Madam, – I may have been the only journalist on a Dublin street when the bombs went off and ran to alert my then employers RTÉ and BBC. My reactions were certainly a lot less courageous than those of Vincent Browne and others who ran to help the injured. That was the difference between Belfast and Dublin. Experience in the North taught people to run away from the scene of a bomb blast. Soon afterwards that day with cameraman Dave O’Connor from Bray I was in Monaghan to cover the aftermath of the bomb there. The butcher’s bill for that dreadful day was worse than anything that any of us had encountered before . . . surely the story would run and run? It didn’t.
The Garda investigation was wound down after just six weeks. That investigation was not led by the Garda Special Branch, but by the detective unit, which was less well-equipped to deal with terrorist offences. Forensic evidence was sent to a lab in England for assessment and the Garda files are now “missing”. Certainly the British authorities have questions to answer and files to produce that were withheld from the Barron inquiry; but there are others with questions to answer.
There are those who sat in cabinet at that time and others in the Department of Justice who owe it to the dead and bereaved to say what they know . . . to explain the desultory nature of what passed for an investigation.
It took only a few weeks for some journalists to get what seems to be a plausible picture of what happened that day. A loyalist murder gang from Market Hill in Co Armagh planted the bombs in Dublin. The Monaghan bomb was a diversion to draw Irish security forces away from the main Dublin Belfast road. But who made the bombs? Allegations persist that the killers were controlled by two British army officers based in Lisburn. Were those allegations ever investigated?
The royal visit has served to remind people of an atrocity that might otherwise be allowed to pass almost unnoticed. I for one would like to know who tried to kill me and anyone else who happened to be passing that day.I don’t seek an explanation to score any kind of political point or to try in some way to explain IRA atrocities.
It is for me and for most of the others personal. We are entitled to know. – Yours, etc,