Barry McGuigan writes moving foreword for Claudy anniversary book

The sporting star, who was a powerful advocate for reconciliation in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, revealed his family’s connection to the atrocity in the foreword to a new publication.

The champion boxer described how his wife, Sandra, had been on holiday in Castlerock with the youngest victim of the bombing – eight-year-old Kathryn Eakin – just days before the attack.

“The Claudy bombing had the single greatest impact on me of anything that happened during the Troubles,” Mr McGuigan wrote.

“It grips me like a freezing cold hand on the back of the neck.”

He continued: “It is the one event that has had the most resounding e ffect on me, and perhaps on a subconscious level it has taught me to always try to treat people delicately and fairly, and to be good natured to everybody – no matter what area they were in, no matter where they were from, no matter where I went.”

Mr McGuigan said his late daughter Danika, who sadly died in 2019 due to cancer, had been given the name Kathryn as “an acknowledgement of Kathryn Eakin’s life”.

On the attack itself, the world famous boxer wrote: “It was a dreadfully callous act to put three bombs into the centre of the village, where people would run away from one bomb straight into another. It was despicable and awful.”