The long hidden Florida connection to Ireland's enduring peace

In this haunting photograph, Spanish tourist Gonzalo Cavedo unknowingly poses with a child beside a car packed with 500 pounds of fertilizer explosives seconds before it exploded in Omagh, Northern Ireland on August 15, 1998. Cavedo and the child survived, but 31 people were killed including the person who took the photo. Another 220 people were injured. "Real IRA" leader Mickey McKevitt was one of four men found liable for the atrocity following a civl trial a decade later.

By Abdon Pallasch, Special to Florida Bulldog

Just months after it started 26 years ago, Northern Ireland’s peace process could have collapsed after an IRA splinter group killed 31 people, mostly women and children, with a bomb in the small town of Omagh.

But that splinter group largely dissolved thanks in large part to an American trucker-turned spy Dave Rupert, who worked his way up to the top of the “Real IRA” and helped convict its leader.

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The long hidden Florida connection to Ireland's enduring peace

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