A hard-hitting letter from Prince Philip slamming the IRA after they executed Lord Louis Mountbatten has emerged 46 years on. The grieving Royal said it would have been easier to stomach the loss of his uncle had it been ‘an accident or an act of God’. But his murder by the Provisional IRA who planted a bomb on his fishing boat made him ‘so bitter’. Writing two days after the assassination, Philip said he resented the fact the IRA ‘considered themselves to be civilised human beings’. He added that he hoped Mountbatten’s assassination would ‘jerk a little bit of sanity back into these people’.
The Daily Mirror front page covering the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979
(
Image:
Daily Mirror)
Philip made the forceful remarks while responding to a letter of condolence from a friend named Richard on August 29, 1979, just two days after Mountbatten was murdered. The two page handwritten letter, on Windsor Castle letterhead and signed ‘Philip’, reads: “Thank you very much for your kind letter. This whole ghastly business might have been easier to hear if it had been an accident or an ‘act of God,’ what makes it so bitter is that it was deliberately perpetrated by some people who probably consider themselves to be civilized human beings.
“One can only pray that this shock may help to jerk a little sanity back into these people.” Mountbatten, the great wartime naval commander, had been fishing at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, with his family when a radio-controlled bomb attached to the boat the previous night was detonated from shore.
Police and bystanders overlook the wreckage of Lord Mountbatten’s boat in Ireland
(
Image:
Mirrorpix)
He was pulled alive from the water by nearby fishermen, but died from his injuries before being brought to shore. His 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull was also killed as was Nicholas’s grandmother Doreen Knatchball and Paul Maxwell, a teenage boy from Enniskillen who served as crew.
Five others were seriously injured. The IRA bombmaker behind the murders was Thomas McMahon who served 20 years in prison before being released under the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The bomb had been placed in his unguarded boat the night before his murder. He had been vacationing in the Irish town of Mullaghmore throughout the 1970s and had refused security detail, despite repeated threats from the Provisional IRA to assassinate him.
Mountbatten had declared, “Who the hell would want to kill an old man anyway?” Sadly he explosion wasn’t the only terror attack that day as late in the afternoon 18 British soldiers were killed near the Irish border at Warrenpoint in an IRA bombing ambush. The letter is being sold by a private collector at RR Auction, of Boston, US, with a modest estimate of £160 ($200).
An RR Auction spokesperson said: “This letter from Prince Philip was written in response to the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, who was killed by a bomb planted aboard his fishing boat in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Ireland, by members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.” Prince Philip died in 2021. The letter has come to light amid fears that the British Government may be forced to pay former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams compensation for ‘unlawful detention’ during the Troubles in the 1970s. The payout could be enabled by Labour’s proposed repeal of The Legacy Act, which blocks compensation claims. The sale takes place on February 13.