Qualla: Dublin and Monaghan Bombings

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Winterbach, Public domain. The bus drivers were on strike that day, so the footpaths were packed. It was a Friday in May, payday for many, the start of the long weekend. At 17:28 on Parnell Street, a metallic green Hillman Avenger that had been hijacked in Belfast that morning detonated outside the Welcome Inn pub. Two minutes later a Ford Escort tore apart Talbot Street outside Guiney's department store. Four minutes after that a third car bomb shattered South Leinster Street beside the railings of Trinity College, three hundred metres from Leinster House. Almost ninety minutes later, in the border town of Monaghan, a fourth car bomb exploded outside Greacen's pub on North Road. Thirty-three people died, and a full-term unborn child died with its mother. Almost three hundred more were injured. It was the deadliest day of the Troubles. No one has ever been charged.

Image: Peter Winterbach | Public domain

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: The Forgotten

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dead were not soldiers or politicians. They were a French Jewish woman named Simone Chetrit whose family had survived the Holocaust. An Italian man named Antonio Magliocco. A World War I veteran. Two infant girls -- Jacqueline and Anne-Marie O'Brien, aged 17 months and 5 mont...

Image: Matti Blume | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: The Strike

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 4.0. The bombings did not happen in a vacuum. They happened during the Ulster Workers' Council Strike, a fourteen-day shutdown of Northern Ireland by loyalists and unionists who opposed the Sunningdale Agreement -- a power-sharing arrangement that for the first time gave the Republic ...

Image: CC BY-SA 4.0

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: Justice Withheld

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit self, Public domain. The specially-appointed Garda investigation team was disbanded in July 1974, two months after the bombings. Department of Justice files on the Dublin attacks went missing in their entirety. When the Royal Ulster Constabulary told the Gardai it had arrested some of the suspected b...

Image: self | Public domain

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: The Child of Our Time

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Two days after the bombings, the Irish poet Eavan Boland saw a photograph on the front of a national newspaper. A fireman was carrying a small body from the rubble. 'The most arresting feature,' Boland later wrote, 'was the expression on the face of the fireman who lifted that ch...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Dublin and Monaghan Bombings: Memorials

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keresaspa, CC BY-SA 3.0. On Talbot Street there is a bronze plaque set into the pavement, listing every name. On Parnell Street there is another. On South Leinster Street, where two young women died instantly against the railings of Trinity College, the railings still stand. In Monaghan town a memorial g...

Image: Keresaspa | CC BY-SA 3.0