The IRA Assassination of Lord Mountbatten: Facts and Fallout

On August 27, 1979, Louis Mountbatten, British naval officer and statesman and last Viceroy of India (1947), was assassinated by an IRA bomb on his boat in Ireland at the age of 79. An excerpt from the article:

"The murder of the British royal and World War II hero signaled a dark period ahead for relations between England and Northern Ireland.
The gruesome 1979 IRA assassination of a beloved British royal—which took place the same day as a deadly coordinated attack on British troops—led to outrage, heartbreak and a heightening of “The Troubles,” the decades-long Northern Ireland conflict.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army claimed responsibility for the August 27, 1979 murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten, 79, Earl of Burma, great-grandson of Queen Victoria, second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and great-uncle of Prince Charles. The World War II hero and last viceroy of India was aboard his 29-foot Shadow V fishing boat with six others near his summer home in northwest Ireland the morning of the attack.

A Sunny Day Turns Grim
IRA assassination of Lord Mountbatten, Shadow V
Part of the wreckage of Lord Mountbatten's boat the Shadow V after it had been bombed by the IRA in August 1979. Independent News and Media/Getty Images
August 27, 1979, a Bank holiday, had dawned sunny, following days of rain. “Dickie” Mountbatten and some of his family who had been staying at their holiday home, Classibawn Castle near the Village of Cliffoney, County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, decided to take an outing on their boat to take in the good weather.

Fifteen minutes after setting sail, a planted bomb was activated by two members of the Provisional IRA, a paramilitary group of Irish nationalists who waged a terror campaign to drive British forces from Northern Ireland to create a united, independent nation. Known as "the Troubles," the conflict raged for 25 years before IRA and loyalist ceasefires were initiated. By 1998, the year the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement settled the conflict, more than 3,600 people had died.

“The boat was there one minute and the next minute it was like a lot of matchsticks floating on the water,” a witness told the New York Times.

The party of seven aboard the Shadow included Mountbatten, his daughter Patricia, her husband, Lord John Brabourne, their 14-year-old twins, Timothy and Nicholas, and Lord Brabourne’s mother, the dowager Lady Doreen Brabourne. Paul Maxwell, 15, a friend of the family who worked on the boat, was also on board. Mountbatten, Nicholas Brabourne and Maxwell were killed immediately. Lady Brabourne died the next day and the others survived serious injuries."