calls would be obvious but they’d have to be seen to keeping everyone safe. I know someone who was sacked for making a hoax bomb threat to her own workplace in central London because she was late for work, she’s still an eejit 50 years later.

The IRA gave warnings, so there was a set of norms that we could adapt to. Occasional disruption, no bins, very unlikely any civilians will be targeted. You can learn to live with anything if you know the parameters.

The situation we’re heading into is rolling chaos, random attacks on ordinary people, overlaid with an inconsistent state, ever-changing rules on what’s acceptable, some groups favoured but not others, etc.

It’s the arbitrariness of it all. You can’t adapt to it, there’s no sense of certainty. That’s why it produces stress in a way the IRA did not*. I can’t believe we’ve had this happen to us.

• it might have been different at the very start of the troubles eg Guildford, and from time to time in Ulster itself eg Enniskillen; whether it felt at those times like there was still some kind of rules I couldn’t say.

Yes, we 100% had bomb drills at my primary in the 80s. Different to a fire drill -- for a fire drill, the bell would ring continuously, for a bomb drills it was the same alarm but rung intermittently, and we'd have to assemble at the absolute furthest point of the school field, rather than in lines on the playground for a fire drill. If forgot entirely about this until you mentioned bomb drills.

Also ingrained in me is deep discomfort of unattended bags/luggage. I've lost count of the number of times I've reported this in recent years, including on a tube platform interchange, and Eurostar terminal (where they gave absolutely zero fucks).

We didn't do bomb drills (rural south west) but yes to the discomfort about unattended luggage. I only realised how ingrained it was when living overseas and seeing an unattended bag at the airport and no-one in the least bothered! The people I was with (German and Australian) thought my concerns were just weird...

But i couldn't relax until we had gone well past (it was at a point where everyone had to queue).

We just got on with life. I was just a few hundred yards away from the dock lands bomb, lost 2 windows at work, went back the following week once police cordon was lifted and windows fixed

On the up side, if you were running late for work you could get away with telling the boss your train had been paused due to a suspicious package and they accepted it, no proper internet then and as they were really frequent they assumed true (weren’t reported in newspapers or on tv)

In 1993, the IRA placed bombs in bins in a shopping street in Warrington. Two children were killed, and lots of people were injured. The IRA blamed the killing of the children on the police because they said they had failed to act quickly enough on the warning they were given.

One of the biggest differences is that the ira generally wanted to stay in the shadows, they wanted to stay alive themselves so no suicide bombs, nothing that could be linked to an individual and would leave coded messages because they were wanted to disrupt economically most of all, and a few specific individuals not Joe Public which got them a bad reputation with their funders (Americans)

Yes that makes sense, you were warned.

Other terror attacks thrive more on fear - Manchester Arena where so many children and young people were, 9/11 the scale of it

No warnings, and people ready to martyr to the cause

Warnings didn't necessarily mean no casualties though.
I remember going into town on Saturdays with my friend and we would see individual shops bring evacuated.
In busy built up town centres there would be no chance of ensuring a big enough cordon unless there had been hours warning.
And I don't recall any warning given for Brighton or I assume they wouldn't have blown up the govt.

My uncle was an ambulance man and was called to central Bristol when the IRA gave warning that a bomb had been set. He and his colleagues sat around on dustbins waiting for instructions. A bomb went off nearby and they rushed to the scene.

The IRA would set a small bomb to attract people and emergency service workers to the area and then would detonate a second, more powerful bomb to cause maximum destruction and risk to life.

Shortly after the first bomb the second one exploded. It was in one of the dustbins my uncle and his colleagues had been sitting on.

Many people were hurt but luckily nobody was killed. A very near miss for my uncle.

They were scary times, but like now, people have to get on with their lives.

Yes people just got on with things.

Coconuts

That's my usual reaction to scare-mongering.

The old urban myth, or real fact, that more people are killed world wide by falling coconuts than by shark attacks. Its actually true. Coconuts kill about 150 a year, last year there were 4 shark attacks, world wide.

Closer to home, I just checked trampolines. Just as a matter of random interest. 13000 injuries last year, in England alone.

How Many Injuries Are Caused By Trampolines? — Happy Hideouts

I don't see the rage bait media calling for trampolines to be banned.

In the mid 80s the media was obsessed with Rottweiler dog attacks, every tabloid had a story every day for about a year, then suddenly something or someone else was a bigger threat and Rottweilers apparently stopped attacking people. The media is a manipulative bastard.