The family of a man killed in a bomb attack on Dublin Airport has called for a renewed garda investigation into their father's killing nearly 50 years ago, as a major UK report related to the bombing is set to publish.
The 1975 bombing, which killed Aer Lingus baggage handler John Hayes and injured nine others, is among the atrocities that is being examined by Operation Denton, an independent UK police investigation set up to examine the activities of the so-called 'Glenanne Gang'.
In the coming weeks, Operation Denton is expected to publish a report into the activities of the UVF-linked gang, which operated across Armagh and Mid-Ulster in the 1970s and whose members included serving soldiers and police officers.
The family of John Hayes say they hope the publication will spark fresh interest in the case and may finally get them answers to questions they have been wondering about for decades.
His son Brendan Hayes told Prime Time "no one was ever arrested. No one was ever questioned. I know it's 50 years ago but that is no excuse not to have an effective investigation into an atrocity like this."
'Ordinary man'
Born and raised in the old post office in Coon, Co Kilkenny, John Hayes had a love of hurling and wide circle of friends before he emigrated to London in search of work.
"He lived over there for a few years and did various jobs. That's where he met my mother. They met at a dance in a club called Charlie Mac's," Brendan said.
After moving home to Ireland, the couple lived in Kilkenny before moving to Co Dublin, where they bought a house in Balbriggan.
John "loved his wife and doted on his three kids", according to Brendan, "he was an ordinary family man".
Bombing at the airport
Saturday 29 November 1975 began as a normal day in the lives of the Hayes family.
Monica Hayes was at home with her three children while her husband John was at work a relatively short drive away at Dublin Airport.
She was preparing dinner when a knock came to the door. Several gardaí and representatives from the airline arrived to deliver the news that her husband John had been killed.
John, a father of 11-year-old twins Brian and Karen and three-year-old Brendan, was the sole victim of a Loyalist bomb at Dublin Airport.
Two devices had been placed in the airport terminal. The first detonated in the toilets leaving nine people injured and John dead. The airport building had been evacuated when a second bomb went off upstairs.
"I was only three when he was killed so I've got no effective memory of him. It's only what my family can tell me, my brother, sister and mother," Brendan said.
"He actually wasn't supposed to be working that day. He volunteered to do a shift because they were short. Tragically he'd gone to the toilet. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's when the bomb went off," Brendan added.
The autopsy findings from the time indicate that Brendan's father was killed instantly by the blast. But it was four or five hours before his body was discovered.
When the gardaí and Aer Lingus managers called to the door to tell Monica her husband had been killed, Brendan said "she just found it unbelievable. She just couldn't accept that it had actually happened".
Brendan remembers his mother's disbelief. "He can't be dead," she said. "I'm making him dinner."
It was much later, according to Brendan, that the magnitude of what happened began to sink in for Monica, who was left alone with three young children.
"It was extremely difficult. There was no support services offered to her at the time, from social services. There was no psychiatric care, and there was no follow-up from the gardaí either. There was no investigation, no visits, no one telling us what was happening with the investigation," he said.
"It's had a devastating effect on the family. We still feel the effects to this day. I don't think the family have really recovered from it."
Losing his father in such circumstances has had a profound impact on Brendan personally.
"It's created problems for me all my life. It's only recently that I've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and recurrent depressive disorder. And it's had an effect on my social relationships, on work. It's just affected every facet of my life."
Brendan is now fighting for justice and trying to find who was responsible for murdering his father in an atrocity that has largely faded from public memory.
"It's been forgotten about. I think it has been overshadowed by the Dublin and Monaghan bombings the previous year," Brendan said.
"But I'm surprised a bomb at the airport has been forgotten about," he added.
The fight for justice
The Hayes family believe serious questions remain about how gardaí handled the case over the past five decades.
"I've only learned of the investigation from my dealings with Operation Denton, and they've effectively said there was no real effective investigation done by the Garda Síochána," Brendan said.
He says the "investigation went cold" after a year and there was "absolutely no follow-up whatsoever. It's really disappointing. It compounds our trauma."
Prime Time put a series of questions last week to An Garda Síochána. At the time of publication the organisation has not provided a response.
Belfast-based human rights solicitor Kevin Winters is representing a number of families of victims killed in attacks that are being investigated by Operation Denton.
"Operation Denton involved looking at a raft of atrocities committed in the period of the mid 1970s in Mid Ulster. You're talking up 120 murders, series of attempted murders, explosions, and atrocities committed on an industrial scale," Mr Winters said.
Families have been briefed about the contents of the Denton report and Prime Time has seen a copy of minutes taken during a briefing with Brendan Hayes.
"He was given specific information about perpetrators, about intelligence, about links to other atrocities. And that was the first time that this family were given anything remotely resembling some form of closure," Mr Winters added.
Brendan Hayes said his family were long led to believe the UDA was responsible, "but it's only in the last couple of years, through my dealings with Operation Denton, that I was told it was actually the UVF," Mr Hayes said.
"They identified five suspects, but they said there could have been up to 12 people involved in the attack. They've given us the names of two people, but they've withheld the names of three, and they haven't really given a sufficient reason as to why they haven't given us those three names," he added.
News of UVF links to the Dublin Airport bomb – first reported in the media by The Irish News last month – is an important step in the Hayes family's fight for justice.
Mr Winters said that discovering the attack was not a UDA act, but linked to the UVF, was significant.
"It points to evidence of connections with the wider, systemic series of atrocities carried out by the Glenanne Gang in the mid-1970s in the Mid-Ulster area - and that's hugely significant. It also opens the door to exposing links with a raft of other cases," Mr Winters said.
"They thought this was a one-off UDA-linked case, and it was anything but," he added.
The Hayes family and their legal team are angry at how An Garda Síochána conducted its investigations into 1970s bombings such as the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in 1974 and the Dublin Airport bomb the following year.
"I think that they were swept under the carpet. I think the authorities down here didn't really want to know, didn't really want to investigate them properly, and they just wanted to bury them, forget about them," Mr Hayes said.
"They should have identified these suspects. And I believe the RUC had suspects' names at the time, and they passed them on to the gardaí, and it seems like nothing was ever done about that. No one was ever arrested, no one was ever questioned," he said.
"I know it's 50 years ago, but still, that's no excuse not to have an effective investigation into an atrocity like this."
Operation Denton is due to publish its report within weeks. Prime Time understands it will detail new information about the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings and the airport bomb the following year.
A key question now is whether Operation Denton will find evidence of collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and British security forces ahead of the Dublin Airport bombing.
Mr Winters said: "Certain basic investigative steps simply didn't happen - and we say that points to collusion. It's not collusion in the narrow sense of having prior intelligence that an atrocity was about to be committed but there were elements of collusion in the broader sense of the word."
Aer Lingus, John Hayes' employer at the time, say that it is engaging with the Hayes family about commemorating the 50th anniversary of its former employee. A special commemorative mass will be held at the church at Dublin Airport next month.
Next month is 50 years since his murder - half a century that could have been so different for the family he left behind.
"You always reflect on how different things would have been," said Brendan Hayes.
"If my father had still been alive, we'd have had a normal family life. We'd have been happy."
Watch reporter Conor McMorrow and producer Lucinda Glynn’s report ‘Dublin 1975’ on the 14 October edition Prime Time at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and the RTÉ Player.
