Relatives of victims of atrocities urge governments to tell truth

TWENTY-NINE years after the greatest atrocity in the history of the state, relatives of the victims of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings are still looking for the truth.

Yesterday, campaign group Justice for the Forgotten called on the British and Irish governments to tell the truth about the atrocities committed on May 17 1974. Tomorrow marks the fateful day when three car bomb blasts killed 26 people in Dublin. Another explosion in Monaghan later the same day claimed a further seven lives.

Even though nobody has been blamed for the bombings that also left hundreds injured, it has long been suspected that the bombings were carried out by loyalist paramilitaries.

Justice for the Forgotten chairperson Bernie McNally was 16 and working in a shoe shop in Talbot Street when the bombs exploded. She was blinded in the right eye and had it removed in 1998. Since then, she has had to undergo ongoing corrective surgery on the socket of the eye she lost, and was in England this week for a further medical consultation.

Ms McNally said it was now 10 years since a British TV channel broadcast an investigative documentary on the bombings called "Hidden Hand the Forgotten Massacre," which claimed there had been collusion. Sadly, she said, the documentary was derided by many politicians, civil servants, policemen, commentators and the media. "It was a false dawn for those of us who need answers to an outrage that changed all our lives."

Metropolitan police chief Sir John Stevens has found that collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries existed in the late 1980s. "Are we to believe that collusion started in 1987 and stopped in 1989," she asked. The group are not expecting Mr Justice Barron, head of the independent commission of inquiry into the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, to expose the full truth when he publishes his report in September.

"Mr Justice Barron has not had the powers to do so; he has not had a tenth of the powers or resources that Stevens had. He has not had the clear and full co-operation of the British Government as promised by Prime Minister Tony Blair. We have never seen the Barron inquiry as an end. We remain committed to pursuing the truth after his report is published."

"Our campaign has never been about vengeance; it has always been about truth. The secrets and conspiracies of the past have to be decommissioned as much as the armaments."