The tragedy of the Irish island began eight centuries ago. Ever since the Normans landed in Ireland in 1169, England gradually drew the island into its sphere of influence. But the decisive rupture came in the sixteenth century. When Henry VIII broke from the Church of Rome and established the Church of England, the Irish held fast to their Catholic faith. From that point on, religion ceased to be a matter of belief alone and became the marker that divided conqueror from conquered.
In the early seventeenth century, the English Crown launched a vast colonization of Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. Protestants who crossed over from England and Scotland took the land of the native Catholic inhabitants and settled there. This is the root of today's Protestant community in Northern Ireland. In 1649 Cromwell drenched Ireland in blood, and in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne the Protestant forces won a decisive victory against the Catholic king. After that, Catholics lived stripped of land, of power, and of education well into the nineteenth century.
The Great Famine that began in 1845 added decisive weight to this enmity. 🥔 While a million people starved to death and another million fled the island, England continued to export Irish grain. Those who survived, and the descendants of the emigrants who crossed to America, did not forget their anger toward England.
In the early twentieth century, when the British government moved to grant Irish Home Rule, the Protestants of Ulster rose up. They would take up arms rather than submit to a Dublin parliament dominated by Catholics. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), formed in 1912, was the symbol of this resistance. The tension between the two sides finally erupted in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the War of Independence, and in 1921 Britain offered a compromise: divide the island in two, leaving the six northern counties — where a Protestant majority was assured — under British rule. Thus Northern Ireland was born.
Partitioned Northern Ireland was not an equal society. The Catholics, who made up more than a third of the population, were systematically excluded from voting, from housing, and from jobs. In the late 1960s, Catholic youth inspired by the American civil rights movement took to the streets, and what met them was the police baton. When rioting spread in 1969, the British Army moved in, and on Bloody Sunday in 1972, when fourteen unarmed civilians fell to paratroopers' bullets, the situation passed the point of no return. This armed conflict, known as the Troubles, claimed 3,500 lives over thirty years.
On the afternoon of Friday, 17 May 1974, Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland, was in the middle of an ordinary commute home. 💥 At 5:30, car bombs exploded almost simultaneously at three locations in the city center. Twenty-six people died on the spot. An hour later, a fourth bomb exploded outside a pub in the border town of Monaghan, killing seven more. The dead numbered thirty-three in all — thirty-four, counting the unborn child of a woman near full term. The injured reached three hundred. It was the single deadliest day of the entire conflict.
Suspicion soon narrowed to the loyalist paramilitary group UVF. But something strange happened. Questions arose as to whether the UVF could have carried out — on its own — an operation precise enough to detonate four vehicles at the same moment. Stranger still was what followed. The Northern Irish police knew who the suspects were, yet gave the Irish police almost no information, and despite clear evidence, no one was arrested. The investigation was effectively closed within the year. To this day, fifty years later, not a single person has faced criminal punishment for this attack.
As the years passed, fragments of what had happened came to light. 🔍 Within the UVF there was a group known as the Glenanne Gang, and among its members were serving British soldiers and Northern Irish policemen. They are believed to have been involved in more than a hundred killings during the conflict. A report compiled in 2003 by the Irish judge Henry Barron presented strong circumstantial evidence that British security forces had been involved in the bombings, and a separate report written by an American lawyer in 2006 reached the same conclusion. The fact that British intelligence ran informers inside loyalist organizations while knowingly turning a blind eye to their crimes was confirmed again and again through investigations into other cases. In 2012, British Prime Minister David Cameron officially acknowledged "shocking levels of state collusion" in connection with another case and apologized.
Yet on the Dublin and Monaghan case, Britain has kept its mouth shut. 🔒 The Irish parliament three times — in 2008, 2011, and 2016 — unanimously demanded that Britain release the relevant documents, but whether Labour or Conservative, the British government has refused, citing "national security." The Legacy Act enacted by Britain in 2023 blocked any further investigation into Troubles-era cases altogether, and the Irish government has taken the law to the European Court of Human Rights.
The victims' families formed a group in 1996 called Justice for the Forgotten and have demanded the truth ever since. The Irish government paid out limited compensation, but to this day there has been no official apology or compensation from the British government. In May 2024, fifty years after the attack, people gathered once again before the memorial on Talbot Street in Dublin. 🌹 But few of those who were directly harmed are still alive. The Irish government called once more that day for the documents to be released, and once more no answer came.
The Troubles formally ended with the Belfast Agreement of 1998. 🕊️ The weapons were decommissioned, and Catholics and Protestants came to share power. In the 2022 census, for the first time, the Catholic population of Northern Ireland surpassed the Protestant population, and Sinn Féin became the largest party. Yet the question of what happened on that Friday afternoon in May 1974 still remains without an answer. Perhaps that answer lies sleeping somewhere in a British archive.
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