‘Bodies were strewn on the pavement’: the worst day of carnage during the Troubles

Fifty years on from the bomb attacks on Dublin city centre and Monaghan town, John Meagher reports on how the events unravelled and talks to some of those who witnessed the dreadful events of that day

They are words, penned by a young Irish Independent reporter, that still haunt the reader half a century later. “Initially, it resembled any other bomb devastation, the like of which I had seen many of in Belfast,” wrote Vincent Browne in the next day’s newspaper about what he had witnessed on Talbot Street, in the heart of Dublin, in the early evening of Friday, May 17, 1974. “The wreckage of cars overturned by the roadside, shop fronts shattered, windows smashed, general chaos.

“Then quite suddenly the extent of the horror focused. We saw blackened objects in a store front move slightly — it took a few numbed moments to appreciate that these were human beings.

“Three or four bodies were strewn along the pavement across the Guineys store. A human torso protruded from a shop window. In one store front, there were two bodies — a man and a woman, both alive — but only just.

“The man was covered in blood but still conscious. We went over to him and he asked quietly, ‘Am I going to die?’ A piece of metal was stuck in his neck and another piece was in his side.”

Later in the article, Browne recalled trying to help the stricken woman. “Her face was severely burnt and a metal object protruded from her neck. Her legs were very badly lacerated, one of them seemed about to fall off.”

The headline on Saturday’s Irish Independent was stark: ‘Our bloody Friday’. It reported that 28 people had died and over 100 were injured after four car bombs caused carnage in three locations in Dublin city centre and in Monaghan town.

Now, years later, the true extent of the attacks is fully known: 34 people, including an unborn baby at full term, were killed, and in the region of 300 were injured.

It was the single worst day of carnage of the entire Troubles.

The Dublin of 1974 felt like a city that was shaking off some of the shackles of the past. Ireland was now part of the European Economic Community and the strictures of Civil War politics were fading somewhat. The most dominant Irish political figure of the century, Éamon de Valera, had retired as president the prevni- ous year, aged 90. Another major architect of the country, Dublin Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, had died in 1973.

Ireland was opening up in other ways too. Thin Lizzy were showing there was far more to the country’s music scene than showbands, and Planxty were helping to reinvent trad. And yet, on May 17, 1974, the top selling single in the country was Joe Cuddy’s version of Any Dream Will Do from the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It had displaced ABBA’s Waterloo from the top of the charts.

Few were to realise it at the time, but a new dawn was rising for Dublin GAA. The football championship would begin that weekend and at the end of it Kevin Heffernan’s Dubs — ‘Heffo’s Army’ — would be crowned All-Ireland champions and a new generation of urban dwellers would be captured by the team in skyblue jerseys.

But despite the optimism for a new Ireland, there were warning signs. The Dublin-Monaghan bombings did not happen in isolation. The Troubles had already spilled over into the Republic and there had been three separate bombing attacks in Dublin in the previous two years. Three people were killed and 185 injured.

Bomb scares had become an uncomfortable part of urban life although the vast majority were false.

On that warm, sunny Friday in May, 50 years ago, few would have been concerned about a paramilitary attack. Many, however, would have been inconvenienced by a Dublin bus strike. It meant the pavements were busier with pedestrians than usual.

Irritating as the bus strike was for some, it was nothing compared to the industrial and social unrest north of the border. The Loyalist-run Ulster Workers’ Council had called for a mass strike to oppose the Sunningdale Agreement, the proposal for powersharing with nationalists.

Dublin must have felt a long way from Belfast that day. No doubt, many were planning a night out in one of the city’s busy bars, or maybe they fancied an evening’s stroll in the Phoenix Park.

Andy Rowen was 11 years old at the time. He had finished school and was helping his father, Robbie, deliver goods in the north inner city. Robbie parked his van on Parnell Street, near the junction with Marlborough Street. At 5.28pm, the first bomb exploded.

Andy later recalled that the door was blown off the van and he remembered his father trying to help a woman lying on the street. Both of her legs were gone. There was shrapnel everywhere and an abiding memory is the sight of debris raining from the roofs.

Years later, his childhood friend, Paul Hewson — aka Bono — would write a song about Andy’s experience that day. “Face down on a broken street,” go the lyrics of Raised by Wolves, “There’s a man in the corner/ In a pool of misery/ I’m in white van/ As a red sea covers the ground.”

Another U2 song, Bad, is about Andy’s subsequent drug addiction. Witnessing scenes of unimaginable horror at such a young age may have played a part in his surrender to the heroin epidemic that swept parts of Dublin less than a decade later.

Bono has often talked about his own good fortune not to be in the area that day. He often whiled away post-school hours in Dolphin Discs record shop on Talbot Street, but the bus strike kept the then 14-year-old away from town.

One witness of the aftermath of the bomb on Parnell Street was future taoiseach Bertie Ahern. In 1974, he worked as an administrative clerk at the Mater Hospital. He had never seen carnage like it. “There was no cordon,” he tells filmmaker Joe Lee in a new feature-length documentary, May-17-74: Anatomy of a Massacre, “everyone was trying to help.” Some 500m away from the car bomb site on Parnell Street, 16-year-old Bernie McNally was coming to the end of her shift at O’Neill’s shoe shop on Talbot Street.

“I was going down the steps to the storeroom in the basement when I heard a big bang,” she tells the Irish Independent. It was the Parnell Street bomb. “A lady who lived upstairs, May McKenna, was from the north and recognised the sound as a bomb. She worked in Clerys, but there had been a strike there that day. She came down to see what had happened.”

Then, at 5.30pm precisely, the Talbot Street bomb detonated. The car had been parked just across the road outside Guineys department store. “It was a flash in the sky,” Bernie says, “like lightning. It’s impossible to describe. Suddenly, I’m on the ground and I can’t see and I don’t know what’s happened. A doctor later told me that I’d been affected by the shock waves of the bomb.” She later discovered that May McKenna had been killed in the blast.

It was Talbot Street that Vincent Browne rushed to first. He had met his brother, Trinity student Malachy, outside the offices of Independent Newspapers on Middle Abbey Street, when he heard the explosions. Thirty years later, at an inquest, he talked about the memory of

‘We tried to lift her but her body simply disintegrated in our arms and we had to put her back down again’

putting his journalistic instincts to one side and trying to help the severely wounded, including a woman near Guineys. “We tried to lift her but her body simply disintegrated in our arms and we had to put her back down again.”

Then, at 5.32pm, a third bomb exploded south of the Liffey at South Leinster Street close to the railings bordering the Trinity College cricket pitch.

Frank Connolly had been in Trinity’s grounds at the time of the explosion. “I came around from Lincoln Place on to the street and I saw a scene of absolute panic, chaos, bodies on the street. People were dazed, having been caught up in the explosion in some way.”

He would later write about the bombings in his role as a journalist and pen a novel, A Conspiracy of Lies, which was inspired by the experience and the subsequent allegations that covert British intelligence operatives may have assisted loyalist terrorists.

A word that was used time and again in contemporary reports of the bombings was “slaughterhouse”. Dublin had seen nothing like it. Many of the eyewitnesses talked at the time about a sense of panic, not just about what had happened, but about the prospect of other bombs going off.

The atrocity was chilling in its co-ordination and effectiveness. Three explosions, on three streets, all from bombs placed in cars that had been driven across the border that day, had detonated in a four-minute period during rush hour. The plan, undoubtedly, was to kill as many people as possible.

The emergency services struggled to cope with the scale of the attack. There simply weren’t enough ambulances to bring the injured to hospitals. Bertie Ahern recalls returning to the Mater that evening and seeing scores of badly wounded people being dropped off. It was a similar picture in hospitals throughout the city.

Bernie McNally remembers the actions of a bus driver, Kevin Roe, who had been on the way to a union meeting at the New Moran Hotel on Talbot Street when the bombing happened. “He went back to Busáras and got as many injured people as he could on to a bus and drove us to [the now defunct] Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital. He was an unsung hero.”

Bernie ended up spending six weeks in the Eye and Ear Hospital. She considers herself to have been one of the lucky ones. An entire family, the O’Briens, who lived in the adjacent Gardiner Street were killed by the Talbot Street bomb. Anna O’Brien, a 22-year-old mother of two, could only be identified by her distinctive earring. So severe were the injuries sustained by her husband, John, that it took a tattoo to identify him. Their infant girls, Jacqueline and Ann Marie, both perished.

By 6pm, anyone in Ireland who was close to a radio had heard the awful news from Dublin.

There was an air of unreality, a sense that the horrors that had become commonplace in Belfast and Derry were now being visited on the Republic too.

No doubt, the bombings were dominating conversations in Greacen’s public house in the heart of Monaghan town that evening. Paddy Askin had worked in the local sawmills and was in the pub after his shift. “It was something he did,” says his daughter Sharon, then just two years old. “He’d have a drink before he’d come home.

“We lived in Glaslough, which is six or seven miles from the town. Mum and my brothers were in the kitchen and heard a bang like thunder. The windows shook. We lived close to the border, so she assumed it was a bomb on the Armagh side.”

It was a car bomb, and it exploded in Church Square, Monaghan town. It detonated at 6.58pm, close to Greacen’s, exactly 90 minutes after the first of the Dublin explosions. The pub bore the brunt of their explosion. Paddy Askin, one of seven people to be killed in the blast, died after six hours. “One side of his body was completely maimed,” Sharon says.

“The devastation that was done to Monaghan town can be seen in the aerial photographs from the time,” she adds. “When you see how much damage it caused, it’s surprising that more people weren’t killed or injured.”

In an hour-and-a-half, Ireland changed utterly, Dublin and Monaghan forever united by a shared trauma.

Among those who died were Italian restaurant owner Antonio Magliocco (37) and a Frenchborn Jewish woman Simone Chetrit (30). An English language student, she had been due to return to Paris the following morning.

Another victim, Colette Doherty (21) had run a shop on Sheriff Street with her husband, John. She was nine months pregnant when she was killed. Her daughter, Wendy, 22 months, was with her at the time of the explosion and was found wandering an hour later, relatively unharmed.

Anna Massey, also 21, worked at Lisney’s auctioneers, and was killed in South Leinster Street. She was due to get married that July.

Archie Harper (73) and George Williamson (72), both farmers, where killed in Monaghan. The oldest person to lose their life was 80-yearold John Dargle, from Ballybough, Dublin. At one point, he had served in the British army.

Everything pointed to the work of loyalist terrorists, but it wasn’t until 1993 that the Ulster Volunteer Force claimed responsibility for the attack. Soon there would be allegations that clandestine British army intelligence unit had assisted in the atrocity. But that was for another time. As Friday, May 17, 1974 drew to a close, the overriding mood was shock and fear about what would happen next. Anger would soon come.