Remembrance Day bombing
1987 Provisional IRA terror attack in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland
The Remembrance Day bombing (also known as the Enniskillen bombing or Poppy Day massacre) took place on 8 November 1987 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. A Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb exploded near the town's war memorial (cenotaph) during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony, which was being held to commemorate British military war dead. Eleven people (10 civilians and a police officer) were initially killed, many of them elderly. A twelfth man was fatally wounded, entering a coma from which he would later die, and 63 were injured. The IRA said it had made a mistake and that its target had been the British soldiers parading to the memorial.
The bombing was strongly condemned by all sides and undermined support for the IRA and Sinn Féin. It also facilitated the passing of the Extradition Act, which made it easier to extradite IRA suspects from the Republic of Ireland to the United Kingdom. Loyalist paramilitaries responded to the bombing with revenge attacks on Catholic civilians. The bombing is often seen as a turning point in the Troubles, an incident that shook the IRA "to its core", and spurred on new efforts by Irish nationalists towards a political solution to the conflict.
Background and planning
The IRA said that the bombing was an attempt to kill British soldiers.
The public source identifies “Remembrance Day bombing” as 1987 Provisional IRA terror attack in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Remembrance, bombing and Provisional.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7311736. Authority coordinates are 54.344, -7.635. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Remembrance Day bombing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.