“We walked up Talbot Street, and as we did it I wasn’t at all prepared for what we were to see,” says Vincent Browne, recalling what he witnessed on May 17th, 1974. “I lifted up a young woman, and as I did so she simply disintegrated. I didn’t know that bodies disintegrated. She was alive, but she disintegrated.”
It’s one of many haunting images to come from the deadliest massacre in modern Irish history, and it begins a new six-part audio series from RTÉ entitled The Forgotten: Dublin Monaghan Bombings 1974, to mark the 50th anniversary of that day.
“The wee cafe, the roof lifted up in the air and dropped down again,” says Eamon Smyth, who was at a petrol pump when the bomb in Monaghan went off. He ended up in hospital having a lump of steel removed from his head.
“Tiny little sandals, half the size of my hand.” That’s Catherine Doyle, who has kept for 50 years a pair of shoes that once belonged to her 17-month-old niece, Jacqueline O’Brien, who was killed in the first Dublin blast along with her five-month-old sister, Anne-Marie, and her parents, Anna and John.
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The Forgotten’s presenters, Barry Lenihan and Ciaran O’Connor – whose aunt died in the bombing – weave together first-person testimony and reportage in this deeply sourced series. They speak to the relatives of victims of the four blasts – three in Dublin and one in Monaghan – and to some of those who survived the bombings, who live with the deep and lasting impacts on their physical and mental health.
So what happened after 34 people were killed by explosions that were almost immediately linked to loyalist paramilitary activity? What happened with the official investigations, north and south of the Border, which puttered out just weeks after the events themselves, and despite the identification of suspects?
The Forgotten highlights incompetence, accident and indolence, all of which appeared to play a part in the loss of key evidence and the foundering of an investigation that could have given some answers to those left behind. But perhaps most damning is the withholding of information, the failure of successive UK governments to hand over intelligence documents and assist in inquiries that might have brought the perpetrators to justice.
Did security forces in Northern Ireland collude with loyalist paramilitaries? Who knew, who turned a blind eye, who pulled the strings and who pretended not to see them? Interviews with historians, authors, experts, former taoiseach Bertie Ahern and former British intelligence officer Colin Wallace shed light on the context in which Irish governments pulled punches in a likely attempt to keep the sectarian violence north of the Border. They make clear what a shambles the Garda investigation was, how badly evidence was handled, how difficult it was to find documentation of anything that went down, and how evasive successive British governments were, failing to co-operate fully with inquiries and keeping back information.
Marian Keenan survived the Talbot Street blast while her two companions were killed. They were “just good, honest, low-maintenance people,” she says; people who had no particular political leanings or role in the conflict that led to their deaths. “Ordinary people in the wrong place,” she says. “So ordinary that you didn’t even have opinions. You just wanted to be happy.”
