Published On Jan 31, 2019
Documentary about the assassination of Lord Louis Mountbatten by the Provisional IRA. Mountbatten was Prince Philip's cousin, the last Viceroy of India and Prince Charles's mentor. He was also a lover of Ireland. He holidayed at his home in the seaside village of Mullaghmore Co. Sligo, each summer.
On 27 August, 1979, Mountbatten, his family and a local teenager, Paul Maxwell, who he had hired as a deck hand, went lobster-potting in his boat.
An IRA member, Thomas McMahon, had slipped onto the boat the previous night and attached a radio-controlled bomb. When the boat was en route to Donegal Bay, McMahon detonated the bomb from shore. The blast killed Mountbatten, his elder daughter's son and Maxwell.
The aftershocks were immense. The event rocked the sleepy fishing village, provoked an already delicate political situation and devastated families from both sides of the divide.
On the day of the bombing, the IRA also ambushed and killed eighteen British soldiers in Northern Ireland, sixteen of them from the Parachute Regiment, in what became known as the Warrenpoint ambush.or Narrow Water ambush, in Co Down. It was the deadliest attack on the British Army during the Troubles