Anthology: As the Dublin bombs occupied the news on Friday May 17th, 1974, households in Monaghan Town were hurrying the evening tea to go to the annual parish retreat in the Cathedral.
At 6.47 p.m. the bomb exploded in Church Square. Shattered windows showered down on the telephonists in the exchange. Blast debris pounded the iron-roofed printing house of the Northern Standard. The doors flew off Mary Berwick's fridge, presses and the cooker in which she was baking meringues for a school cake sale. Pieces of the green Hillman Minx car with the bomb landed in her upstairs drawing room. Shaken by the blast, the arm of the gramophone on the top landing dropped on to an old 78 record and began to play Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Then a 30-year silence.
Introducing Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology, editor Evelyn Conlon admits to being nervous still about what to say. Meeting family members it struck her "what a burden it is to be forever cast as the relative of someone killed so publicly on a particular day". There was also the "pitfall to be avoided of making art out of our neighbour's grief".
Ciarán Ó Cearnaigh, with a parallel commission to produce a public memorial sculpture for Monaghan Town, was mindful too of the difficulties. Made at the request of relatives and other interested parties, the memorial, he says, had to be apolitical, show no religious bias and yet be poignant in its meaning.
So, questions of who bombed Monaghan town and why, and the reasons for the long postponement of truth and justice are left for another work, another story. In any case, as contributor John McArdle suggests, "by making scapegoats we can only imagine we are healed".
Instead, geographer Patrick Duffy outlines how the county town's municipal spaces and thoroughfares have always provided a platform for passing parades of celebration, power and control, alongside demonstrations of loyalty or support for party, creed or ideology.
Writers Eugene McCabe, Patrick McCabe, Peter Woods and Mary O'Donnell offer fictional flavours of Border life. And in personal pieces Nell McCafferty is melancholy and wise, Frank McNally funny, and barrister Paddy MacEntee examines privilege and exclusion. A third strand introduces poems by the likes of Ted McNulty, Padraig Rooney, Hugh Maxton, Shane Martin, Aidan Rooney Céspedes and Leland Bardwell, chosen as emotional touchstones for the bereaved families to underpin this memorial "salute".
Interwoven among the poems, stories and non-fiction are plainspoken eyewitness accounts by relatives and townspeople. The strongest element in the book, these short pieces describe those who died and what they were doing as the searing explosion engulfed Greacen's pub and McGlone's cafe. Several of the testimonies are taken from Don Mullan's earlier book, The Dublin and Monaghan Bombings (2000). But there are additional pieces by neighbours and relatives of the dead who volunteer their memories, recalling the pandemonium caused by the bombing that day and reflecting on the long term impact: their sense of grief, loss and neglect spanning decades.
Then there are the hidden casualties, parents who suffered "a turn" when they learned about offspring dead or in jeopardy, people who were never right after the shock. Sensitively handled throughout, a subtle and honest account emerges of decent people caught in an act of calculated violence done to them and their town.
Along with the shocked and the injured, seven citizens lost their lives: Archie Harper, George Williamson, Thomas Campbell, Patrick Askin, Peggy White, Thomas Croarkin and Jack Travers. Yet, as campaign secretary Margaret Urwin says, until the people through Justice for the Forgotten organised a wreath-laying and inter-denominational service on Sunday May 14th, 2000, to mark the 26th anniversary, no commemorative service had ever been held in Monaghan. It was at this service that a call for a fitting memorial was articulated.
• Brian Leyden is a writer whose most recent book is The Home Place (New Island, 2002)