



Detectives investigating the IRA murder of 21 people in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings have interviewed the Provisionals’ director of intelligence at the time of the atrocity, who admitted he was debriefed after the attack.

Kieran Conway confirmed he was questioned by officers from the West Midlands police counterterrorism unit in Dublin on Friday.

The interview took place at Pearse Street Garda station in central Dublin under the terms of the mutual legal assistance treaties, which allow foreign police forces to question Irish citizens in the republic about crimes committed in other countries.

Conway said he “again repeated his personal shame and regret over the bombings, which he described as murderous and amongst the worst atrocities committed by the IRA”.

Now a solicitor in Dublin specialising in criminal defence, Conway voluntarily spoke to detectives in connection with his memoir of life inside the IRA, called South Side Provisional. In the book, Conway revealed certain details about the Birmingham pub bombings to which the IRA has never officially admitted.



No one has ever been convicted in relation to the atrocity in England’s second city, although six people served long sentences after being wrongly charged and found guilty of the bombings. They became known as the Birmingham six and, after a long campaign to prove their innocence, were freed by the court of appeal in 1991, having spent 16 years in prison.



Conway said the Birmingham bombs were a “total disaster”. He said the IRA unit responsible could not find a functioning telephone box to issue a warning in time to clear the bars in the city’s Bullring area, that could have prevented the mass loss of life.

For decades the IRA never publicly admitted responsibility for the atrocity but Conway said not only did the organisation bomb Birmingham but it knew the six jailed men were innocent “from the get go, from the very start”.

A statement issued by Conway’s publisher to the Guardian after his police interview said: “he had nothing to add to the few lines in his book and that the names of the bombers, and those who directed them, had been long in the public domain due to the work of Chris Mullin and other journalists.

“He said the only additional information he could give the police was the name of the man who debriefed the then O/C and adjutant of the IRA’s England command in the immediate aftermath of the bombings together with Dave O’Connell, but that he would not be prepared to do that.

“Mr Conway confirmed he was present in the house where the men were debriefed for other reasons and was later told by Dave O’Connell that the bombers were unable to locate a working phone box in time to ring in a warning. During the interview, which was attended by a British detective and which was recorded, Mr Conway also admitted he had been a member of the IRA from 1970 to 1975 and again from 1981 to 1993, when he left in protest at the IRA’s acceptance of the Downing Street declaration.”

It added that Conway “has no fear of being prosecuted for IRA membership more than two decades ago”.

Some relatives of those killed in the bombing have been campaigning through the Justice for the 21 pressure group for a fresh inquest into the murders and the reopening of one of the biggest cases of mass murder in British criminal history.

Two hundred people were seriously injured, many for life, by the blasts at the Tavern in the Town and the Mulberry Bush.



Those in the IRA unit responsible were sent over from Dublin and were named in a World in Action television investigation entitled Who Bombed Birmingham?, which set out to prove that the six imprisoned men were innocent. One of the Birmingham six, Paddy Hill, has become a strong supporter of the Justice for the 21 campaign.

Conway, who was the head of the IRA’s intelligence-gathering department for a period in the 1970s, has claimed in his book that members of the Dublin establishment, including a top banker, a stockbroker, a leading journalist and several mainstream politicians, helped the Provisionals in their armed campaign.



Elite figures ferried IRA weapons around in luxury cars and hid wanted activists in houses in some of the wealthiest areas of Dublin, such as Killiney, he alleged.