State should apologise for ignoring plight of victims and bereaved of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings
Dublin firemen search through the rubble on Parnell Street the morning after the explosion.
It was 50 years ago today that 33 people and an unborn child were murdered in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings.
In a highly synchronised operation in Dublin, three bombs were set off in less than four minutes around 5.30pm. Just 90 minutes later, another bomb went off in Monaghan. There were no warnings.
The operation was designed to kill and maim. And there is considerable evidence that elements of the British security forces were involved in what was effectively a bombing operation in a neighbouring liberal democracy in western Europe.
The tragedy and trauma was compounded by the scandal that followed. In the aftermath of the worst atrocity in the state since the civil war 50 years previously, the government of the day largely sat on its hands. Nobody was ever really pursued for the crime, not to mind prosecuted.
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Last Wednesday, there was all party support in the Dáil for a Sinn Féin motion calling on the Government to press the British to release files that might assist an investigation into the Glennane gang, a Loyalist murder gang who are believed to have been responsible for Dublin-Monaghan. The motion and its sentiment and support was suffused with rank hypocrisy on the part of Sinn Fáin, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent Labour.
As with other outrages from the period of the northern conflict, Sinn Féin seeks justice with one eye open. In the party’s value system, any victims of loyalists or British forces deserve justice for their murdered loved ones. Any victims of the Provisional IRA were not murdered, they were killed for political reasons in a conflict.
The justice to which they are entitled, including cooperation from anybody who knows anything, is highly qualified. There is a hierarchy of victims here in so-called Republican ideology based on the righteous pursuit of a fantasy island by the Provos. As such, emotional statements from Sinn Féin reps on behalf of the bereaved and wronged ring hollow.
In this instance, there is a further element to Shinner hypocrisy. The bombs used in Dublin were highly advanced. No such synchronised operation had taken place previously. The only group known to have the kind of bombs needed for such an operation were the Provos.
In retired garda John O’Brien’s recently published book on the outrage, , he points out that the loyalists did not have the capacity to carry out the attacks.
What is possible, if not probable, is that the British security element which colluded with the loyalists supplied the bombs. And where did they get the bombs? Retired British army lieutenant colonel Nigel Wylide told O’Brien that in 1974 “the army were consistently recovering large quantities of crystalised ANFO each week” from the Provos. This is the kind of bomb that was used in Dublin-Monaghan.
So Provo bombs, initially designed to kill innocents in the North or Britain, were used by security services to kill innocents in Dublin and Monaghan. Same instrument of terror, different perpetrators, but all the victims are equally innocent, equally robbed, all equally deserving of justice.
The hypocrisy from the parties that were in government in 1974, Fine Gael and Labour, and that of Fianna Fáil, which came to power in 1977, is of an even higher order.
At two top-level intergovernmental meetings in September and November 1974, British prime minister Harold Wilson told Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave that “the people who bombed Dublin were now interned (in the North) and that this was the only way which they could be dealt with because the sort of evidence against them would not stand up in court". Wilson was certain as to the culpability of those he referenced, he told Cosgrave.
“This information was central, critical, crucial, and pertinent to the discovery of the culprits and never actioned,” O’Brien writes.
The Taoiseach and senior government did not inform the garda commissioner, did not push the British for more detail, did absolutely nothing. One theory for the inaction is that the government was so obsessed with the violence of the Provos they did not want to do anything that might deflect and point towards violence from the Provos’ enemies.
In a horrible coincidence, the second meeting noted above occurred on November 17, 1974, the same day as the Birmingham pub bombings, which killed 21 people and injured 182 others. The Provisional IRA was responsible for that outrage.
No doubt the Irish government would have done anything at all to assist the British in bringing to justice those who perpetrated Birmingham. Yet for the sake of expediency, justice for those murdered in Dublin and Monaghan was not given anything like the same priority.
That changed in 1997 when Bertie Ahern came to power, about 23 years too late for a proper investigation. Since then the main obstacle to accessing the truth has been obstinance from the British who refuse to release the relevant files.
So today, all parties are seeking justice. Everybody in the Dáil can sing from the same hymn sheet and point a finger at the Brits.
What is really missing is an abject State apology to the victims, the bereaved and injured. Their plight was ignored when it really mattered, when their government quietly consigned them to collateral damage in the prevailing conflict.
The British may or may not eventually get a conscience, but in the meantime the proper and decent thing to do for wronged citizens is to give them the apology they deserve.
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