An IRA commander named several times as the man who built the Birmingham pub bombs told the Irish Mail on Sunday this week: ‘I didn’t do Birmingham, but I blew up Mountbatten.’
Michael Hayes, speaking outside his Dublin home, denied being involved in the November 1974 Birmingham bombings – claiming instead to have ‘saved lives’ after defusing a third bomb.
Lord Mountbatten, a cousin to the UK’s late Queen Elizabeth II and a grand-uncle to King Charles III, was killed in Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo in the summer of 1979.
Also killed were Mountbatten’s 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull; Doreen Knatchbull, Nicholas’s grandmother and Paul Maxwell, a teenage boy from Enniskillen serving as crew.
Last night, Paul’s mother said she would welcome a police probe into Hayes’s claims. Another IRA man, Thomas McMahon, was convicted of the crime in November 1979.
A 1979 report on his conviction in the Washington Post told how gardaí were keeping open the Mountbatten file in the belief that up to seven others were involved in the plot.
Hayes, who served two and a half years for possession of firearms and explosives and IRA membership, shortly before the Mountbatten attack, has previously taken collective responsibility for all the actions of the IRA in a TV interview with journalist Chris Mullins, but has never before explicitly linked himself to the most high-profile atrocity in the Troubles.
According to Mr Mullins, Hayes was the deputy head of the IRA’s England department in the late 1970s and 1980s ‘I’m commander and chief of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. I command,’ Hayes told the MoS this week.
‘I blew up Mountbatten. I blew up Harrods as well. I blew up Margaret Thatcher. I didn’t bomb Birmingham, I saved lives.’
Asked about McMahon, Hayes replied: ‘I was his commanding officer. Tom McMahon, he was only a participant. I am an explosives expert, I am renowned.’
‘I went to Libya, trained there as an explosives expert.’
Asked if he was saying that he was the man who designed the bomb, he boasted: ‘Yes, yes, I blew him up. McMahon put it on his boat and I am an explosives expert.’
‘McMahon was only participating. I planned everything, I am commander-in-chief. My men are loyal to me,’ Hayes said.
Asked why he was speaking now, he replied: ‘I went on television publicly claiming full responsibility for it. I took collective responsibility for everything.’
When it was put to him that he had never previously linked himself to the Mountbatten murder, he said: ‘I’m telling you now.’
When pressed for details of the operation in Mullaghmore, he told the MoS he had been in Sligo.
‘When I killed him in Sligo? I was in Sligo,’ he said.
‘[It took] about a week [to plan], we were efficient and I’m very calm. I’m not afraid of anything, I fear nothing.’
Asked to confirm again he designed the bomb, he said: ‘Yes. He [McMahon] put it on board the boat. Francis McGirl made a bs of it and now he’s dead.’
‘I blew up Earl Mountbatten in Sligo, but I had a justification, he’d come to my country… Look at the Famine, An Gorta, are we to forget that? The Black and Tans?’
‘He came to my country and murdered my people and I fought back. I hit them back.’
There is no bar to prosecution of Troubles era offences and any immunity as part of the Good Friday Agreement applies only to convictions handed down for crimes that have been prosecuted before the courts.
Legal experts told the MoS this weekend that Hayes’s comments made him liable for prosecution if An Garda Síochána and the Director of Public Prosecution pursue him.
A legal source with direct experience of Troubles-era prosecutions said: ‘This person (Hayes) could very reasonably be prosecuted and I think there is a general distaste in the Republic, at least, about not going after IRA men who’ve committed atrocities.’
Asked if gardaí would investigate Hayes after his comments, a Garda spokesman told the MoS: ‘As a matter of public record two persons were prosecuted in respect of the murder of Lord Mountbatten.’
‘One individual was acquitted and a second individual served a sentence of imprisonment and was subsequently released pursuant to the Good Friday Agreement. An Garda Síochána does not comment on named persons.’
However, this prospect was not something that worried Hayes, who said when asked if he feared prosecution: ‘No, I fought a war, I was justified. I fought a war.’
Asked about the two boys murdered that day he replied: ‘Them children were not supposed to be on the boat in the first place. ‘I did not kill the children. I don’t kill women and children.’
Asked if he regrets the explosion that day because of the children who died he said: ‘Blowing up Mountbatten? No.’
Pressed on the children who died, he relented. ‘Yes, I regret that,’ Hayes said.
‘That wasn’t meant to happen. I’m a father. I’m not made of stone. Of course, I regret it.’
The children were ‘casualties of war’ he told the MoS.
Asked how he felt when he heard they died, he said: ‘I was sickened, I cried. I’m a father and grandfather myself. I’m not made of stone. I know what it’s like to be in pain, I still cry for my mother.’
Hayes lives in a small terraced house in Dublin 8 and is well-known by his neighbours.
He told the MoS he ‘took collective responsibility for all actions carried out by republican forces’.
‘I took collective responsibility for everything. I took collective responsibility for all actions of the IRA on television. Chris Mullins interviewed me and I said: “Don’t throw bricks in glass houses, let me tell you half our population was decimated through hunger, starvation, An Gorta”.’
In 2017, Hayes, who has been named several times publicly as the man who built the Birmingham pub bombs, apologised for the atrocity that killed 21 people.
Six Irishmen, who later became known as the Birmingham Six, were wrongly convicted of the bombings.
Speaking to the BBC in 2017 for a special programme on the atrocities, Hayes claimed his unit had not intended to kill civilians.
He told the BBC there was an eight-minute delay on the explosive devices that went off at the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town pubs in Birmingham.
Asked by the BBC if he planted the devices, Hayes replied: ‘No comment. No comment.’
He continued: ‘I’ve been accused of a lot of things, without one shred of forensic evidence, without one statement made, without one witness coming out against me.’
Hayes revealed that the bombs were made of gelignite explosive and were left by two IRA operatives.
Asked if he was one of those individuals, Hayes replied: ‘I’m not telling you.’
He also told the BBC he defused a third bomb on Birmingham’s Hagley Road when he heard about the carnage in the city-centre pubs, saying ‘we were horrified’ because ‘it was not intended’.
He told the MoS he did not regret doing the interview, saying: ‘No, I took collective responsibility for everything. My men are devoted to me and didn’t have to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. People say I’ve gone down in history now.’
In 1990, a year before the Birmingham Six walked free, ITV’s World in Action named Hayes and three other men they said were responsible for the bombings.
The investigative TV show accused Hayes of being one of those who planted the pub bombs. It also alleged he helped to plan other IRA attacks in England including the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings in 1982, in which 11 people died.
Hayes was also accused of being part of the IRA unit that bombed Harrods department store in London in 1983, killing six people.
He was also, according to World in Action, connected to the bomb at the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, when the IRA tried to kill Margaret Thatcher and murdered five people.
Hayes has not been charged with any of the above offences and no one has been convicted of the Birmingham bombings. Questioned about the 1974 Birmingham bombings, the 50th anniversary of which takes place this November, Hayes continues to deny planting any device.
He said people were not supposed to die and ‘warnings were given’. ‘I didn’t do the Birmingham bombings. I defused a bomb on the Hagley Road… [inaudible] so I saved lives.’
Asked why he has been named as being responsible, he replied: ‘Even though I didn’t do it? Because the Birmingham police convicted the wrong men, beat confessions out of them. They couldn’t convict me, I pointed out to them: “Don’t throw stones at glass houses because of your own people.”’
Hayes also told the MoS that he was involved in the 2004 Northern Bank robbery and claimed he is worth ‘millons on paper’. ‘I carried it out and planned it,’ he said.
Hayes told the MoS that he and his children are educated, that he speaks eight languages and that he has ‘travelled the world’.
Asked if he was proud of his IRA past, Hayes said he was most proud of his children. ‘There’s nothing romantic about wars, but it has to be fought. As long as there is division in the country there is always going to be prejudice, you know that. I done what I had to do. I don’t glorify it, I never glorify it, but I took collective responsibility for everything.
‘I eventually came to the conclusion there is nothing romantic about war, it’s bestial. I had to fight because I wanted to fight. Now my children are educated, my war is over.’
Last night Mary Hornsey, 84, mother of victim Paul Maxwell, said she would welcome a police probe into Hayes’s claims ‘to see whether or not he was involved, whether he really was the commander who did give the order’.
She added: ‘I think we would require justice, not revenge. Not revenge – I would never want revenge – just justice.’
She said of the loss of her son: ‘It’s something that never goes away, never will go away. People don’t really understand what happens when something like that happens, a loss of a child.’
Last night Ian Paisley Jr, the Democratic Unionist Party MP for North Antrim in Ulster, called for An Garda Síochána to ‘immediately’ investigate Hayes’s claims.
‘The sensational, shocking and blood-curdling statement by a self-confessed, cold-blooded murderer ought to be immediately investigated by the police and the man brought to justice,’ he said.
Author Dr Andrew Lownie, who wrote a book about Mountbatten and his wife, said: ‘This appears to be an extraordinary confession – and may get us closer to the truth of what happened that day.’
For 40 years Sinn Féin, which was the political wing of the IRA, refused to apologise for the murder, insisting that Lord Mountbatten knew the danger he was putting himself in by visiting Ireland.
But in 2021, days after Prince Philip’s funeral, Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald said she was ‘sorry’’ for the ‘heartbreaking’ assassination.
