The Weaver Street bombing in Belfast 1922: violence, politics and memory

Abstract

On 13 February 1922, an unidentified person threw a bomb into Weaver Street, which was full of Catholic children at play, killing four children and two women. The bombing became a locus of political controversy between the British government, the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State and the government of Northern Ireland, and became the archetypal story of innocent Catholic lives taken by the intercommunal conflict in the six counties which became Northern Ireland in 1920‒22. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the role of this intercommunal conflict in Irish and British politics, using the Weaver Street bombing as a case study. This article analyses nationalist representation of the conflict as an orchestrated campaign against Catholics, ‘a pogrom’; unionist representation of the conflict as loyalist self-defence against the I.R.A.; and the British government's effort to publicly maintain neutrality in the conflict.