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On March 20, 1993, the day before Mother's Day in the UK, two bombs hidden inside cast-iron litter bins detonated on Bridge Street in Warrington, Cheshire. The Provisional IRA gave a hurried warning to a charity line, but local authorities received insufficient detail to evacuate the bustling shopping precinct. Johnathan Ball, aged three, died instantly. Tim Parry, twelve, suffered catastrophic injuries and died five days later when his family made the agonizing decision to turn off life support. Fifty-six other civilians sustained injuries.

The Cranberries were touring the UK at the time. Dolores O'Riordan, then just twenty-one years old, felt physically sickened by the news. While public rhetoric from militant republicans claimed the attack was a calculated maneuver against British economic centers, O'Riordan saw only the butchery of children shopping for Mother's Day cards.

"I remember seeing one of the mothers on television, just devastated," O'Riordan told the BBC years later. "I felt so sad for her, that she'd carried this child for nine months, watched him grow, and then some idiot who thought he was making a point took him away."

O'Riordan retreated to her Limerick apartment with an acoustic guitar. She had spent her early youth surrounded by the omnipresent shadow of the Northern Ireland conflict, yet she refused the quiet compliance often expected of Irish artists. She wrote the core progression on acoustic strings before realizing the track demanded raw violence. When she brought the song into rehearsals for the band’s second album, No Need to Argue, guitarist Noel Hogan swapped his signature jangle-pop sound for massive, overdriven distortion.