The Brighton Bomb: Narrative Approaches

There’s more than one way to tell a story, now more than ever.

Join us for a discussion about different narrative approaches to the 1984 Brighton bombing, the biggest assault on a British government since the Gunpowder Plot.

Exploring three different media – book, podcast and documentary – this special event, hosted by BBC NI news anchor Tara Mills, brings together Rory Carroll, author of Killing Thatcher (HarperCollins, 2023), Owen McFadden, series producer of the 2024 BBC Sounds podcast The Brighton Bomb, and Mary McKeagney, BBC Commissioner on the 2024 documentary Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher. 

Rory Carroll, currently The Guardian’s chief Ireland correspondent, was a twelve-year-old living in Dublin at the time of the Brighton Bombing and remembers the scenes in the aftermath. Rory has had a long and highly successful career as a foreign correspondent reporting from Belfast in the 1990s, London, Baghdad during and after the American invasion, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Los Angeles. In 2013 his first book, COMANDANTE: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela (Penguin Press and Canongate) was published. In 2018 he returned to Dublin and found himself spellbound by the memoirs, biographies, police reports, court records, testimonies and eyewitness accounts of a story which he had assumed was familiar but was anything but. Killing Thatcher is born from that fascination.

Owen McFadden is an audio producer with over two decades experience of creating content for BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Live, and Radio Ulster. He has made award-winning programmes with some of the biggest names in music, the arts, comedy and current affairs, including Fergal Keane, Brian Keenan, Martin Sheen, John Hurt, Malcolm McLaren, Willie Nelson, Steve Van Zandt, Whoopi Goldberg, Ronnie Spector, U2, Pauline McLynn, Alice Cooper, Simon Callow and Nik Cohn. He was the series producer of The Brighton Bomb a ten part series made by Walk On Air productions for BBC Radio 4.

Mary McKeagney began her TV career as a researcher at UTV and has worked at RTÉ, BBC and in the Independent Sector as a Producer/Director, and Series Producer for nearly 30 years. She joined the BBC in 2007 and is a multi-award-winning programme maker across various genres including entertainment, documentary and current affairs. She has executive-produced specialist factual, ob-doc, entertainment and drama series, and joined the BBC Commissioning team in 2021. Some of her projects since then have included dramas Dead and Buried, Hope Street, Funboys and St. Mungo’s, Network factual series including Once Upon a time in Northern Ireland, The Fast and the Farmer-ish, and Teenage Predator/Online Killer, and documentaries such as Patrick Kielty: One Hundred Years of Union; The Year that Rocked Irish Dancing; Bombing Brighton; On Drugs; Kinahan: The True Story of Ireland’s Mafia, and Hunting the Online Sex Predators.

Tara Mills has worked for BBC Northern Ireland for more than 25 years. She started her career as a reporter during a pivotal part of the peace process. After ten years reporting with a particular interest in social affairs she moved to presenting. She’s been the 6.30 news anchor for the last ten years. She has also made three recent documentaries about mental health.  Her most recent BBC Spotlight film, I Am Not Okay, changed government policy around funding for children with autism and a severe learning disability. It was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award. Social justice is at the heart of all of her journalism.