Tom Lawlor, a photographer at 'The Irish Times' in 1974, recalls the day ofthe bombings
It was coming up to half five and I was getting ready to go home when I heard the first explosion. It was an unmistakable sound. My ear was tuned to it after years covering the North.
I ran outside and headed towards O'Connell Street. The sound of the explosion had come from that direction. I was almost at O'Connell Bridge when I heard the second explosion. It was on Talbot Street.
I'd say I was there within 10 seconds and saw people running out as I ran in. There was a young man turning his scooter around. People were shouting and screaming and rubbish was falling out of the air. My feet crunched on a carpet of mayhem as I ran forward.
This was bigger than anything I had encountered before. In a shattered shop window across from Guiney's three women lay together, clothes stripped away by the explosion. I could see labels on their underwear, still white against their blackened skin.
Another body, so disfigured I could not say whether it was a man or a woman and with strips of rag hanging about the upper body, was lying against a silver power-box at the edge of the footpath. The end of one leg was a bloodied stump. It was an unfolding scene of bodies, many of them blown into shattered shop windows, like the three women across from Guiney's.
It was so quiet you could hear voices crackle over the walkie-talkies as gardaí began to arrive. The fire brigade and ambulances would soon follow.
A young woman in a grey coat lay on the footpath. There was no panic in her posture. She looked as if asleep. Her dark hair moved in the breeze, down its length to her shoulders. Her blood was filling the seams between the paving slabs, framing her shape.
I became terribly conscious of being there, thinking: "I am looking at you, dead, and someone at home is waiting. I know before the people most entitled to know." It was a strange feeling.
She could have been my sister. I became worried about my mother, who worked in Brett's drapery shop further down Talbot Street. My sisters regularly visited her too. There was no one there. I spent about 10 minutes on Talbot Street, gathering all the information I could through the eye of my camera. The instinct to collect images overpowered everything else.
Pushed on by the responsibility of the job, imagination was suspended. It didn't dwell on horrors but saw everything through the lens, coolly.
Then I headed for Parnell Street, where the first bomb had gone off. Photographers were arriving from the other newspapers. There was glass all over the place. Aidan O'Keefe, from the Sunday World, took a picture of a baby's body in a shop window. There was uproar when it was published.
The damage on Parnell Street was not as extensive as it had been on Talbot Street, which was narrower and crowded with people, many of them heading for Connolly Station. There was a bus strike in Dublin at the time.
I took about 15 pictures on Parnell Street, then rushed back to the office to process what I had. I rang home to discover that my mother hadn't gone to work that day due to the bus strike.
I told the editor (Douglas Gageby) it was probably the biggest-ever bombing in Dublin. He believed me when he saw the images, many of which have never seen the light of day because they are so horrific. He decided not to publish those, for the sake of the families and indeed readers.
If it was me I would probably have put the most horrific one on the front page, I was so angry. That's why you need someone with an emotional distance to make decisions like that. But I think it was right to take those images. Future generations will see what we did to each other in the 1970s.
After I went home that night, I just had to come back into town again. A friend, Paul Mulhern, came with me. We have often talked about it since. Talking to him is like exorcising the effects of that day. I brought him to Talbot Street, and standing there in the midst of the twisted metal was Conor Cruise O'Brien, then minister for posts and telegraphs. I didn't take a picture. I felt the event had been documented enough. It didn't need a photograph of a politician in the debris.
We went to Bowes pub (on Fleet Street across from The Irish Times). It was a late night, with journalists arriving from all over the world. Everyone was upset and there was also that huge adrenalin rush that affects journalists on a big story.
It took me days to arrive at any sort of normality. Every parked car seemed a threat. We all felt terribly exposed.
I travel to Talbot Street by bus three or four times every week, with its pathetic stone monument which is nowhere near where the people died that day. They deserved better. They have not been honoured properly.
I will never forget the girl in the grey coat. I have taken pictures in the hunger camps of Bangladesh, in the Arctic, in all sorts of situations around the world, but I will never forget her lying there as if asleep, her dark hair waving as her blood filled in the pavement cracks."