The collective amnesia over the Dublin-Monaghan bombings

By Ronan McGreevy (for the Irish Times)

The Dublin-Monaghan bombings directly affected thousands of people, not just the relatives of the 33 people and an unborn baby who were killed, but the hundreds injured and their families.

Bernie McNally was 16 in 1974. The seventh of eight from a working-class family in Artane, she left school at the first available opportunity, as many people did at that time, and went to work in O’Neill’s shoe shop in Talbot Street in the summer of 1973.

She remembers May 17th, 1974, as a lovely early summer’s day. O’Neill’s was closing at 5.30pm and she went downstairs to get her coat to make an early exit only to be summoned by two older workers to another floor as there was a late customer who had entered the shop.

She went down to the basement to fetch a pair of sandals from the storeroom and was making her way back up the stairs when she heard a loud thud coming from the bomb on Parnell Street. Moments later, she saw a flash from a Northern-registered car parked outside the shop and was hurled across the ground floor by the force of the blast. “I thought I was hit by lightning. Everything started to collapse and fall in on top of me,” she remembers.

She never lost consciousness. The first sound she heard was the low moans of a customer in the shop who later died from her wounds. “When I looked out into the street, I knew all normality was gone. It was like hell on Earth,” McNally recalls.

Eventually she was taken to Moran’s Hotel and put on a bus to Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital on Grand Canal Street. There was no ambulance available for the walking wounded.

As McNally was receiving treatment along with hundreds of others, the then taoiseach Liam Cosgrave made a television address. He expressed “profound sympathy” for the victims. The Government did not know who had done it, “but everybody who has practised violence, preached violence or condoned violence must bear a share of responsibility for today’s outrages”.

This was interpreted then and now as a reference, not to the loyalist paramilitaries who carried out the killings, but to the IRA which the then-coalition government regarded as the biggest threat to the State. The Dublin-Monaghan bombings occurred six weeks after Fine Gael senator Billy Fox was shot dead by the IRA, while the IRA had also been engaged throughout the early months of 1974 in a campaign of civil disruption including hoax bomb threats and letter bombs in Dublin and Cork. There was no claim of responsibility for the Dublin-Monaghan bombings until 1993, when the UVF admitted responsibility, so the blame at the time was generically spread to all the “men of violence”.

The coalition government adopted a hardline approach to republican violence when it took office in 1973. Though there was a day of national mourning after the Bloody Sunday massacre, there was none for the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. The government refused to fly all flags on public buildings at half-mast and only opted to do so in Dublin and Monaghan following public pressure.

Cosgrave refused to provide an explanation for these omissions, but it was most likely the coalition government felt that the Bloody Sunday day of national mourning had boosted support for the Provisional IRA.

On July 3rd, 1974, McNally was discharged from hospital, but in reality it would be only the start of a lifetime’s journey in and out of hospitals. She lost the sight in her right eye. When she was 40, she had a corneal implant to replace her eye.

Six days after she initially got out of hospital, An Garda Síochána quietly shelved the investigation into the worst case of mass murder in the history of the State. According to the Hidden Hand TV documentary, which was broadcast in 1993, gardaí had the names of the chief suspects but not the evidence to arrest them and got no co-operation from the RUC.

In his report on the bombings published in 2003, Mr Justice Henry Barron found no evidence that the government of the day had attempted to close down the investigation, but he issued a withering judgment that it “showed little interest in the bombings”.

The Barron report contained another astonishing fact. In September 1974 Cosgrave was told by British prime minister Harold Wilson that the people who had bombed Dublin had been interned in the North on other charges. This was repeated at a similar meeting in November “but the matter does not seem to have been pursued by the Irish government”.

The report concluded that by July 9th, 1974, the investigation unit into the bombings had been stood down save for a number of desultory inquiries to the RUC that got nowhere. It has since emerged that the UVF based in Belfast and Portadown were responsible for Dublin-Monaghan bombings, most likely with help from elements within the British security forces who wanted to wreck the Sunningdale powersharing agreement.

None of this was apparent at the time to McNally or the families of those who were looking for answers. “I didn’t think when I was 16 that I would be 66 and still trying to find out the truth of what happened. I can’t believe it has been 50 years. It is still so vivid and clear in my head,” she said.

Collective amnesia set in early after the bombings. Irish Times correspondent Paul Murray noted on the first anniversary of the bombing that there was a “real residue of pain within the hundreds of people affected, some to a greater or lesser extent”, yet across Irish society “many people seem to have forgotten that the bombings ever took place”.

The indifference of the government fed into the indifference of society and left the victims isolated for decades afterwards, McNally believes.

“The government didn’t lead the charge on this. The media did nothing at the time. Mr Cosgrave spoke about the evil men who perpetrated these bombings. He promised that no stone would be left unturned.

“Good men turned their back on the evil men and evil men flourished, because there was also the Miami Showband massacre, Belturbet [on December 28th, 1972, a car bomb planted by loyalists exploded in the main street in Belturbet, Co Cavan, killing two teenagers] and others because the Irish government did nothing at the time. They abandoned the families.”

She rebuilt her life, got married in 1980, had four children and now has five grandchildren. Many of them will be there for the 50th anniversary. “I was lucky. I was able to go home to my family and my parents. All those who were killed that day, their families were left without their loved ones. I am blessed to have survived that day.”

Urgent Appeal