I think the IRA usually warned of a bomb a few minutes before it going off, so that it would cause a lot of inconvenience, a lot of material damage and relatively little human casualties.
http://articles.latimes.com/1997-04-19/news/mn-50393_1_code-...
I thought it was interesting to find the information via a 20 year old online newspaper article, instead of a link to Wikipedia or some more recent rehash of the information presented in the article.