Almost 50 years ago, in the early hours of 2 February 1972, the British embassy in Dublin was gutted by fire. This was not an accident. A huge crowd had gathered in protest outside the lovely Georgian terrace in Merrion Square all through the previous day. They cheered as young men climbed across the balconies and smashed a window. They threw in some petrol and lit it. A fusillade of petrol bombs was unleashed from the crowd. People chanted the slogan they had learned from the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965: burn, baby, burn. The police did nothing to stop the attack.
I was 14 at the time, so I wasn’t there. But some of my older friends were and I wished I had been with them. The assault was organised by the IRA, but most ordinary, peaceful Irish people approved of it. It seemed like the right thing to do, a reasonable response to the massacre the previous weekend in Derry of 13 unarmed civilians by the first battalion of the British army’s Parachute Regiment. A woman waiting for a bus in Dublin told the Irish Times: “I felt outraged that the British should do this and I felt that whatever the rights and wrongs, they would know how we felt when we burned down their embassy.”
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