www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=36&si=1809047&issue_id=15486THE word 'collusion' was used 18 times on RTE's Drivetime evening news report on Wednesday evening - the first main broadcast news report on the publication of Paddy McEntee's report on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Only at the end of the 20-minute report, during a brief interview with one of the survivors, Bernadette O'Hanlon, was there a single reference to the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force.
With the balance of the programme so heavily weighed with references to collusion, Mary Wilson posed a question about collusion "between the British authorities and the bombers" it is clear that the perception of the media in Ireland and now probably among the public at large is that there was some form of alliance between the British Government, the British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the people who planted three bombs in Dublin and one in Church Square in Monaghan on Friday, May 17, 1974.
The McEntee Report, however, does not support that theory, nor does extensive investigation by the Sunday Independent, which interviewed the leadership of the Ulster Volunteer Force and members of both the British and Irish security services about the bombings.
Mr McEntee points out in his report that the UVF had been bombing targets in the Republic since 1969. In October that year, UVF man Thomas McDowell electrocuted himself while preparing a huge bomb intended to blow up the ESB sub-station at Ballyshannon Co Donegal. McDowell was a quarryman by trade, and an explosives expert - by definition, an expert bomb-maker. Yet, the repeated speculation on RTE and elsewhere since the Dublin/Monaghan bombings became a conspiracy theory story in the Nineties is that the UVF was incapable of making powerful bombs and getting them to go off in unison.
This point was put to the UVF leadership who pointed out that the only skill needed to set bombs off in unison was to set the timers - adapted alarm clocks - to the same time. The UVF even pointed to the make of the alarm clocks, the ubiquitous 'Jock Clock' made by the largest manufacturer of hand-wound alarm clocks, Westclox, formerly the Western Clock Company of Illinois. Nearly every household in Ireland had atleast one such alarm clock at the time.
Every member of the UVF was taught the rudiments of adapting the clocks as timers and manufacturing the basic timer/power unit to detonate explosives.
David Ervine, the popular loyalist figure who died in January, was one such bomb-maker. He was arrested by the British Army four months after the Dublin-Monaghan bombings while driving a car bomb which he intended to detonate outside the headquarters of rival loyalist organisation the Ulster Defence Association, in east Belfast.Ervine was a close associate of one of the main bomb-makers who prepared the bombs intended for Dublin in May 1974.
Wednesday's RTE report, as with others, also failed to mention the context in which the UVF decided to bomb civilian targets in the Republic - as it had already done on several occasions in Dublin and the Border counties.The UVF's strategy was to attack Dublin during the height of the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) strike aimed at bringing down the power-sharing assembly at Stormont, and also at undermining the proposed 'Council of Ireland' agreed as part of the Sunningdale Agreement in January of that year, which loyalists saw as giving Dublin a role in the running of Northern Ireland.
The UWC strike was successful. And the UVF also succeeded in forcing the then Coalition Government in Dublin to, effectively, turn its back on events in Northern Ireland.
As Mr McEntee observes in the prelude of his report: "The manner in which the Sunningdale process was pushed ahead in the teeth of vehement local opposition greatly inflamed loyalist antipathy towards their own Government and towards the Republic of Ireland. It was unquestionably the major catalyst for the Ulster Workers Council strike in May 1974, and most likely also for the Dublin and Monaghan bombings."
Despite the fact that so many Garda documents relating to the investigation of the bombings subsequently disappeared, Mr McEntee unearthed an Army report from December 1973, relating to a meeting with British Army intelligence, which forewarned of the probability of loyalist attacks in the Republic. That report, drawn up by the Army's Intelligence Directorate, stated: "Protestant militant organisations have now become a serious threat to peace in Northern Ireland and it is believed that there is a serious risk that they could spark off a Civil War. The danger period is seen as the current month and up to the first week in January 1974. If this is avoided another peak is seen as mid-January.
"The Protestant militant campaign, should the signal be given to start it, would include widespread industrial unrest, withdrawal of services, refusal to man even essential services, blocking of roads, erecting of barricades, attacks on Catholic ghettos particularly in Belfast, assassination of Protestant and Catholic leaders . . . and bombings and shootings both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic."
Mr McEntee also observes: "In relation to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, it is worth noting that the bombings took place during a period when loyalist militants achieved a level of power and popular support never seen before or since. They did this by achieving equally unprecedented levels of co-operation, organisation and discipline amongst themselves."
He has correctly set the context in which the UVF made its decision to lash out at the civilian population in the Republic in exactly the same way the IRA had attacked the civilian population in Northern Ireland. The loyalists believed, with justification, that the Provisional IRA had bombed Northern Ireland into a situation where the union with Great Britainwas under threat and joint London-Dublin rule was on the way.
It was a short step from establishing that belief to hijacking cars in Belfast and Portadown, loading bombs into their boots and driving them to Dublin and Monaghan town where they would kill 33 people and injure hundreds.
The conspiracy theories about 'British authorities' being involved do not hold water, as both the reports by Paddy McEntee and the report by Judge Barron have found. One that found its way into the Barron report, that a mysterious ex-British Army officer was frequenting hotels in Dublin, was investigated by gardai at the time. The Garda report found that the manwas a 'homosexualist' and was in Dublin because he liked to frequent establishments in South Great George's Street popular with gay men at the time.
At least one other "mystery" raised by campaigners about some type of conspiracy at Government as well as Garda level is also spurious. It has been alleged that files on the bombing were removed or destroyed from the Department of Justice premises on St Stephen's Green. Senior sources have informed the Sunday Independent that at the time of the bombings, and for quite some time afterwards, it was policy for the Garda not to supply files on crimes to the Department until charges had been brought. With no charges, there were no files sent to St Stephen's Green.Since the conspiracy theories were first aired in a Yorkshire Television documentary, Hidden Hand: the Forgotten Massacre in1993, the idea of 'collusion' has settled into the public consciousness in the Republic to such an extent that it becomes the core issue of an RTE news bulletin which fails to address the issues of the Ulster Workers Council strike and the background and history of the UVF.
This fits nicely into the revisionist history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland that has been expounded by Sinn Fein for more than a decade since the 'Peace Process' began. In its own terms, Sinn Fein refers to its campaign of 'recovered memory', a process whereby certain events like the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, Bloody Sunday, the Maze Prison Hunger Strikes and security force "collusion" with loyalists are emphasised while IRA atrocities are written out of history. This has been highly successful. There is now a generation of young Irish people who know almost nothing of the atrocities inflicted by the IRA on the civilian population of Northern Ireland and Britain as well as on members of the RUC and part-time members of the Ulster Defence Regiment.
Five months after the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, the IRA detonated a bomb in a popular bar in the centre of Birmingham, killing 21 people. That event is almost entirely forgotten but almost everyone has heard of the six Irish men unlawfully and wrongly arrested, charged and imprisoned for the bombings - the Birmingham Six.Jim Cusack
