Good evening. The Irish Republican Army's murderous violence has reached a new hike this week.

Fourteen bombs have gone off in London in recent months.

The Irish Republican Army had warned that their renewed bombing campaign in Northern Ireland

would be taken to the British mainland during the election campaign which began yesterday.

Five large hotels hit by bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army and police expect more.

As the 1970s stretched on, so did the IRA's bombing campaign, which now focused on targets in Britain.

But despite making headlines with increasingly brutal attacks, the IRA was no closer to an outright win against the British Army.

Instead, they settled in for a long war.

The leadership sat down to review the situation, to see where they could steer the movement,

since there was no obvious political outcome on the horizon.

Tommy McKierney is a historian and was a young IRA volunteer at the time.

One of the observations was that there needed to be a wider connection between the provisional IRA and the wider population

to involve the population in the broader structure, not necessarily an armed conflict,

and socialization and political work.

And the idea, I think, has been sometimes described as broadening the battlefield,

but it was effectively said that we had too many spectators.

But there's an old, if you like, please shed blood to the IRA for many years,

that people in Ireland would give the IRA practically anything in terms of food, shelter, finance,

but never give them a vote.

To win the conflict meant expanding the terrain of struggle.

That lesson was also becoming clear in the United States.

By the late 70s, militant Irish Republicans, who were associated with the Irish Northern Aid Committee,

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