Two Bombs

Spick & span in a full-dress Admiral's uniform King George stood with Queen Elizabeth one day last week in Belfast's City Hall on a State visit to the capital of loyal Northern Ireland.

BOOM! In the middle of the welcoming addresses a bomb exploded. It had been placed with a length of fuse in a warehouse a quarter of a mile from the route over which the royal party had just passed. It looked like an "Irish gesture." not intended to destroy but merely to attract attention. Nobody was killed. The King & Queen hearing the noise, started with alarm but were quickly informed that a leaking gas main had accidentally exploded. Not until the royal visit was over did Ulster's police reveal the truth, that the Irish Free State's Republican Army, most antiroyalist element in Ireland, had tried to make the King's visit a fiasco, had in the past 24 hours burned 28 customs houses on the Free State-Ulster border, dynamited a railway bridge near Dundalk.

Few days later a second deathless bomb exploded not far from Belfast's West End police barracks. Nearby a man lay badly beaten up. This, police thought, was another "gesture" to frighten into silence anybody who knew too much.

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