Roslyn Dee
It’s 46 years since the Dublin and Monaghan bombings – and there’s still no justice
YOU never forget the sound. Nothing like the deafening bang you expect, it’s more of a dull whoosh. When I heard my first bomb, I was sitting in the examination hall in school, working my way through my O-level French paper. It was the afternoon of June 12, 1973.
There were two bombs in Coleraine that day but the one that whooshed through my head was the one that did all the damage. Only a few hundred yards away from where I was sitting, it exploded without warning on a busy street.
I remember we all looked up from our exam papers. What was that? A nervous energy fizzled through the room like a Halloween sparkler. I remember the subsequent silence, and then the confused and anxious looks. Then we all put our heads back down and carried on with our exam. Six people died in Coleraine that day. Another 33 were injured, many suffering loss of limbs and other life-changing physical traumas.
When the dust finally settled, with the dead buried and the destroyed and damaged premises scaffolded or boarded up, attention turned to justice, to ensuring the IRA members who had perpetrated the outrage should not get away with it. Nor did they. Two young men served time for the bombing, including Sean McGlinchey (brother of the INLA’s Dominic McGlinchey), who spent 18 years in jail. Finding himself lost in the one-way system, he had simply abandoned his car and run for his life, leaving the primed bomb to take the lives of six innocent people.
That sentences were handed down probably provided only cold comfort to those who lost loved ones, but cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.
Less than a year after the Coleraine bombings, another spate of explosions wreaked havoc. This time it wasn’t 33 people injured. This time it was 33 people who died.
On May 17, 1974, at 5.30pm, three car bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the centre of Dublin. Two-and-a-half hours later another was detonated in Monaghan.
Yes, this Sunday marks the 46th anniversary of the infamous Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
And close to half a century on from the murderous carnage unleashed that evening in a Border town and on the streets of our capital, the bereaved and their families are still waiting for answers. Still looking for accountability. Still seeking the truth.
My late husband was 21 years of age on that dreadful day in May 1974 and was working in a printing and photographic company close to Parnell Street, the location of the first explosion. About to head home for the evening, he unplugged a machine from the socket at the exact moment the first bomb went off. Strange as it might seem, for just a minute he thought the blast was his fault. Quickly, however, he realised what had happened and over the years that followed he often talked about the horror on the streets that evening as he tried to make his way out of the city centre and home to Artane.
Long acknowledged as a loyalist atrocity, but one that still produces more questions than answers on the issue of British collusion, the death toll from those four bomb blasts remains the largest loss of life in any one day in the Troubles.
Sean McGlinchey was punished for what happened in Coleraine. Nobody, almost 50 years later, has ever been held accountable for the bombings
in Dublin and Monaghan.