It was like something out of Dante’s Inferno’

A bright orange and red flash, a crack and then a huge blast shattered the heart of the country on a warm summer’s evening.

Journalist Frank Khan, among the first on the scene, recalled walking into ‘Dante’s Inferno’ as dust and debris fell over blood and scattered limbs.

The cries and screams of survivors pierced the eerie silence that suddenly dropped over Dublin’s city centre at 5.28pm on Friday, May 17, 1974.