Letters to the Editor: State has failed victims of Dublin and Monaghan bombings

Patricia McKenna says the victims of the bombings and their families were abandoned not only by the government in office in 1974, but by all governments since

The aftermath of the bombing in Dublin on May 17, 1974, when four bombs went off in Dublin and Monaghan. 

The current focus on the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of Friday, May 17, 1974, is, in my opinion, too little, too late. I was a schoolgirl in Monaghan when the bombs went off. For many years I believed the IRA were responsible for this atrocity — understandable given the IRA’s track record.

It was only in the 1980s that I realised that these atrocities were not the hand of the IRA but in fact perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries with the hidden assistance of state agents of a foreign power. I wondered why I had wrongly jumped to my initial conclusions but a brief look back at what was said at the time, especially by the government of the day, provided a reasonable explanation.