The day before Robert Carswell was sworn in as a high court judge in 1984, he spotted a Provisional IRA booby-trap bomb attached to the underside of his car. The eventual lord chief justice of Northern Ireland and law lord, who has died aged 88, alerted the security forces, but an attempt to defuse the device was only partially successful.
“There was an immense amount of damage done to my car – which was a write-off – my house, [its] contents and, by way of after-effect, my wife’s health,” he said in a House of Lords debate in 1988. “I had to get on with my job, and happily I was able to do so. She was badly affected for a long time afterwards.”
