Abstract
During a winter afternoon, a small group of men planted two bombs in the capital. The first exploded at a popular tourist attraction, while the other damaged a prominent government building, one of the most recognizable edifices of Western democratic tradition. No one was killed and only minor injuries were reported, but later the same day, a Senator from Vermont introduced a bill into the American Congress making it a federal crime to use explosives to destroy public or private property, or “for the purpose of assassination or murder or the destruction of life.”1 Given the audacity of the attack, and the public outcry that followed it, it may be surprising that the legislation never made it out of the Judiciary Committee, and that a similar bill died in the House of Representatives. Nevertheless, the bills reflected a public discussion going on in the United States and Europe about the dilemma that acts of terrorism posed to open, democratic societies. While the proposed legislative language resembled 20th-century counter-terrorist legislation, in fact the bombing took place in 1885. Equally remarkable, the bombing that precipitated the debate took place in London, not Washington. The American reaction to these distant events signalled a new concern in Congress about Irish terrorism, and an awareness that Irish-American involvement had made an issue that, while legally a domestic concern for the United Kingdom, was also a real concern for the United States. Indeed, the bill introduced by Senator George Edmunds was one of the first efforts by the United States to criminalize transnational terrorism.
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Gantt, J. (2010). Introduction. In: Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250451_1
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