A crowd of Belfast Catholics was watching an evening soccer game on the television set in Kellys Bar when a bomb exploded in a parked car outside, setting off a weekend of violence in which nine people were killed and 100 injured. The Catholics blamed the bombing on Protestant extremists; the British army concluded that it might have been caused by I.R.A. explosives that went off by accident. In a sense it did not really matter. The important fact was that after two months of direct rule from London, the Ulstermen were as close to anarchy as ever.
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