Bomb unit called to Baltimore home after gelignite discovery

FORMER RTÉ correspondent Fergal Keane is now even more well known in Baltimore since the bomb disposal unit arrived at his house, last Thursday, to safely dispose of 180 sticks of gelignite.

A builder, who was just one hour into a job to restore an old stone shed on the property at Lahern, found a ceramic container stuffed with the explosives.

He contacted Fergal, who immediately drove from his home in Dublin to the property he’d bought with his wife Tara Buckley in 2017.

‘Because this place is so old, and nothing had been done for years, we always thought we’d find something,’ said Fergal, who inspected the cache first thing on Thursday morning.

‘I knew exactly what it was because of my work – I worked a lot in Northern Ireland and other places – so we phoned the gardaí straight away. I always thought it would be a gun, or money, but no, it was this stuff.’

Gardaí from Clonakilty came over and had a look at it. They phoned the bomb disposal squad and army personnel driving two jeeps and a large truck immediately set out from Collins Barracks in Dublin.

Some of the 180 sticks of gelignite that were found and disposed of at Lahern in Baltimore.

They arrived within a few hours and utilised a digger on the renovation site to create a big hole in which members of the army’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team carried out three controlled explosions.

Gardaí closed off the road and some of the houses in the immediate vicinity were evacuated.

Fergal said he wasn’t fazed by the situation. ‘The only fear I had was that people might handle it and it might go off if people gave it a bang, because I know it is very volatile.’

He said interest in the story has been incredible. Some of his photographs have been viewed 400,000 while two videos, taken at a safe distance by a neighbour Pat Collins, were viewed over 100,000 times each.

It is believed the explosives were there for a century, since the War of Independence, and were probably put there by Denis O’Neill, who was the local IRA commander 100 years ago.

Fergal described the sticks as ‘like those you see in old western movies’ but they were reported to have huge explosive potential – enough to take down a city block, which makes it one of the largest finds in the country for many years.