Twenty-five years after the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, the Justice for the Forgotten Committee is stepping up its demands for total transparency and a full public inquiry into the circumstances in which 33 people died and hundreds more were injured. Justice for the victims, both dead and injured, requires nothing less, the committee says.
On that fateful day - May 17th, 1974 - the three Dublin blasts were heard almost simultaneously, at about 5.30 p.m. Twenty-three people were killed outright and there were scores of terrible injuries. Many women and young children were enmeshed in the carnage.
The Dublin Disaster Plan was activated immediately and the medical and emergency services swung into action.
Parnell Street was in total confusion. Broken plate glass littered the footpaths, bodies were strewn around the street, people were screaming and there were pools of blood everywhere. Gardai attempted to move people away to let ambulances through. The dead lay covered with newspapers and blankets.
It was incredible that more people had not died in the South Leinster Street explosion, at the junction with Lincoln Place. It was the height of the Friday rush-hour, after all, with slow traffic, people walking to buses and trains and Trinity students swarming out from lectures and exams. The blast threw everyone to the ground. Then there was quiet. Flames and smoke engulfed the centre of the roadway.
At first, people were too terrified to move, in case there was another blast. Then they began to rise and huddle into little groups. They continued to stand and stare until the gardai finally cordoned the area off, 20 minutes after the explosion. The ambulances and fire brigade had difficulty in getting through. One man, whose arm had been blown off in the blast, had to be taken to hospital in the back of an estate car.
The bomb in Talbot Street was in a car parked just 20 yards from the junction with Lower Gardiner Street. Here, too, the street was crowded. The blast hit shoppers and pedestrians. Cars parked within 50 yards of it were wrecked. Dead and injured people lay on the pavement, in the roadway and inside shop windows. A fleet of ambulances, private cars and a single-decker CIE bus took the injured - many of them badly mutilated - to city hospitals.
In Monaghan, 90 minutes after the Dublin bomb attack, five people died in another blast, which caused havoc in the centre of the town and badly injured 28 people. The bomb went off without warning outside Greacen's Bar in Church Square, the end of the line for the express bus service. Most of those killed and injured were in the bar, which was all but demolished. Firemen, gardai and civilians put their lives at risk under the sagging masonry to extricate the dead and injured.
A large crater in the street marked the spot where the bomb had been planted and blackened, twisted wreckage lay all around.
At Monaghan County Hospital, staff were at full stretch treating the victims of the explosion. Additional space was made available in the medical wards by transferring some patients to St Davnet's psychiatric hospital.
In Leinster House, on the evening of the bombings, the Cabinet went into emergency session. The then minister for justice, Mr Patrick Cooney, told the meeting that two of the three cars used in the Dublin bombings had been hijacked the previous day in Belfast. The RUC confirmed this later for the media, adding that the two cars had been taken from loyalist areas. The owner of one had been stopped at gunpoint by three armed men, two of whom held him hostage until 90 minutes before the three devices exploded in Dublin.
The Taoiseach, Mr Liam Cosgrave, in a statement broadcast on radio and television, expressed his revulsion and condemnation of the bombings. "What has happened today", he said, "will help to underline the criminal folly and utter futility of violent action as a means for furthering political ends. It will also help to bring home to us here, in this part of our island, what the people in Northern Ireland have been suffering for five long years. Today's evil deeds will only serve to strengthen the resolve of those, North and South, who have been working for peace."
The Fianna Fail leader, Mr Jack Lynch, said that all those who had been involved in bombing campaigns in all parts of Ireland had blood on their hands.
Both the UDA and the UVF were quick to deny responsibility. The Provisional IRA also denied its involvement and condemned the bombings as "vile murder". Official Sinn Fein said in a statement: "We are quite sure that the Protestant workers in Belfast are as horrified at today's events as were their Southern co-workers on Bloody Friday in July 1972."
The statements were quickly forgotten and so, too, it seems, were the victims and their families. Very few TDs attended the annual commemoration Masses in the years since 1974 or even the special 25th anniversary ceremonies this year, according to Michelle O'Brien and Tim Grace, joint chairpersons of Justice for the Forgotten.
"While the Taoiseach, Government Ministers and TDs attended the funerals of some of the victims . . . that was the sole gesture forthcoming from them", they wrote in a letter this newspaper on June 30th last. "When we wrote to members of the Oireachtas seeking their support for a tribunal of inquiry into the bombings, 60 per cent of TDs and 45 per cent of senators didn't bother to reply."
Those who died in the Dublin bombings were: John O'Brien (23); Anne O'Brien (22); Jacqueline O'Brien (17 months); Anne Marie O'Brien (5 months); Anne Massey (21); Anne Byrne (35); Simone Chertrit (30); John Dargle; Patrick Fay (47); Antonio Magliocco (36); Anne Marren (20); Colette Doherty (21); Christina O'Loughlin (51); Edward O'Neill (39); Marie Phelan (20); Maureen Shiels (44); Breda Turner (21); Marie Butler; Breda Grace (35); Mary McKenna; Siobhan Rice (19); Dorothy Morris; John Walsh (27); Elizabeth Fitzgerald (59); Josephine Bradley (21) and Concepta Dempsey (65). The last three listed died some days later as a result of injuries sustained in the blasts.
Those who died in the Monaghan bomb attack were: John Travers (29); Margaret White (46); Thomas Campbell (52); Patrick Askin (53); George Williamson (73); Archibald Harper (72) and Thomas Croarkin (35). The last two listed died later from their injuries.