The Barron report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, published this week, concludes that the killers were never properly pursued. Mark Hennessy, Political Correspondent, asks why
Within minutes of the Parnell Street bomb 15-year-old St John 's
Ambulance volunteer Emma Crabbe struggled to find signs of life in a man lying on the pavement.
"He was dead. Then I was called to a man covered by a plank. When I lifted it up one of his legs was missing and lying nearby. One side of his head was completely ripped away and was lying on the ground. There were bodies all over the place. Many people were in deep shock," said Crabbe.
The Parnell Street bomb, carried in a green Hillman Avenger, exploded just after 5.28 p.m. on May 17th,1974. Eleven people died. Even worse was to come.
Ninety seconds later, the metallic blue Ford Escort parked outside O 'Neills in Talbot Street erupted, turning the evening rush-hour into a scene from hell. Dr John Cooper, an anaesthetist from Belfast's Mater Hospital who witnessed the bomb, said: "I ran back to see a woman on the pavement decapitated. Another woman lay dead with a piece of a car engine embedded in her back. A man was dying with an iron bar through his abdomen." Fourteen people died.
By now the clock had passed 5.30 p.m. The blue Austin 1800 Maxi parked in South Leinster Street, near the Dáil, exploded. Two people died.
Just before 7 p.m., the green Hillman Minx left outside Greacens' Pub in the centre of Monaghan town detonated. Seven died, immediately or later.
Shortly after 10 p.m., a caller, styling himself "Captain Craig of the Red Hand Brigade ",phoned the Irish News and The Irish Times office in Belfast to claim responsibility.
The Dáil was not in session on May 17th,1974. On the following Tuesday, the then taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, rose to offer condolences to victims.
"Nothing I can say will adequately describe the feelings of shock and horror caused by the destruction of human life and hope last Friday," he declared. "The persons caught up in this calamity
bore no malice towards those who destroyed or maimed them. Their lives were no threat to those who treated them as enemies. But because they happened to be in certain streets at certain times,
they are now dead –o disfigured for life. Those responsible have reaped their grim harvest."
The Government would "look for and will give all possible support "to the Garda to track down the killers and the perpetrators "of all crimes of violence in this island or elsewhere".
Today, nearly 30 years on, the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government is accused by the Barron inquiry of having failed to fulfil that very promise.
Equally, Mr Justice Barron's 228-page report, which was published on Wednesday, criticises the Garda investigation, headed by Chief Supt John Joy, Chief Supt Anthony McMahon and Det Supt Dan Murphy.
The investigation was hampered by the Garda's poor forensic knowledge, since it had no laboratory and few officers trained to preserve crime scenes.
Officers had to depend on the State Laboratory, which juggled criminal forensic work with "testing milk for the Department of Agriculture".
Det Tom O'Connor, of the Garda's ballistic section, and other gardaí took samples from the bomb scenes, though many were subsequently found to be useless. Some had been taken from the
wrong places. Others had been damaged by water from firemen's hoses. Proper tests, carried out in Belfast, did not occur for 11 days.
By then it was too late. R.A.Hall, of the Department of Industrial and Forensic Science in Belfast, said explosive types could be identified only if tests took place within six hours.
"It is, for example, of little value to examine the fragments of the bonnet from a vehicle which has contained a device in the luggage compartment," he said in his report.
Once underway, the investigation quickly identified a main suspect, David Alexander Mulholland, a 35-year-old Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)member from Portadown, Co Armagh. Subsequently linked to another UVF figure, Billy Hanna, Mulholland was picked out by witnesses from photographs supplied by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
Much has been made since the Barron report's publication of Cosgrave's failure to pass on information received from the British prime minister, Harold Wilson. He and the minister for foreign
affairs, Dr Garret FitzGerald, were told at a meeting in London in September 1974 that two of the bombers had been interned.
"This was the only way that they could be dealt with because the sort of evidence against them would not stand up in court," Wilson declared, according to an Irish note of the meeting.
However, the Garda had already known about the internments for months, since Irish military intelligence had picked this up from British military colleagues in early June. In addition, Army
intelligence had told Garda colleagues that the UVF, including another shadowy figure, Billy Marchant, had carried out the bombing.
Nevertheless, the Barron report finds that the Cosgrave government made no attempt to find out more from Wilson and, equally, made "no efforts" to push the investigation. In its defence, one cabinet member of the time now argues that Wilson had only mentioned that the duo had been locked up to justify the British use of internment – which Dublin wanted ended.
While the Garda had received the same information from the Army, "little was made "of it, though further details were sought from the RUC about the suspected bombers.
On July 15th, the Garda asked the RUC to interview Mulholland, Marchant and three others, all of whom drank regularly in the Brown Bear and Horseshoe pubs on the Shankill Road. The RUC interviewed Marchant but not Mulholland, and only one of the three others. It reported that it had learnt nothing of any use, even though the interviews appear to have been perfunctory.
Though the RUC did not bring in Mulholland, it offered to do so if the Garda would send an officer to sit in on the interrogation. Hoping that Mulholland could be arrested the next time he crossed the Border, Chief Supt Joy decided against taking up the RUC offer. There was, by 1974,a reluctance in principle to joint interrogations, partly because the Garda did not want the RUC travelling south.
However, there was something else, too. In November 1973, the IRA had, according to a reliable Garda informer, threatened to kill gardaí found in Northern Ireland. An internal Garda memo circulated at the time did not place a blanket ban on officers travelling north, but left it to each of them "to decide as they see fit".
"It is inconceivable that fear of Provisional IRA reprisals may have influenced the decision not to accept the RUC's offer of a joint interview with Mulholland," Barron speculates.
During his meeting with Barron, former justice minister Paddy Cooney said joint interrogations would have been "a radical departure ".However, this is not so. Garda detectives had
interviewed suspects in the North – after the December 1st,1972 Dublin bombing and after a January 1973 Donegal double
murder – when no RUC officers were present.
The 40-strong Garda investigation into the 1974 bombings, which had not interviewed any key suspect, inexplicably began to wind down in late June – less than six weeks after the attacks.
In early July, Chief Supt Joy sought final paperwork from all officers, while two separate reports on the bombings were published in July and August. The Dublin report was just 34 pages long, along with maps, photographs, 98 statements,a list of exhibits and a list of the dead.
Offering no theories about who might have carried out the atrocity, Chief Supt Joy concluded: "This investigation will continue and developments will be reported."
The 45 pages of Monaghan findings struck a different tone, in that they included a list of suspects, but the conclusion, again, was that the investigation could be taken no further.
"It will be appreciated that investigations were greatly hampered by reason of the fact that no direct inquiries could be made in the area where the crime originated," the report stated. "There was no
access to potential witnesses in Northern Ireland and there was also the disadvantage of not having been able to interrogate the suspects or put them on identification parades."
Somewhat defensively, it went on to argue that "far greater progress "could have been made if all interviews in areas such as Portadown had been carried out by the Garda.
Struggling to cope with the Northern Ireland crisis, during a year when 220 people were to die, the Fine Gael/Labour cabinet's focus was only intermittently on the threat posed by loyalist terrorists.
In late 1973, Army intelligence warned that they could strike, but the danger was deemed to have receded following the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement. Instead, the cabinet had other preoccupations. In particular, ministers were obsessed by the threat posed to the Republic by the Official IRA, even though it had gone on ceasefire in 1972.
One official report submitted to the government in early 1974 argued "that the greatest long-term danger to the security of the institutions of the State comes from the activities of the Official
IRA."
The threat offered by the Provisionals, who by then had completely overtaken the Officials in men and weaponry, came next. Only then were loyalists considered. Towering over all of this, however, was the cabinet's deep and, in retrospect, justifiable fear that the British were going to pull out of Northern Ireland.
"That was very real. Wilson considered it. There would have been violence everywhere. Thousands would have died," said one cabinet minister of the time.
Just a week before the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the RUC seized
documents in Myrtlefield Park in Belfast and claimed that the Provisionals were planning a "doomsday" takeover of Belfast. In hindsight, the information was deliberately overplayed to suit the
agenda of British security figures, who wanted all-out war on the Provisionals.
The secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, certainly held strong suspicions about some of the British army intelligence officials.
"It was a unit, a section, out of control. There's no doubt it reflected the views of a number of soldiers: 'Let's go in and fix
this lot',and so on," he declared. Following a review in early 1973,the then High Court judge, Mr Justice Thomas Finlay, recommended the creation of a special cabinet security sub-
committee in Dublin. Though formed, it remained at more than one remove from the bombing investigation and never even learnt of the Garda's difficulties, but nor does it seem to have asked.
In 1975,information emerged in a court case that UVF member Robert Bridges may have been involved in the bombings, but the lead seems not to have been followed up.
Four years later, three more suspects, Joseph Stewart Young, Samuel McCoo and James Somerville, were named by RUC CID officers.
Acknowledging that the RUC appeared "to be much more co-operative", the Garda considered seeking to interview the three, but seem not to have done so. No reason is offered.
The task of the Barron inquiry, which has cost €1.5 million, has been hampered by the complete loss of all Department of Justice files, and by grudging, limited co-operation from the British.
The Garda's failure to deal with the Dublin/Monaghan bombers, who
operated from a farm at Glenanne, Markethill, Co Armagh had tragic consequences for others. Owned by former RUC reservist James Mitchell, the farm was the centre of a murder ring for much of the 1970s,aided and abetted by some RUC and UDR men. In the wake of May
17th,this group is believed to have struck on 14 further occasions, including the murder of three members of the Duggan family in Ballyduggan.
For some, the Dublin/Monaghan bombings are a footnote in history, occasionally brought back to life by grainy black-and-white film on television bulletins.
For others, May 17th, 1974 is but yesterday in lives marred by grief, injury and the conviction that they were betrayed by the State.
Edward O'Neill, a four-year-old boy on the day of the explosions, was left with shrapnel protruding from his face and head after he was injured in Parnell Street. His father, Edward senior, was killed; his brother, Billy, was badly hurt.
Since then, Edward O'Neill has endured multiple operations. The last took place in May 2003. History lives on in pain.