In Belfast, night can be deceiving.

The city settles softly after dark. Streetlights spill amber onto wet pavement. Pubs empty in laughter and low conversation. The hills beyond the city hold their silence, and in neighborhoods where old scars hide beneath fresh paint, peace often feels ordinary enough to forget its own fragility.

But peace in Northern Ireland has always had a memory.

Late on Saturday night, in the Dunmurry area south of Belfast, that memory returned in fire.

A car bomb exploded outside a Police Service of Northern Ireland station after a delivery driver’s vehicle was hijacked and turned into a weapon. The blast sent flames into the night and debris across nearby streets, shaking homes and waking families in a residential area where children were sleeping and windows glowed with the quiet rituals of an ordinary weekend.

The explosion came as police were evacuating residents.

Officers had already sounded the station’s attack alarm and begun rushing people from nearby homes when the device detonated. According to police, several residents—including two babies—were being carried to safety at the moment of the blast. By morning, cordons stretched across the neighborhood. Forensic teams moved carefully through broken glass and scorched pavement.

There were no reported fatalities.

In a place where history often counts its losses in names and dates, that fact felt almost miraculous.

Police have launched an attempted murder investigation led by the Terrorism Investigation Unit. Authorities said the device was a compressed gas cylinder bomb placed in the boot of the hijacked vehicle after armed men stopped the driver in the Twinbrook area of west Belfast and ordered him to deliver it to the station.

The method carried the shape of an older violence.

In Northern Ireland, “proxy bombs” are not only tactics; they are memories. During the Troubles, civilians were sometimes forced under threat to carry explosives to military or police targets. The practice left deep psychological wounds, not only on victims but on communities who learned to fear ordinary vehicles and ordinary roads.

This attack comes decades after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the accord that largely ended three decades of sectarian conflict in which more than 3,500 people were killed.

Yet peace here has never been simple or complete.

Small dissident republican groups, opposed to British rule and to the peace process itself, have continued sporadic attacks. Police said their initial thinking is that the New IRA may be responsible, though no formal claim has yet been publicly confirmed. Just weeks ago, a similar attempted bombing targeted a police station in Lurgan, where another delivery driver was forced to transport an explosive device.

The pattern is troubling.

It suggests not a return to the widespread violence of the past, but the persistence of fragments—small, dangerous remnants of old wars that refuse to disappear entirely.

Political leaders across Northern Ireland condemned the attack swiftly.

First Minister Michelle O’Neill said those responsible “speak for absolutely no-one.” Brendan Mullan, chair of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, said the device was sent “to kill officers and cause maximum harm” in the heart of a residential area. Community leaders urged calm and reminded the public that support for peace remains overwhelming.

And still, the sound of an explosion changes a place.

In Dunmurry this morning, parents swept broken glass from doorsteps. Police tape fluttered in the cold air. Businesses stayed shuttered. Children asked questions adults have spent decades trying not to answer.

The city remembers.

It remembers checkpoints and bomb warnings, armored vehicles and shuttered shops, funerals and names etched into memorial stones. It remembers how quickly ordinary life can bend beneath fear.

But it also remembers something else.

It remembers endurance.

As daylight spread over Belfast, buses ran, traffic moved, and the city resumed its careful rhythm. The peace walls still stood. The roads reopened in parts. Investigators gathered evidence. Politicians spoke. Families made tea and watched the news in quiet rooms.

The flames had faded by then.

What remained was smoke, shattered glass, and an old question whispered once again through the streets: how fragile is peace, and how many times must it be defended?

In Northern Ireland, the answer has never come easily.

But the morning came anyway.

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Sources: Reuters The Guardian Associated Press The Irish Times Sky News