TODAY's anniversary of the Dublin bombings, in May 1974, for me recalls vividly that night in Jervis Street Hospital, as more and more casualties arrived. In a short space of time we took in 200 wounded people, a few of them dying, a few with major injuries, but most of them with relatively minor.
A group of us led by Leo Vella, the consultant surgeon in charge of casualty, had prepared a very careful major emergency plan to guide doctors like myself and others through the crisis which was about to engulf us.
The hospital telephonists had a list of who was to be notified and the order in which they were to be called. The first was to the casualty department, to make sure that every entrance except one, would be closed securely. This was absolutely critical to the successful management of the situation.
Within minutes of the first casualty's arrival, people were coming in by the dozen and it was essential to sort them quickly - into those whose lives depended on immediate, expert attention and those whose superficial injuries were much less urgent.
Along with one or two walking wounded there might be several relatives or friends, perhaps splashed with other people's blood, sometimes very agitated.
Triage Essential
This sorting at the point of entry, technically known as triage, is of the utmost importance if chaos is to be avoided.
We had previously prepared large red, yellow and green labels. The red labels were attached to very seriously injured patients who were immediately removed to the red area which was the casualty operating theatre.
Green labels were attached to those who very clearly had only minor injuries such as small cuts. These patients were passed to a large green area. The yellow labels were used for an intermediate group. All relatives, friends and anxious inquirers were brought over to the large canteen on the ground floor of the nurses' home.
The bombs were heard by a very alert nurse in the surgical outpatient department, Mary Campbell. She realised what the noise meant and did not wait for any call, but hurriedly closed all the entrances except the one narrow entrance which she manned herself. Indeed, there had been little time to spare as the first casualties arrived within minutes.
The second priority was to get a coordinator to the hospital as fast as possible. Three of us, Leo Vella, Brian Lane, one of the general surgeons and I, were the official coordinators.
Our job was to know every detail of the emergency plan.
Whichever of us got to the hospital first would act as co ordinator until the last patient had been treated. It happened that I was the first of the three to arrive and so assumed the role of coordinator.
The function of a coordinator is rather like that of a general in a very confused battle. In addition to the large influx of casualties - that night more than 200 - a constant stream of off duty nurses and clerical staff came in to help, as well as doctors and surgeons from other hospitals coming to see if they could give a hand. It was all wonderful and very generous help.
Dates of Birth
One of the most important functions of the clerical staff was to get identification details of every casualty, names, addresses and dates of birth. Why dates of birth? Because there could very easily be two Bridget Murphys and one does not want to give wrong information to inquiring relatives.
Today it is simple to collate all this information on a small personal computer, but in 1974 it all had to be done by hand. The coordinator also had to bear in mind the ever increasing number of anxious relatives and friends coming in to inquire.
At a very early stage I went over to talk to them in the canteen of the nurses home, to explain to them that our first job was to treat the seriously injured and to tell them that as soon as we had hard information we would bring it to them. During the night I went over to talk to them about every 20 minutes.
Thankfully there were only a few dead, but there was no problem in being sure of their death because they were literally blown to bits. I remember two young women with horrible injuries. One had her throat sheared away by shrapnel and her, breathing was coming through a lake of blood.
It is for injuries like this, or injuries that obstruct the airway, that the first doctor you need on hand is an anaesthetist to secure a safe airway. The other young woman had the front of her pelvis horribly torn by shrapnel.
Many bombings have a certain disregard for life, but only a very few like this one were designed to cause the maximum carnage - the bomb was placed beside a bus stop at rush hour.
The sight of these two women was so bestial that I was tempted to let press photographers in to take pictures of the wounds, with the idea that the publication might make people realise the true horror. But common sense prevailed and I did not produce what would have been an ultimate obscenity.
One doctor had tuned a radio to receive the Garda frequency. The idea of this was that we would know immediately if there were any further bombs.
There is one very unhappy, but little publicised result of all bombings, whether in Dublin or Manchester or London, and that is that in the next 24 hours the police get a hundred or more hoax calls.
Hoax Calls
The unfortunate police have to follow every one of them up. One hoax call, that night, told us that there were several bombs on the railway line above Binn's Bridge. One I shall never forget came at about 4.30 a.m., when we heard the weary voice of a Garda despatcher saying "Car X19, Car X19, will you for Jaysus' sake go to a hundred and somethin' Upper Rathmines Road. There's a f***er there who says he has a bomb under his bed."
My last memory of the night is arriving home near 9 a.m., utterly exhausted because I had been on the go for 24 hours. I fell into bed, in what was more a coma than a sleep. After about 15 minutes my wife called me to say there was a reporter on the phone. She had told him that I had gone to bed but he said it was important.
I picked up the phone and talked briefly to the reporter, but I do not imagine that he liked what I said. The curious thing about that sort of interruption at the beginning of an exhausted sleep is that it is very hard to get back to sleep again.