A lone bagpiper played as survivors laid floral wreaths at a memorial to the dead on Dublin’s Talbot St, where one of four car bombs detonated without warning amid shoppers and commuters on May 17, 1974.
An outlawed anti-Catholic group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, later claimed responsibility, but suspicions have long lingered that British soldiers or police from Northern Ireland were involved.
At a connected memorial ceremony today in Monaghan, where a bomb killed seven people about 90 minutes after the three Dublin blasts, several survivors said their families have struggled for decades to overcome the loss.
The Dublin-Monaghan bombs were by far the bloodiest terrorist attacks committed in the Republic of Ireland during the past 35 years of conflict over neighbouring Northern Ireland, a part of the United Kingdom. Nobody was ever charged in connection with any of the killings.
