'There were bodies lying everywhere' after deadly blasts

The evening of 17 May 1974 started as just another ordinary Friday evening in both Dublin and Monaghan.

After-work pints. Final preparations for 21st birthday parties and communions. Young people heading home for the weekend.

In sunny Dublin, the streets were busier than usual with Dublin Bus in the throes of a record 65-day strike.

But as the city hummed, three cars converged on the capital loaded with explosives.

Earlier that morning, three vehicles were hijacked or stolen in Belfast as a sophisticated loyalist paramilitary plot to bomb Dublin swung into gear. The hijackers brought the cars to the bomb squad at a farmhouse outside Glennane in south Armagh before heading for Dublin.

In Portadown, a fourth car was stolen; the car that would later house the Monaghan bomb in an apparent attempt to bring focus away from the border and allow the Dublin attackers return freely to the North.

The Dublin cars were primed near the airport; before being carefully placed in the city centre when it was at its busiest.

Between all the incidents, 34 people including an unborn baby lost their lives. The eldest fatality was an 80-year-old World War I veteran, while a five-month-old baby also died.

It marked the deadliest day of the Troubles.

5.28pm, Parnell Street – Bomb 1

Friends Breda Turner (21) and Marie Phelan (20) headed for Dublin city centre full of excitement, both carrying out last minute errands for a friend's 21st birthday party. Breda went to a dry cleaners on Parnell Street while Marie visited Guineys over on Talbot Street to pick up a gift for the party.

Like many young people from the country working in Dublin at the time, Ms Turner returned home most weekends to visit her family in Thurles. "We always looked forward to Friday evenings, she'd be home for the weekend. But that particular Friday evening, she wasn't coming home," explains Breda's sister, Marie Power.

"She just went up Parnell Street to a dry cleaners that day and that was the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Her whole life was wiped out in a flash. She had just gotten engaged. It's as if it was only a month ago. It's crazy thinking that length of time has passed."

As Breda Turner went to the dry cleaners, Edward O'Neill Snr (39) went to collect his sons Billy and Edward Jnr from the barbers ahead of Billy's First Holy Communion the following day.

"The reason he went to this particular barbershop was because the owner was a friend of his, was involved in the same karate club and had just gotten a new poster of Bruce Lee, who was the man of the moment at the time. So, he'd have taken the boys to see that," outlines Edward's daughter Angela.

"It was back in the day when you could go in for a sneaky pint and leave your kids in the barber shop with your friend. But he came back, collected the boys, walked out and the bomb exploded at that moment.

"They were standing right at the car where the bomb was placed."

Edward Snr died, while his two sons suffered serious injuries which still leave an impact to this day.

"It was my communion too and I was in the hairdressers with my mum. And I remember arriving home that evening and a neighbour coming towards her with a chair. And then later that evening my mother told my sister and myself that dad had gone to heaven. This still upsets me."

"And then I went ahead and made my first communion the next day."

Three months later, Angela's mother Martha gave birth to baby Martha. She was still-born at full-term. In 2022, her name was the 35th added to a memorial plaque for victims of the bombing on Talbot Street.

5.30pm, Talbot Street – Bomb 2

"A friend from work and a friend from home."

That was how Ann Marren (20) described Marian Keenan, a school friend of hers from Tubbercurry in Co Sligo, and Josie Bradley (21), a colleague of hers in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, when the three girls met near North Earl Street minutes before the bombings.

That evening Ann and Marian met up by chance and hoped to get the train back home west. The friends often used the journey to catch up on life and share plans for the weekend. After Ann popped into Dunnes to pick up a pair of tights for her sister, the two girls proceeded in the direction of Connolly Station.

"This girl came down and she came towards us. That was Josephine," remembers Marian.

"I don't know whether she was going down for the weekend or not, but she turned to walk with us. I don't know why because I never got to ask her."

Josie Bradley, a native of Co Offaly, had made plans that weekend to go looking at flats with her twin sister Marian Bradley.

"We had so many plans for the future ... we were going to live together and the big thing we were all really looking forward to was to celebrate our 21st birthday", recalls Marian.

As they moved down Talbot Street, at 5.28pm the girls heard the first explosion go off on nearby Parnell Street. Marian Keenan remembers how the three girls stopped "and I said to them, we have to get out. There's something going on. We have to get out of here."

Less than two minutes later the second of three car bombs detonated near Guineys just as the girls were passing. 50 years later that moment is as clear in Marian Keenan's mind as if it were yesterday.

"As far as I understand, we were right beside it. And I was lucky they told me, because when a thing explodes, there's a gap. And I was in that gap. But they weren't. They were right beside it. I knew they were dead. I couldn't stand up but I was completely alive. I never thought I wouldn't be alive."

Ann Marren was killed instantly, Josephine Bradley survived until the following Monday and Marian Keenan miraculously survived.

"My last memory of the girls is just happy people. Looking forward to the weekend. Just good, honest, low maintenance people. Ordinary people in the wrong place. So ordinary that you didn't even have opinions. You just wanted to be happy"

Mrs Keenan can still vividly recall how her friends died in front of her.

"Straight away. Straight away. Especially Anne. She was beside me. And it was immediate. Big lump hit her. I can see it to this day. Big lump. Poor thing. Age 20"

Parnell Street victim Breda Turner's friend Marie Phelan, from Waterford, was exiting Guineys at the same moment, as recalled by her brother Pat Phelan.

"She finished work on Friday evening, 17th of May. She made her way across O'Connell Street ... into Guineys. As she walked out the door, the car was directly outside the door. So, that was it. That was over in an instant.

"My dad went to Dublin the following morning. He went to the Mater Hospital and he went to see his daughter. Her only identification was a ring. So, what father wants to see his daughter like that? And my mom just ... went into silence, trying to comprehend what had happened. That wasn't easy. That was hard."

"The dress that she was going to wear going to the 21st stayed on the bed for four months. It was never touched."

5.32pm, South Leinster Street – Bomb 3

Christina O'Loughlin (52) was a very unusual person for the time.

Born in the early 1920s, she was proud to be a French polisher at the prestigious Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen's Green.

"It's basically where you have pieces of furniture that need to be touched up every so often. They might need to be stripped down close to the bare wood and oiled, stains removed and then a proper finish put on. She loved her job and was very popular," remembers Christina's son Kevin.

Mrs O'Loughlin left the Shelbourne Hotel around 5.20pm; heading for the family home on Townsend Street. She walked past Dáil Éireann and turned right onto South Leinster Street when the third bomb exploded.

"She would have been home by 6pm. She had a routine, she was coming home to cook our dinner and very soon we realised something had gone wrong," says Kevin.

"It took a while to realise that she might not be coming home. Then around 3 or 4am my father and other relations headed off just to find out things ... .and eventually found her in the morgue at Amiens Street."

Also killed at South Leinster Street was Anna Massey (21), who was due to be married in July and had written her wedding invitations the night before.

"The two of them were walking past the car bomb when it exploded and both of them were killed more or less instantly," Kevin O'Loughlin said.

"After my father and relatives came back from the morgue, my brother and I would have asked could we see our mother, and people told us it was better we didn't as the injuries were so horrific. So, we never saw her again.

"It's as though she just disappeared off the face of the earth."

Immediate Aftermath

Among the first on the scene after the Talbot Street bomb were journalist Vincent Browne and his brother Malachy, a final year medical student at the time. The brothers had arranged to meet at the door of Independent Newspapers when they heard the explosion.

"I wasn't at all prepared for what we were to see. I assumed that it was a bomb that had been a warning and probably a few people might have been injured but not that much.

"But as we walked up Talbot Street, it was just utterly shocking," recalled Vincent on a recent return visit to Talbot Street.

"It was around here - across the road from the Electric Circus bar now - that we suddenly realised that there were bodies lying on the street. And I lifted a young woman and as I did so, she simply disintegrated. I didn't know the body could disintegrate. She was alive but she disintegrated.

"I put her down and then we came across a big, tall man with a huge piece of metal from a car on his side. We lifted him up very awkwardly with the help of a stranger and we took him to what was then Moran's hotel."

"And we came back out and we were looking for people not who were dead but who were still alive and who might be saved."

One of those looking to be saved was Bernadette Jolie, who felt the brunt of the Talbot Street explosion as she walked from her job in the Kylemore Bakery head office on Store Street.

"We were walking along and the next minute the whole place shook. It felt like an earthquake or something. And afterwards it seemed there was a huge silence. I was thrown forward onto my knees. I got up and didn't realise I'd been injured or anything until I noticed that my right arm was just hanging by my side and the blood streaming down it.

"There was lots of screaming and people running and a man ran by me with a baby in his arms that was covered in blood. There were lots of injuries. People had bits of their bodies blown away".

'We were all streaming blood'

Also caught in the chaos was Maeve Taylor, who'd come into Talbot Street with three of her daughters to buy Holy Communion shoes. At 96, she's the oldest living survivor of the atrocity.

"We were outside Guiney's when there was a deafening noise and glass shattered everywhere around us. We were blown across the street and my shoes were blown off. My feet were cut and the children suffered injuries to their faces, hands and legs. We were all streaming blood. You could see nothing because of the black smoke. We eventually found a chemist and asked the owner to take us to the hospital".

Vincent Browne remembers how ambulances were slow to arrive with a bus strike exacerbating evening rush hour traffic.

"Finally an ambulance seemed to arrive. But oddly, there were no stretchers. So we could put only one person into the ambulance. And then a Garda said there was another bomb about to go off and we ran down towards Connolly Station. We didn't know if we were running into the bomber. But, there wasn't another bomb.

6.57pm, Monaghan Town – Bomb 4

Around 120 kilometers away in Monaghan town, word was spreading of events in Dublin.

"It was a miserable old evening, it was like old fine rain," recalls life-long Monaghan resident Tommy Haggan. "I was down in the credit union, and I could see the television and it was up in the news about the Dublin bombings. Little did we realise that we were the next victims in Monaghan."

Shortly before 7pm, a green 1966 Hillman Minx - loaded with explosives - parked outside Greacen's pub in the centre of the town.

"I would have been around 14 years of age at the time and Crossroads, which was a TV series on UTV, was a big favourite of mine," says Monaghan native Enda Galligan. "Crossroads was always finished at 6.57pm. And that Friday evening, just as the credits rolled, there was this almighty boom."

"I remember the windowpane in the house started to rattle. It was a millisecond, but it just seemed like forever. And I thought 'why is the window rattling?'," remembers Brendan White. "Then I heard the explosion. I walked outside and saw the smoke coming from the town and knew both my dad and my mom were there."

'All hell had broken loose'

As Brendan White ran to check on his parents, pandemonium erupted around Church Square in Monaghan town. Locals still recall feeling the force of the explosion 12 kilometers away in Emyvale, while eyewitnesses remember how windows "melted" out of the buildings near the bomb car prior to the explosion.

"There was lots of dust, lots of glass. Poisonous dust. The whole walls of the bank that was there would have shaken. The place was in darkness. You didn't know where you were going, uphill or downhill," recounts John Rooney.

John McQuaide rushed to the scene from his job in The Ulster Arms bar across from Greacens and remembers how fear spread of another bomb.

"People were running in every direction. One minute there was a bomb down in Church Square, and another minute it was round the North Road and people were running there. The cafe and pub were ablaze, it was a wooden structure.

"And talk of unsung heroes, one of them was a boy called Patsy Cairns from Tully. He went to that blazing building and out the back of the building were two large cylinders of gas attached. And Patsy Cairns rolled one of them cylinders out into the middle of the road to take it away from the fire. And I thought, 'could I have done that?'"

"All hell had broken loose," says Enda Galligan who was driving home from work when the bomb exploded. "The pub was in destruction. And yet, the pint of Guinness - half finished - still stood on the counter. I got this strong smell. And there was a piece of plate glass stuck in the bank wall between the stonework."

Eamon Smyth was filling his car with petrol when a piece of the bomb struck him in the head.

"I got hit on the head with something. I didn't know what it was. I thought it was glass. I ended up going to the hospital and they checked it and took it out. It was a lump of steel, a lump of wire, about three inches long. After the hospital I went for a few beers before heading home. I still have the wire at home."

Amid the chaos, visiting missionary priests arrived from the nearby Westenra Hotel.

"They would have gone out onto the street along with the local priests here - Father McSorley and Father Kevin Cassidy - and they would have been anointing the people on the street in the carnage that erupted," says Monaghan native Frances Meehan.

"The ambulance then arrived," continues John McQuaide. "I remember them carrying out a Mrs White. They carried her out on a door and put her back into the ambulance."

At this point, Brendan White turned into the centre of Monaghan and immediately feared for his mother Peggy, who worked part-time in the cafe above Greacen's pub.

"That's when I realised my mom was right in the middle of it. It was madness. And somebody told me that a lady had been carried out the back entrance, so I rushed to Monaghan Hospital.

"What happened is apparently she came over to the window. She was on the second floor. She came over to the window to look out to see if my dad was coming. Just a couple of minutes before 7pm. And the bomb was planted directly below that window.

"Just as she was looking out, it went off. A lot of glass blew into her face and her body. The last words my mother spoke to my sister at the hospital were 'take care of my boys', so she knew."

Mother-of-four Peggy White (44) was the only woman to lose her life in the Monaghan blast.

'It seems like last week'

As locals scoured the debris for casualties, John McQuaide realised two men, who had minutes earlier invited him to join them in Greacen's 'for a feed', had felt the full force of the bomb.

"There was a man laying where the door was, and that was Tommy Campbell, who I'd been talking to five minutes before that."

Mr Campbell (52) was a bachelor farmer from Silverstream. He had come into Monaghan to collect his mother's pension and was waiting at the bar for the seven o'clock bus home when the bomb exploded. His mother died from shock a few weeks later.

Also lifted from the rubble was Tommy Croarkin (36), who worked in a furniture factory in Monaghan town.

"Tommy lived at home alone with the mother out in Tyholland," explains his nephew Jimmy. "He had the same routine every Friday. Get the cheque changed, head for a pint or the dinner and then get the 7pm bus back to live with Mammy."

"He kept very much to himself, there's not even a photograph of him or maybe just one I think, that's how quiet he was. Tommy was found lying on the ground outside Greacen's. He had the handle of the door of the pub in his hand."

Mr Croarkin survived for nine weeks after the explosion - with his mother often thumbing a lift to Dublin from Tyholland to visit her son in hospital. He died on 23 July 1974.

"I had two chances to go into that bar and I didn't," recounts McQuaide. "I've thought about it when lying in bed at night when I can't sleep. I can't believe it's 50 years. It seems like last week."

'No sign of Mammy'

In Harmonstown in north Dublin, Aidan Shields worried for his father Leo.

"My father worked in Guiney's on Talbot Street. And 5.29pm on that Friday evening, he went out and pulled the shutters down on the shop. He probably saved a few people by pulling the shutters down as the glass and shrapnel didn't get into the shop," he said.

However, it wasn't his father Aidan had to be worried about.

"He got home on the Dart. But then we had to tell him that there was no sign of Mammy."

Maureen Shields (42) had decided to head into Dublin to surprise her husband, waiting right outside Guineys when the Talbot Street bomb exploded

"She went into town and decided that she'd collect him. She just decided to surprise him. And we know what happened. He'd have walked by her on the street and didn't recognise her. And she kind of wasn't recognisable because a few hours later I was the one who had to identify her," recalls Aidan who was 19 at the time of the bombings.

"The morgue was shocking. Absolutely shocking. They pulled the sheet down and it took more than a glance, I can tell you, to decide that was my mother that I had known for 19 years"

Leo Shields never returned to work in Guineys after 17 May 1974.

"He just couldn't go back. He tried to go back to work but he couldn't believe that he had probably walked over her body on the street," his son said.

Mr Shields died 22 months later.

"He died of a broken heart."

An anxious wait

Across Ireland, families anxiously waited for their loved ones to return from Dublin. Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters stood at train stations in different corners of the country hoping their loved ones would disembark from the evening services from Connolly Station.

For many, relief. For others, five decades of heartbreak.

"The train came in and there were a few people that would have known Siobhan at the station, and I just asked had anybody seen her, and nobody had seen her," remembers Wexford's Liz Gleeson, who lost her sister Siobhan Roice (19) in the Talbot Street bomb.

"We had a business in the town," continues another of Siobhan's sisters, Aileen Murphy.

"My husband started ringing around. We couldn't get through on 999 because the lines were jammed. Eventually, a few of us went to Dublin in the early hours of the morning ... and found Siobhan in the mortuary opposite Busaras."

Also waiting for passengers off the Dublin train was Ann Marren's brother in Ballymote, Co Sligo.

"I turned on the news and had an awful feeling about it," says Ann's sister Margaret who was working as a nurse in Scotland at the time.

"My brother had gone to Ballymote, as he normally would, to pick Ann up from the station and she wasn't on the train. But he met a neighbour who told him not to worry about it, because a lot of them were turning back from the train station after the bomb."

"Ultimately, I was still in Scotland and the gardaí obviously contacted the police in Scotland and they in turn contacted my hospital. Somewhere around midnight, I could hear the night sister come and tip tap down the corridor and she came into the room.

"And she never had to tell me to this day. I just knew."

For the family of Ann's friend Josephine Bradley, relief turned into despair.

"It was 1974, nobody had phones, especially in a small little country area. So, my brother went to the local village, Ballyboy ... and made calls to Dublin. He got through to Jo's accommodation and he was assured she was there and safe," explains Josephine's sister Frances.

That night the Bradley family offered a decade of the rosary in thanksgiving, thinking Josephine had survived the bomb. Her sister Pauline went to her Debs ball and stood for a minute's silence for the casualties in Dublin and Monaghan, not knowing they included her older sister.

"On Saturday morning, our local guard came out to the house and said Josie's bag was found on the street, on Talbot Street. That's when the nightmare began," says Frances Bradley.

"They hadn't checked her room in the accommodation," laments Josephine's twin sister Marian, "so I went to the City Morgue and there was a long queue of people waiting to identify their loved ones.

"While I was sitting waiting, I started ringing the hospitals again to be told that Jervis Street had a Janet Bradley registered.

"I ran to Jervis Street to find Jo lying in a bed next to the window with the sun smiling in on her. She smiled, we hugged, she squeezed my hand, she was happy that I had found her.

"'But unfortunately, the bomb from the blast had caught her tummy and she had horrendous damage done on her stomach."

Josephine's sister Sr Claudia Bradley immediately booked a flight home from Los Angeles to be at her sister's bedside.

"I hoped against hope that Josie was still alive. But, passing over New York, I witnessed a glorious sunrise and it didn't go unnoticed. It was at that very time, 11.30pm Irish time, Monday 20 May, that dear Josie died."

Monaghan Hospital

Back in Monaghan, the Askin family were waiting too.

"We were always waiting at the end of the lane for Da to come home. But, this Friday, he wasn't coming home. And at 6.58pm, the windows vibrated in the kitchen - and we were living six miles away from the bomb," recounts Paul Askin.

A radio news flash then pierced through the Askin family kitchen in Glaslough with details of the Monaghan bomb.

"Ma knew straight away, because he wasn't home. He survived for six hours after the explosion," remembers Paul, who was just six-years-old when his father Paddy (44) died.

Nurses at Monaghan Hospital recount how Paddy spoke about his then two-year old twins, Sharon and Sonia, before his death

"Whatever side he was sitting in the pub was whatever side the blast came in. That was that. That's the side," says Paul Askin.

"Ma always had the money that was in his pocket that night. She always kept it. It's still in the house. Some of the coins are bent out of shape and everything from the force", adds Sharon.

Mr Askin was in Greacen's pub with David Parker, getting cheques cashed and having a Friday pint after their week's work.

"He was buying Paddy Askin a drink when the bomb exploded. He had his hand putting his wallet back into his inside pocket, which left him with an injury with his arm that they couldn't get right. He was blew over the counter and all the glasses and all the bottles all embedded in him for years and years afterwards", recounts Mr Parker's daughter, Georgina Kent.

"Daddy would feel a wee prick somewhere and he'd say to my mother 'look at that', and mummy would pick out a wee piece of glass. He was one of the last to leave the hospital and he looked so old. He was all coloured and cuts and he could hardly walk. My younger siblings screamed and ran away because they were frightened of him. He wasn't their daddy."

Beside David Parker in hospital was Archie Harper (73).

The farmer and publican had gone to town with his daughter Iris and was returning to his car opposite Greacen's when the bomb exploded.

"I went to visit my aunt and I walked through the door the bomb went off", says Mr Harper's daughter Iris Hall.

"I ran down the street and collapsed when I was told Daddy was gone to hospital. Both of us going to town to do our own things and for this to happen."

Mr Harper survived for four days, but was unconscious.

"The day before he died, he put his hand out in my hand and he opened his eyes crying. And I was hopeful he was coming out of it. But nothing could be done for poor Daddy."

"So that was my story. My life changed forever that day. He was close to me and I was so close to him. I went everywhere with him. My life has been horrendous because of this."

'We didn't know until Saturday Anna was in the bomb'

It took over 24 hours for the grim reality to emerge that an entire family had been wiped out in one of the Dublin bombings.

Anna O'Brien (22), her husband Johnny and daughters Jacqueline (17 months) and Anne Marie (5 months) lived on Gardiner Street, around the corner from Parnell Street, where the first bomb exploded.

"She went down for a walk, I'd say, and they went straight into the bomb. We didn't know Anna was in the bomb until the following evening at 7pm," says Anna's sister Alice.

"The only reason we knew she was in the bombs is after my father went into town that day because my auntie across the road from Anna, Chrissie, said she didn't hear from her all night.

"They went down to the mortuary and she was in it. Chrissie identified her by her earrings, the earrings she gave her. And Johnny had a tattoo on his arm - with Anna's name on it. They really got the brunt of it.

"My father couldn't identify her because it was too bad. He said it was like a slaughterhouse, they were putting legs and arms together to make a body. God knows what was in them coffins," she said.

The only family photo of the O'Brien family is one of two adult coffins flanked by two white caskets.

"My father wasn't the same after what he saw that day in the mortuary. I think he hit the drink.

"And my mother, she might as well have died that day because that was the end of her. Her eldest daughter and her then only grandchildren, you know that way? For nine years she lived after that. She was 43 when Anna died. The doctor said she died of a broken heart."

Catherine, another of Anna's sisters, still cherishes a pair of sandals baby Jacqueline wore the day before her death.

"It just makes me closer to them that I still have them," she says.

"What got me through these years is, Anna, John, Jacqueline and Annemarie are together up in heaven, as a family - the way they should have been down here. I'm 56 now and I was six when it happened. That's what gets me through'.

'I woke up and they were anointing me'

Noel Hegarty was a 15-year old apprentice tailor with big hopes for the future.

"I liked it, loved it. Louis Copeland could have been working for me now! Unfortunately that day, May 1974 was the end of my tailing career as such," he said.

Mr Hegarty was due to meet his sister on Talbot Street. Instead, he walked straight into the bomb.

"I remember a flash and a big puff of smoke and that was it. I remember a terrible smell, a stench afterwards. I just couldn't get rid of it. It was like sulphur or burning.

"I remember waking up in the hospital and I was being anointed. It was three days later before my father and my eldest brother actually found me. I wouldn't have had any identification on me at the time."

Mr Hegarty spent up to four months in Dublin's Richmond Hospital but admits he has spent "most of my life in and out of hospital" as a result of the bomb.

"I had this buzzing sound in my ears all the time, just constant. It was only later in life I realised my eardrums were perforated.

"I have pictures in my mind and I don't know where these pictures came from. I can see people, bodies, blood everywhere. I'll always remember the sound of glass. Just shards as though somebody dumped a load of glass on the ground. And if I ever heard the sound of car door banging, I became very nervous. Frightened. Scared."

Scared of what?

"Afraid that another car bomb would go off. That stayed with me - I won't say it has gone away because it's still there."

The bomb's lasting impact profoundly affected Noel Hegarty's mental health.

"I became very suicidal after it. Very withdrawn. I don't think I've ever got over it. I never will. I was only a teenager at the time, starting out in life and I didn't have the tools to deal with what arose and what was the aftermath. Just the only way I could deal with it was either take an overdose or try and kill myself.

"I ended up in Portrane then. Their answer was electric shock treatment. I had twelve courses of that, one after the other.

"They say you're only supposed to get six, but I got twelve. It doesn't make you forget. It only makes things worse. I could never trust a doctor after that"

The Omagh bomb in 1998 brought with it memories of May 1974.

"I tried to commit suicide again. But I'm lucky that I have a family around me that look after me. They're always there for me. Sometimes I feel as though I've let them down by the things that have happened over the years"

With the help of his son, Mr Hegarty wrote a poem to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the bombings. Ahead of the 50th anniversary, his focus is on both justice and remembering those who died.

"The people that died were human beings. They had a right to live. They have a right not to be forgotten. To be remembered. What happened should never be forgotten. It's very important that the carpet that they lifted back in 1974 and swept everything under it, that they get rid of that carpet now. Open it up and let everybody see the truth.

"The hope is there. It'll never go away. It's all we have, really, isn't it? A bit of hope. That's it".

'Truth will set us Free'

'Truth will set us Free'

Nobody has ever been charged in connection with the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and most of the alleged suspects are now deceased. The garda investigation - into the biggest mass murder in the history of the force - was wound down within weeks.

The bombings occurred on the third day of the Northern Ireland workers' strike arranged by Unionists opposed to the Sunningdale Agreement, which gave a bigger role to Dublin in running Northern Ireland.

Almost twenty years later, loyalist paramilitaries - the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) - took responsibility for the bombings, but insisted they acted alone.

However, the sophistication of the bombings - which were unlike anything carried out by loyalists either before or after, has given rise to persistent allegations of collusion with British security and intelligence forces. The type of explosives used has also prompted questions.

Irish judicial inquiries have failed to definitively get to the bottom of what happened that ordinary Friday evening, frustrated by a lack of access to both key Irish and British documents.
A new review - Operation Denton offers hope, with its head Iain Livingstone this week saying he has had access to never before seen top secret material.

But, five decades on, families and survivors still feel a long way from justice and truth.

Ahead of the 50th anniversary, Dominic Meehan stands in the middle of Church Square in Monaghan town and lists out all his friends and relatives who died in the bomb.

"The people that were killed were innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the people who perpetrated that on the people of Monaghan town and on all the people of Dublin; they didn't carry it out without intelligence, without assistance."

Other cling to the belief that the full events around 17 May 1974 will come out into the open.

"I believe that out of the most unexpected corners of our lives, somewhere, somehow, the truth will come out," says Sr Claudia Bradley.

"And the truth will set us free".

The Forgotten, from Barry Lenihan and Ciaran O'Connor, a special RTÉ six part radio series on the events surrounding the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, is available on the RTÉ Radio App.
It's also available on podcast platforms.