Name Mick Murray Role Irish republican | Died 1999 | |
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Michael Joseph Murray (ca. 1936 – 7 March 1999) known as Mick Murray and Squire Murray was a Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer, later named as an organiser of the Birmingham Pub Bombings, which killed 21 people on 21 November 1974.
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Personal life
He was born in Donnycarney, County Dublin and was educated at Scoil Mhuire, Marino. He ran a pub in Kilbeggan and he joined the IRA in the early 1950s. He was a father of six.
Republican activities
Murray worked in Birmingham as a labourer at a forgings and press factory, while living in Watt Road, Erdington.
Murray's involvement in the 21 November 1974 bombing of the Mulberry Bush and the Tavern in the Town included choosing the targets and making the bombs. He transported the bombs to Birmingham city centre before handing them to the planters. He made the telephone warning using the codename Double X.
The two bombings resulted in the deaths of 21 people - mostly young people. A total of 182 were injured, many seriously. Murray later reportedly told Paddy Hill and Johnny Walker that the phone boxes to be used had been vandalised, requiring the finding of another, some distance away.
He was charged with explosives offenses jointly with Michael Sheehan and James Kelly (aka Woods). All three were tried as part of the same trial that convicted the Birmingham Six. The Lord Bridge of Harwich was the presiding judge at the trial of the Birmingham Six, who were accused of bombings in Birmingham in November 1974. In his last case before he joined the Court of Appeal, he summed up saying there was "the clearest and most overwhelming evidence I have ever heard in a case of murder". The defendants served 16 years in prison before the convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991 due to new evidence emerging, largely that the defendants had been beaten by the police to secure their confessions.
In prison he was active in the blanket protest campaign. On release he was excluded from England and worked as a driver for An Phoblacht while resuming IRA activities. He stayed loyal to the Provisionals following the Real IRA secession, but remained a hardliner within the organisation, strongly opposing decommissioning. Following his death in 1999, his body was buried in Clonmellon, County Westmeath.