Bayardo Bar attack

Bayardo Bar attack
Part of The Troubles
Memorial to the victims of the attack on the site of the Bayardo Bar
LocationBayardo Bar
Aberdeen Street,
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Coordinates54°36′14″N 5°56′53″W / 54.604008°N 5.948119°W / 54.604008; -5.948119
Date13 August 1975
Attack type
shooting, bombing
Deaths5 (4 Protestant civilians, 1 Ulster Volunteer Force member)
Injured50+
PerpetratorProvisional IRA Belfast Brigade

The Bayardo Bar attack took place on 13 August 1975 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A unit of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), led by Brendan McFarlane, launched a bombing and shooting attack on a pub on Aberdeen Street, in the loyalist Shankill area. IRA members stated the pub was targeted because it was frequented by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Four Protestant civilians and one UVF member were killed, while more than fifty were injured.

According to journalists Alan Murray and Peter Taylor, it was a retaliation for the Miami Showband massacre almost a fortnight earlier when members of the popular Dublin-based band were shot dead by the UVF at a fake military checkpoint.

McFarlane and two other IRA volunteers, Peter "Skeet" Hamilton and Seamus Clarke, were sentenced to life imprisonment for perpetrating the Bayardo attack.