BY: Margaret Urwin
DUBLIN: For those of us old enough to remember the dreadful day on which the Dublin and Monaghan bombs exploded, it is hard to believe that 50 years have passed. Despite all the terrible atrocities down through the long years of the Northern conflict, no day saw a higher death toll than 17 May 1974 – 34 deaths including a full-term unborn baby. A third of those killed were young women and baby girls aged between 5 months and 22 years.
That Friday was a fine sunny afternoon with the promise of summer in the air. In Dublin, the city buses were on strike. The citizens were going about their daily business – shopping, meeting friends and travelling home from work. Several young female civil servants were making their way to Connolly Station in the city centre to catch trains home to various parts of Ireland. The time was approaching 5.30 pm – the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week.
At 5.28 pm precisely, without any warning, the first car bomb exploded in Parnell Street killing eleven people including an entire family – a young father and mother and their two baby daughters, aged 17 months and five months respectively. Two minutes later, 14 people perished in a second bomb explosion in nearby Talbot Street. The dead included a young mother and her full-term unborn baby. The baby was recognised as the 34th victim by the Dublin City Coroner at the Inquests, which were not held until May 2004, 30 years after the atrocity. Almost simultaneously, a third bomb exploded across the Liffey, in South Leinster Street, near Dáil Éireann (Irish Parliament) where two women were killed instantly. The Dublin dead included a French and an Italian citizen.
An hour and a half later, a fourth no-warning car bomb exploded in the centre of Monaghan town claiming another seven lives – six men and one woman. These were co-ordinated attacks.
Nobody has ever been charged with, much less convicted, of this terrible massacre.
It was 19 years before the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) claimed responsibility and only after the broadcasting of Yorkshire television’s ground-breaking Hidden Hand: the forgotten massacre, in July 1993. The UVF insisted it acted alone in contradiction of the claims made in the documentary of security force collusion. Later evidence from a number of whistle-blowers, the report of Judge Henry Barron’s Independent Commission of Inquiry in 2003, (an Inquiry established by the Irish Government) and my colleague, Anne Cadwallader’s book, Lethal Allies, published in 2013, all pointed to collusion by members of the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and British intelligence in these attacks. Judge Barron cites the failure of the British authorities to make original documents available and their refusal to supply other information on national security grounds as resulting in the scope of his report being limited.
In the years since the Barron report was published, many efforts have been made to persuade the British to co-operate. Three motions were passed unanimously by Dáil Éireann in 2008, 2011 and 2016 urging them to make the undisclosed documents available to an independent, international judicial figure for assessment. These motions were ignored by Westminster.
Due to this non-cooperation, the families decided, in 2014, to take the risky and traumatic course of civil litigation against the British Ministry of Defence, the PSNI and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. A small victory was won by the families when a challenge by the British Government to try to prevent the case being heard in the High Court, Belfast on jurisdictional grounds and time limits, was rejected in April 2024. The families now look forward to the opportunity of having their case heard in the coming months.
Two investigations into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and many linked cases in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are nearing completion. The Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland (PONI) has been investigating these cases for several years and is expected to report in the summer. The second investigation, or review, known as Operation Denton, is also continuing and is expecting to report before the year end. This review covers the same linked cases but has a wider remit than the PONI investigation. It has powers to inquire into the actions of the British Army and the Ulster Defence Regiment as well as those of the police (the former RUC).
The families are hopeful that these inquiries can deliver previously withheld information so that, after half a century, they can achieve some closure. All the families have ever wanted is the truth.
The film May-17-74 Anatomy of a Massacre premieres in the Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin on May 10th.
