A British report on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings has criticised an eleven-day delay in getting debris from the blast-site to the North's of Forensic Science Department in Belfast. The Republic's top forensic scientist today for the first time received the 25-year-old British report on the attacks that killed 33 and injured over 250 people in 1974. The paper was delivered to Dr James Donovan by a representative of the bomb victims, Mr. Don Mullen, who says that Dr. Donovan was not consulted before the debris was sent North. Mr. Mullen has called for a tribunal of inquiry into the unsolved crime.
On 17 May 1974, 3 bombs exploded in central Dublin within 90 seconds, and another went off in Monaghan Town. 19 years later the Ulster Volunteer Force said that they did it. However, nobody has ever been arrested, and suspicions linger that British military intelligence directed the eight people suspected by police of being the bombers. Campaigners on behalf of the murder victims are amazed that, under these circumstances, most of the bomb debris was sent to Belfast, where Dr. R. A. Hall of the North's Department of Industrial and Forensic Science concluded that the Monaghan bomb was similar to Loyalist car-bombs.
Dr. Hall's forensic report criticised the 11-day delay in getting debris to him in Belfast from the four bombsites. He said that if clues to who had carried out the attacks were to be found, organic evidence needed to be examined within hours or at most a few days of the blast. Yesterday the Minister for Justice John O'Donoghue rejected calls for an independent inquiry.
