Car Bombs and Barrack Busters

Car Bombs and Barrack Busters is the remarkable story of a quiet, unique professional elite, an account of a highly specialised cadre, one whose narrative needs not to be sensationalised; it is too serious for that, and speaks for itself. EOD team personnel are not to be glamorized; they are too grounded for that. But this too is not a history to be allowed to become forgotten and taken for granted; it is too important for that. Hazardous, unpredictable and precarious, the numerous incidents that occurred during ‘the Troubles’ and in the post Good Friday Agreement era since, and right up to the present day at home in Ireland, but also on overseas peacekeeping duties abroad. All these theatres and contexts involved the necessary deployment of Irish army bomb disposal teams to contribute towards a restoration of a form of normality amidst challenging and changing circumstances. The constant intent of the various paramilitary or militia bombmakers throughout remained deadly, their focus fixed, changing only was the very dangerous nature of the means they used, namely their munitions, viable improvised explosives devices, incendiaries, bomb-making factories and bombs in transit, and these perhaps booby trapped into the bargain.