Mountbatten usually holidayed at his summer home, Classiebawn Castle, in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, a small seaside village between Bundoran, County Donegal, and Sligo town on the northwest coast of Ireland. The village was only 12 miles away from the border with Northern Ireland and near an area known to be used as a cross-border refuge by IRA members.[77][78]
Despite security advice and warnings from the Garda Síochána, on 27 August 1979 Mountbatten went lobster-potting and tuna fishing in a thirty-foot (10 m) wooden boat, the Shadow V, which had been moored in the harbour at Mullaghmore. IRA member Thomas McMahon had slipped onto the unguarded boat that night and attached a radio-controlled fifty-pound (23 kg) bomb. When Mountbatten was aboard en route to Donegal Bay, just a few hundred yards from the shore, the bomb was detonated.
The boat was destroyed by the force of the blast, and Mountbatten's legs were almost blown off. Mountbatten, then aged 79, was pulled alive from the water by nearby fishermen, but died from his injuries before being brought to the shore.[78][79][80] Others killed by the blast were Nicholas Knatchbull, the 14-year-old son of his elder daughter Lady Brabourne; and Paul Maxwell, a 15-year-old from County Fermanagh who was a crew member.[81] The Dowager Lady Brabourne, his elder daughter's 83-year-old mother-in-law, was seriously injured in the explosion and died from her injuries the following day.[82] Lord and Lady Brabourne, Nicholas Knatchbull's mother and father, along with his twin brother Timothy, survived the explosion but were seriously injured.[83]
The IRA issued a statement afterward, saying:
The IRA claimed responsibility for the death of Lord Louis Mountbatten. This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country.[77]
Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams said of Mountbatten's death:
The IRA gave clear reasons for the execution. I think it is unfortunate that anyone has to be killed, but the furor created by Mountbatten's death showed up the hypocritical attitude of the media establishment. As a member of the House of Lords, Mountbatten was an emotional figure in both British and Irish politics. What the IRA did to him is what Mountbatten had been doing all his life to other people; and with his war record I don't think he could have objected to dying in what was clearly a war situation. He knew the danger involved in coming to this country. In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland.[84]
On the day of the bombing, the IRA also ambushed and killed eighteen British Army soldiers, sixteen of them from the Parachute Regiment at Warrenpoint, County Down, in what became known as the Warrenpoint ambush.[78] Thomas McMahon, who had been arrested two hours before the bomb detonated at a Garda checkpoint between Longford and Granard on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle, was tried for the assassinations in the Republic of Ireland, and convicted by forensic evidence supplied by Dr. James O'Donovan that showed flecks of paint from the boat and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes.[85]
Thomas McMahon (born 1948) is a former volunteer in the South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and was one of the IRA's most experienced bomb-makers.[2]
McMahon was convicted of the assassination of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten of Burma and three others (including two children and an elderly lady) at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in the west of Ireland.[3]
He planted a bomb in Shadow V, a 27 ft fishing boat belonging to Mountbatten at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, near Donegal Bay. Lord Mountbatten was killed in the bomb blast along with three other people; The Dowager Baroness Brabourne, Mountbatten's elder daughter's mother-in-law; his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull; and a 15 year old crewmember Paul Maxwell.
The IRA claimed responsibility for the act in a statement released immediately afterwards. In the statement from the organisation they said: "This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country."[4]
McMahon was arrested by the Garda (the Republic of Ireland's police force) two hours before the bomb detonated, having been initially stopped on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle.[4]
He was tried for the assassinations in the Republic of Ireland, and convicted by forensic evidence supplied by Dr James O'Donovan that showed flecks of paint from the boat and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes.[2] He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder on 23 November 1979, but was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.[5]
After his release, Toby Harnden in Bandit Country reported that McMahon was holding a tricolour in the first rank of the IRA colour party at a 1998 IRA meeting in Cullyhanna.[6] However according to a BBC report, McMahon has said that he had left the IRA in 1990.[3]
He has twice refused to meet Paul Maxwell's father, John, who has sought him out to explain the reasons for his son's death. In a May 2011 interview for The Telegraph, Maxwell stated that he had "made two approaches to McMahon, the first through a priest, who warned me in advance that he thought there wouldn't be any positive response. And there wasn't. I have some reservations about meeting him, obviously – it might work out in such a way that I would regret having made the contact. On the other hand, if we met and I could even begin to understand his motivation. If we could meet on some kind of a human level, a man to man level, it could help me come to terms with it. But that might be very optimistic. McMahon knows the door is open at this end.".
He likewise refused requests from Knatchbull's twin brother, who lost an eye in the same explosion. The latter, however, has forgiven McMahon and other members of the IRA who committed the act.
His wife has stated "Tommy never talks about Mountbatten, only the boys who died. He does have genuine remorse. Oh God yes.” [7]
McMahon lives with his wife Rose in a hillside bungalow in Lisanisk, Carrickmacross, County Monaghan. He has two grown sons. He helped with Martin McGuinness's presidential campaign in 2011, erecting posters for McGuinness around Carrickmacross.
