FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Fianna Fáil government was on the brink of defeat over its efforts to strengthen the Offences Against the State Act in December 1972 when two bombs exploded in central Dublin, killing two men, and prompting the collapse of a revolt in Fine Gael against its own leader, Liam Cosgrave, who supported the government moves. John Healy described the drama in the Dáil.
- JOE JOYCE
THE TWO explosions in the heart of Dublin stopped Leinster House dead in its tracks on the way to the country for what promised to be a bitter and divisive general election.
Tom O’Higgins of Fine Gael was on his feet speaking when the first bomb went off. He was still speaking when the crump of the second bomb was heard more clearly. He went on making a speech and it was not until Deputy Davern came in and asked him – three minutes after the second one – if, in opposing the Bill, he was aligning himself with the action which had set off two bombs in O’Connell Street.
O’Higgins stopped and fixed the deputy: “Don’t be a bloody ass,” he said – and Tom O’Higgins is a man who respects Parliament and parliamentary language and, if the dust of the bombs had not yet subsided (indeed ambulances speeding to the scene could be heard in the precincts), before the politicians were ready to milk them, the House was to sober up quickly as the details of the tragedy filtered back.
Fine Gael had been divided: all the lobby information was that [taoiseach] Jack Lynch was heading for the country and although efforts had gone on all day to save Fine Gael faces, Fianna Fáil was not yielding an inch.
Liam Cosgrave, on the other hand, was firm in his determination that he would not, as the lobbies had it, walk into the same lobby as Neil Blaney who had started the day’s debate with what Labour’s Jimmy Tully was later to call a speech “bragging” about his hand in helping the establishment of the Provos.
But the exploding bombs set the Fine Gael “rebels” who had refused to follow Liam Cosgrave scurrying back behind their leader and, just before 10 pm, spokesman Paddy Cooney, by agreement, came in and withdrew the crisis-making amendment.
The House, its main parties united, had redeemed itself for what up to then had looked like the last squalid day of a squalid parliament.
The long day started with Neil Blaney. Neil’s speech was an election speech, and indeed he had plenty of company in this for nearly everyone in the House yesterday accepted it was the end of the road.
They went to it with a vengeance [. . .] Yesterday we slipped right back into an era we thought was dead and gone and which had been buried by Seán Lemass.
Mr de Valera and his supporters could have been in the Chamber facing the old Cumann na nGael line-up and while the faces were all, in the main, post- Civil War faces, the language of politics, as the day wore on, became more and more the language of recrimination.
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