I.R.A. gunmen try to kill top Ulster judge

Press, 4 March 1982, Page 9

I.R.A. gunmen try to kill top Ulster judge

NZPA-Reuter Belfast Northern Ireland's top judge. Lord Lowry, escaped assassination yesterday when several shots'were fired at him in the grounds of Queen’s University near the centre of Belfast.' The gunmen wounded a professor of mathematics, Robert Perks, aged 37, who was later said to be in a satisfactory condition in hospital. The outlawed Irish Republican Army later claimed responsibility for the attack. Lord Lowry, aged 63, Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland since 1971, was arriving for a lunch engagement when four shots were fired at his armour-plated car as it drew up outside the university staff common room. The police said the shots came from a first-floor window of a disused house across the road.

Eyewitnesses said body-

guards first threw the judge to the floor of his car then dashed for the house, guns drawn. But the gunmen — the police said they believed there were at least two — had slipped away through a back garden. The wounded professor was in a party waiting to welcome Lord Lowry, who is a prominent international showjumping judge and a former British Army intelligence officer in North Africa during World War Two:

It was the first serious attack on a member of the judiciary in Northern Ireland for five years. Judges' have always been high on the I.R.A. “hit list” and usually travel with bodyguards. Last year a bomb was found in a gutter at the university hours after an eminent British judge, Lord Scarman, had given a lec-

ture. In 1974 a magistrate was shot dead at his home nearby. The I.R.A. gunman was later caught and jailed for life.

In 1976 ; Judge Garret McGrath — one of the few Catholic judges in predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland — was shot and wounded while on holiday in North Antrim. He subsequently resigned from the County Court Bench. Lord Lowry went ahead with a planned lecture to first-year law students an hour later as . the police searched for a’ car seen speeding away with three men in it.

In 1975 Lord Lowry presided over a constitutional convention aimed at evolving a form of government to satisfy differing Protestant and Catholic political factions in the British-ruled province. The convention failed.