The Troubles: Who will speak up for the victims of the bombing outrages?

Fifty years ago this month, on May 17th 1974, thirty three people and two unborn children were murdered when the Ulster Volunteer Force detonated three no-warning bombs in rush hour Dublin, and a fourth ninety minutes later in Monaghan. It was the largest loss of life on a single day in the Troubles.

No-one has ever been convicted for the bombings but the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) admitted responsibility in 1993.

There are allegations – well-founded, most observers now say – of collusion by members of the British security apparatus.

Dáil Eireann has passed many motions asking that the British Government allow access by an independent, international judicial figure to all original documents relating to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

The Government has repeatedly asked their British counterparts for action, but so far without success.

The families of victims, who allege collusion in the atrocities, have been pursuing damages in Belfast High Court since 2014.

But time is not on their side…

MALOVELENT INTENT

One of the most poignant of stories relating to the bombings is that of Derek Byrne from Talbot Street.

Just 14 at the time, he was just two weeks into his first job. A football player and fan, he even put in an extra hour that day to earn more money for a new pair of boots.

As soccer folk might say, the lad had promise. Indeed, he was to travel to England that night for a tournament. He also had a trial coming up with an English club.

Happy days.

So, there he was, filling the tank of what he thought would be the last customer at about 5.25pm and thinking of the adventures to come when …

Bam. The first of the four car bombs exploded about three metres away.

In later years he could recall bits and pieces of the carnage. But he was so badly injured that, by the time he arrived in Jervis St Hospital, a mere 400 metres away, he was pronounced dead.

He wasn’t. He woke in time, you might say, but it took eighteen hours of painstaking surgery to save him.

That life he dreamed of was gone. For nigh on forty years, surgeons were still taking chunks of shrapnel out of his battered body.

He was one of the survivors on whose behalf solicitor Kevin Winters issued High Court proceedings against the police, military and the NI Secretary of State for damages for “conspiracy to murder and misfeasance … in relation to collusion allegations around the Dublin-Monaghan Bombings.”

Derek was one of the many victims and survivors who travelled to Belfast in December 2018 to listen as the High Court ordered the release of documents in their case.

However, the UK State immediately appealed this order.

Five years later he was there again, to hear the defendants’ argue against discovery of material.

Wheelchair-bound and in extreme discomfort, he travelled, as his solicitor said later, “knowing he was severely life-limited and very much against medical advice.”

Sadly, just days later, Derek died, in November 2023, aged 63.

A tenacious man, then, but at great cost. His life, characterised by courage and fortitude, was admirable beyond words.

Powerful people make big decisions that affect many. Those who died and were injured in the bombings of 1974 weren’t the powerful, but they matter every bit as much.

Who knows? Derek Byrne might have gone on to be one of Jack Charlton’s heroes. He was exactly the right age. Or maybe the guy you encountered playing soccer in Coolock who was two notches above everyone else on the pitch.

That’s until someone turned his life on its head without any right to do so but also with deep cynicism and malevolent intent.

ROUNDLY CONDEMNED

The Stardust families have shown a similar determination to that which drove Derek. They wanted fiercely to have the truth laid bare, showing almost limitless resolve and tenacity in the face of one legal obstacle after another.

Forty-eight young people died. The horror hasn’t dimmed in over forty years. How could it?

Disgracefully, we now know, the first inquest found that arson was a probable cause, grievously compounding the pain.

That conclusion was, of course, deeply, shamefully wrong. But it has taken till 2024 for the truth to be asserted in the jury’s finding of unlawful killing – followed by an official apology in the Dáil by Taoiseach Simon Harris.

Grief, and then a wholly understandable anger, sustained the survivors. They simply refused to let the memory of their lost loved ones fade without justice.

Now they can begin to think of closure.

That the Stardust survivors have reached that point is worth celebrating. One hopes that the same will happen for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

But let us not delude ourselves. Truth is regarded as a hostage by the powerful. Mostly it is released on terms that suit them, not the victims.

Look at what has just happened in the UK: a total of 36 inquests involving the deaths of 74 people during the Northern Ireland Troubles will not now go ahead after the UK government’s Legacy Act became law on May 1.

This legislation has dispensed with previous methods of investigating the past and transferred responsibility for all Troubles-related inquiries to a new investigative body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR).

This development has been roundly condemned by victims and survivors groups, human rights organisations, politicians and members of the legal profession.

Amnesty International has described it as “a cliff edge for truth, justice, and accountability for victims of the Northern Ireland conflict” and a “dangerous international precedent.”

It is both. The new law is being challenged in courts in Belfast and Europe and its most controversial provision, a conditional amnesty for perpetrators, is suspended pending the outcome.

IRA INCENDIARY BOMB

In all of this, we cannot ignore the other atrocities that led to the deaths of over 3,500 people in the Troubles, where the shadowy perpetrators of appalling misdeeds are as able to evade investigation as the British security forces.

For example, think of the 29 people (and two unborn babies) who died in the “real” IRA bomb attack in Omagh in August 1998. Of the 15 civilians killed by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in a Bomb Attack on McGurk’s Bar in North Queen Street, Belfast in December 1971. Of the 21 civilians killed in IRA bomb attacks on two public houses in Birmingham in November 1974.

Of the 12 civilians burned alive in the IRA incendiary bomb attack on the La Mon Restaurant near Belfast on February 17th 1978.

There are so very many more.

How many of their survivors have reached closure? Some, yes. But all? No chance.

So who’s going to speak up for them?

And this all begs other, bigger questions beyond our shores.

For example, who will set a truth and reconciliation process in motion for Gaza? In Ukraine? And how will State-level butchers and mass murderers be brought to account, as they most certainly were after the Holocaust?

There’s a difference between a problem resolved (however late and imperfectly) and one that is left to fester. The former heals, slowly perhaps but surely, whereas the latter rots, suppurates, infects everything around it.

That’s why the truth must out. Nothing less is acceptable.