THIRTY YEARS ON AND JUSTICE STILL DENIED

At 5:30 PM on Friday May 17th 1974, as the evening and after-work crowds moved through rush hour streets, three no-warning car bombs exploded in Dublin. Ninety minutes later, another massive no-warning car bomb exploded 75 miles away, just south of the border in Monaghan town.

In all thirty-four people, including an entire family and one full-term unborn child, were killed. It was, and still remains, the single greatest atrocity of the the Troubles.

Thirty years on many questions remain unanswered. A callous void of official silence continues to be extended the families of the victims in their search for truth and accountability. At every turn they have been met with obstruction, denial, and resistance. To this day there have been no arrests, no charges and no convictions for any part in the massacre—all of this despite overwhelming evidence that up to twenty suspects, some serving or former members of the British security forces, were identified within weeks of the bombing.

BRITISH SECURITY FORCES COLLUSION

From the beginning, there have been strong suspicions of British intelligence and British security forces involvement in the planning and execution of the attacks. The loyalist group who eventually claimed responsibility for the bombings, the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force), did not have the ability to have carried out these bombings unaided. Materials used in the bombings had never been used by the UVF previously, and no similar bombing action was ever repeated by the group. In point of fact the coordinated Dublin and Monaghan bombings bore all of the hallmarks of a highly skilled military operation.

The Dublin bombs were all detonated within a five-minute period. Their timing and placement was clearly intended to cause maximum death and injury. Two other bombs at crowded locations in Bus Aras (bus station) and in Amiens Street were also planted at the same time but failed to detonate. The Monaghan bomb exploded outside a busy pub ninety minutes later at 6:40 PM, as the Friday night patrons watched the carnage in Dublin on the evening news. 

Four cars were stolen in Belfast and Portadown for the attacks. Barely ten hours lapsed between the theft of the bomb cars and their synchronized detonation at four locations in Dublin and Monaghan.

A British Army bomb disposal expert has concluded from technical examination that the bomb material could not have been manufactured by the loyalists and must have been provided to them by military sources, possibly from confiscated republican arms dumps.

In 1993 Yorkshire TV Channel Four presented a documentary “HIDDEN HAND – THE FORGOTTEN MASSACRE”. This explosive documentary forever changed the atmosphere of official silence and denial surrounding the events before and after the bombings, and made a strong and conclusive case for the direct involvement of British security forces in the mass murder. 

Among some of the evidence unearthed by the documentary follows:

Nine days after the documentary aired, the UVF officially claimed responsibility for the bombing – nearly TWENTY YEARS after it took place. 

EVIDENCE DESTROYED, GONE ‘MISSING”

Further evidence of the complicity of State forces in the bombings has been confirmed by the unusual treatment of forensic evidence from the massacre.

For reasons unknown, physical evidence from the bomb blasts was divided up and sent to two different labs. The majority of the bomb evidence was sent to the Northern Ireland Forensic Laboratory, but was not officially received there until the 28th of May; eleven days after the blast. No results from the Northern Ireland Forensic Laboratory were ever sent to the Irish State Laboratory. In addition, the delay in sending critical evidence to the North of Ireland could have seriously compromised the evidential integrity of the samples; had those results ever been made public or used in a criminal investigation.

To this day the actual whereabouts of the forensic evidence from the bombings is unknown. It defies belief that crucial evidence in the single largest mass murder case in the history of the Irish Free State, should be missing or unaccounted for. 

In a 1993 article for the Sunday Business Post, journalist Frank Doherty stated that he had uncovered proof that key forensic evidence was handed over to the very same British security officers suspected of having had a hand in the bombings. His British intelligence source indicated that a concerted effort to recruit British intelligence agents in the Irish security forces was underway at the time of the bombings—a claim that 1970’s Irish Labour TD Justin Keating had also made about the Gardaí, saying they were "heavily penetrated by British agents" at the time. On In December 1972, British agents John Wyman and Patrick Crinnion were arrested and accused of infiltrating the Garda Siochana to steal state secrets and to provide British intelligence with information.

BARRON INQUIRY

In November 2003 the long-awaited Barron Inquiry into British collusion in the bombings was released after numerous delays and attempts by the British government to block its release. The findings vindicate what many have long suspected – that individual police officers and members of the British army's overwhelmingly Protestant local regiment "either participated in or were aware of preparations for the bombings."

Other findings of the Barron Report included:

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