By 1973, increased searches and surveillance by the British security forces were making it harder for IRA members to plant their bombs and escape.

[5] One of the proxy bomb attacks carried out by the IRA during this period took place in 1975, when an employee of Northern Ireland's Forensics Laboratory in Newtownbreda was forced to drive a car laden with explosives to the building.

[8] In July, an armed group kidnapped an off-duty Garda and forced him to drive a car bomb to the village of Magheraveely, on the border between County Cavan and Fermanagh.

[8] On 11 September 1974, masked gunmen in British Army uniform hijacked a car in Northern Ireland, placed a time bomb inside and forced the owner to drive it into the village of Blacklion, County Cavan.

[9][8] In the 1986 Hindawi affair, a Jordanian citizen romanced an Irish woman working as a chambermaid in a London hotel, getting her pregnant, asking her to marry him and persuading her to fly on an El Al airliner to be introduced to his family in Damascus, Syria.

[13] While his family was held at gunpoint, he was forced to drive his car to a rural spot on the other side of the Irish border in County Donegal.

[13] Gillespie was then put in a van loaded with 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of explosives, chained to the seat to prevent his escape and told to drive to the Coshquin permanent border checkpoint on Buncrana Road.

[14] In tandem with the Coshquin operation, members of the IRA's South Down Brigade took over the house of a Catholic man, James McAvoy, 65, in Newry.

[12] At Flagstaff Hill, near the Irish border, members of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade loaded the van with one ton of explosives.

McAvoy was strapped into the driver's seat and told to drive the van to the accommodation block at Cloghoge permanent vehicle checkpoint.

Before he drove off, a senior IRA member seemed "to have a pang of conscience" and whispered in McAvoy's ear "don't open the door; go out through the window".

Smith, who was also a Northern Ireland Catholic, was posthumously awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal, as he tried to warn his comrades about the bomb, rather than running for cover.

[18] According to journalist and author Ed Moloney, "as an operation calculated to undermine the IRA's armed struggle, alienate even its most loyal supporters and damage Sinn Féin politically, it had no equal".

[19] Moloney has suggested that the tactic may have been calculated to weaken the position of alleged "hawks" in republicanism, those who favoured armed action over electoral politics.

At the same time, Moloney argues that the widespread public revulsion would have strengthened the position of those in the IRA who were considering how republicanism could abandon violence and focus on electoral politics.

Peter Taylor wrote of the proxy bombs that by such actions and the revulsion they caused in the community, IRA hardliners inadvertently strengthened the hand of those within the republican movement who argued that an alternative to armed struggle had to be found.

[22] In early February 1991, another proxy bomb wrecked an Ulster Defence Regiment base in Magherafelt, County Londonderry, but there were no fatalities.

[23] Two months later, on 8 April, near the border town of Belleek, County Fermanagh, a civilian female motorist working in the local RUC/Army barracks was taken hostage along her husband at an IRA checkpoint and forced to drive to the facilities with a bomb in her handbag.

[27] One of the brothers died, along with six Colombian soldiers, and another survived with serious injuries in a separate incident, when only one of the three explosive charges attached to the vehicle went off, resulting only in minor damage to the target.