The day revisited - Dublin: Everyone who has reason to remember Friday, May 17th, 1974, recalls a glorious early-summer day in Dublin, full of sun and the promise of the weekend.
The Feis Ceoil was in full swing, and so was the Holy Communion season.
In the North, the Ulster Workers' Council strike was hardening, but Dublin's commuters were more concerned about problems nearer home. The buses were off again, so many workers were walking home. Even Clery's was on strike.
Normal, everyday life. Marie Butler was in town to collect her strike pay. Antonio Magliocco was standing outside his fish-and-chip shop in Parnell Street. Anna and John O'Brien and their two small children were on a shopping expedition in town.
And then, in a blinding flash, all this normality was washed away. A few moments was all it took to snuff out 34 lives, to leave hundreds maimed, to turn Dublin for one awful day into the Belfast of the 1970s or the Beirut of the 1980s. The first bomb exploded at about 5.30 p.m. in Parnell Street, outside a pub and around the corner from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. A second device, also in a car, then exploded in Talbot Street, in front of O'Neill's shoe shop. Then a third bomb went off on South Leinster Street by the railings of Trinity College. All three explosions occurred within 90 seconds.
To set the seal on the single worst day of atrocities during 30 years of the Troubles, one further car-bomb was detonated outside a pub in Monaghan town, just 90 minutes later.
Survivors remember a bright flash, a loud bang and a shockwave. Then darkness and silence, an eerie, dusty calm before the rescuers arrived.
Forbes McFall was in College Park in Trinity, where a few students were playing cricket and the sound of a party drifted in on the warm air. It was just after 5.30 p.m. on the pavilion clock when the South Leinster Street bomb went off, he reported the following day in The Irish Times.
"The blast threw everyone flat on the ground. Then there was a quiet. When we looked up a thick pall of flame and smoke was rising from the roadway. But there wasn't a sound. Nobody moved in case there would be another blast. A black filth was falling from the air."
McFall joined students who rushed to the rescue. "The road was littered with glass, shop-fronts obliterated and every window in sight shattered." Beside a burning car, McFall saw a charred, decapitated body lying on the pavement. "Only the sight of two brown platform boots suggested that she was a young girl." Across the road, he sidestepped a dead man lying half-covered in a shop doorway. "A little huddle of people in a laneway were trying to help a man whose foot had been blown off."
Across the Liffey, the same horrors were being played out. In Talbot Street, they covered the dead with newspapers from the local newsboy's stand. "One girl was decapitated and at least one pedestrian, a girl, had her leg blown off. Two bodies in Guiney's window space were so badly mutilated, according to an eye-witness, that they were fused together," reported Nigel Brown and Geraldine Kennedy. A passing doctor patched up the injured with splints made of broken timber.
Up in Parnell Street, a St John's Ambulance volunteer, Paddy Phillips, looked after the injured until the ambulances arrived. "It was something I never want to see again. One poor man was laying there with his eye blown out and his face seemed to be badly mashed."
A colleague saw one man lying on the ground screaming with pain. "He seemed to have his spinal cord completely broken."
An Emergency Disaster Plan was put into operation but the hospitals were overwhelmed. The morgue filled as anxious families inquired after loved ones. There was a rush to donate blood at Pelican House, so much so that staff had to turn away hundreds. The Army blew up suspect cars, which turned out to be harmless.
It quickly emerged that the cars used in the attacks had been stolen in Belfast and Portadown earlier that day.
The UDA and the UVF denied responsibility but the UDA's press officer Sammy Smyth couldn't disguise his glee: "I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State and now we are laughing at them." The explosions killed all sorts of people. Eighty-year-old pensioner John Dargle, who lived alone in Ballybough and had no family.
The O'Brien children Jacqueline and Anna Marie, only 4½ months and a year and4½ months old, who perished with their young parents on Parnell Street. Antonio Magliocco, who came to Ireland from Italy a decade earlier, and Simone Chetrit, a French language student who had planned to return to Paris the following day.
Ultimately, the bombings claimed 27 lives (including an unborn baby) in Dublin, and seven more in Monaghan.
