‘There was an almighty explosion

David Irwin, Nigel Carr and Philip Rainey tell their memories of the horrific day they were caught up in an IRA car bomb blast

Even now, 30 years on, David Irwin can recall the events of April 25, 1987, almost frame-byframe. He remembers waiting for his Ireland team-mate Nigel Carr to arrive at his Belfast home, and thinking it was peculiar, as Carr was never late for anything. He remembers the battered old Ford Orion Ghia in which they were to share the driving to Dublin for Ireland’s first World Cup training session, and the run of green lights that seemed to be speeding their journey. And he remembers picking up Philip Rainey, the Ulster and Ireland full-back, after he had been dropped off by seven-monthspregnant wife, Susan.

Rainey had jumped into the back seat behind Carr, and the tedium of the journey was relieved by the joshing and jibing you would expect from three men in the prime of their rugby careers, just weeks away from the inaugural World Cup in Australia and New Zealand the following month.

Carr and Rainey were both 27, Irwin 28. The world was still at their feet. Yet as the car approached the border with the Republic of Ireland at Killeen, that world was seconds away from being blown apart.

All three players already had plenty of stories to tell. Irwin, a teak-tough centre, had reached his career pinnacle, having been a stalwart of the British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand in 1983, starting in three of the four Tests.

Rainey had etched his name into Irish rugby folklore by landing a last-gasp long-range penalty to secure a famous victory for Ulster against the Grand Slam-winning Australia side in November 1984.

Carr, though, was the man of the moment. He had burst on to the international scene in 1985 and the tearaway openside flanker had been the key cog in Ireland coach Mick Doyle’s ‘give it a lash’ game plan that clinched the Triple Crown that year.

He had been a certainty for the Lions tour of South Africa in 1986, but when politics intervened and the tour was cancelled, he was selected at openside in the Lions side who played against the Rest of the World XV to celebrate the International Rugby Board’s centenary instead.

Despite the demands of his day job as a forensic scientist, he was widely regarded as one of the fittest and most dynamic back-row forwards in the northern hemisphere and was relishing the prospect of testing himself against the world’s best Down Under.

The three had played rugby against each other at school and then bonded like brothers while team-mates at Queen’s University, Ulster and then the Ireland camp.

Irwin was regaling his companions with tales of his medical exams when the group’s car passed a Ford Cortina parked on the side of the road, just as another vehicle was alongside them driving north in the other lane. Inside it was Lord Justice Maurice Gibson, then the secondhighest judge in Northern Ireland.

The 73-year-old and his wife, Lady Cecily, were returning from a short holiday. Moments earlier, the judge had stopped to shake hands with the members of the Garda, the Irish police force, who had escorted him to the border at the Customs post at Dromad. But as he drove towards the Royal Ulster Constabulary escort that awaited him at the other side of the border, the IRA remotely donated a 500lb bomb in the Cortina, killing the judge and his wife instantly and throwing their car towards Irwin’s.

“There was just this almighty explosion, a huge noise and what appeared to be a thousand flash bulbs going off,” recalled Irwin. “In that instant, I thought my car had been blown up and I remember thinking ‘why me?’ I thought it must have been a mistake. The next thing I remember was seeing another car facing the same way as me, as if it had just stopped beside me. Inside was just an inferno and two vague shadows in the front seat and I thought it must have been two police officers.

“I felt my arms, felt my legs and I was still in one piece but as I looked out my driver’s window to my right, there was a huge crater, about 15ft across the road.

“I looked to my left and the whole of the front of my car had been pushed in towards the passenger side because the car had hit my front right-hand corner – another thousandth of a second and it would have hit me directly – and the roof was pushed down.”

In the back of the car, Rainey was lying unconscious. “I thought he was dead,” recalled Irwin, who remarkably had only suffered a cut to the nose and singed hair from the blast. Fate, critically, had also determined that Irwin, with his medical training, was the only one of the three who was fully conscious and mobile.

“I got out of the car and it was obvious that the two people in the other car were already dead,” he recalled. “I tried to get Nigel’s door open, which was difficult because it had been bent and crushed and eventually yanked it open. He had a bad cut across his forehead and his legs were trapped by the dashboard but I told him I had to get him out because the petrol tank could explode.

“I took him under his armpits and actually pulled him out of his trainers and carried him 30 metres up the road and lay him down on a grass verge. He told me his right thigh was painful and I told him he might have broken his femur, so I took my belt off and tied his knees together.”

By the time Irwin had returned to the car, Rainey had stirred. “Thankfully, he had just been knocked out and I took him up the road as well and lay him down beside Nige.”

Remarkably, Carr