IRA orchestrates series of bombings in Ulster

August 7, 1981

The outlawed Irish Republican Army blitzed Northern Ireland with more than a dozen bombs, blasting railroad lines, a hotel, shops, offices, cars, and a British veterans club in the biggest IRA terror strike in two years. Six people were injuired. In the precisely orchestrated show of force, 14 bombs went off in two hours -- 11 of them in the first 60 minutes -- at locations more than a 100 miles apart.

The blitz followed the weekend deaths of two IRA hunger strikers in the Maze prison and came as another inmate slipped into a coma 47 days after beginning a fast of for political-prisoner status. (He has since been taken off the strike.)