The names of some of the culprits were known to An Garda Síochána within a relatively short time of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974 , writes Kevin Myers.
Those names were - presumably - supplied by British Intelligence, but not enough was done to pursue the guilty men. And now we find from the Barron report that relevant files in the Department of Justice went missing "in their entirety", which is of course what tends to happen to inconvenient files in this State.
What is the explanation for this? The answer is most probably the e-word: extradition. Rather than have the guilty men rounded up and brought to justice in the Republic, was it not more politically convenient to let the bombings drift away in a collective amnesia? Because if the Dublin and Monaghan bombers were extradited from the North, might not then there be the expectation that IRA murderers would be extradited to face justice for numerous atrocities in the North and in Britain? The great thing about doing nothing is that it is just that: it is doing nothing. There are no records, no minutes, no documents, no witnesses that will testify that you made a decision to do nothing. The decision is made passively and silently and then comes into effect. No further conversations are had, no further decisions are made. Files are filed, and forgotten, and perhaps later removed: otherwise nothing happens. The Troubles continue, and the slaughtered dead of Dublin and Monaghan are - thankfully - air-brushed out of the collective memory.
Those who colluded in this pathological inactivity must have been grateful indeed that the 34 dead were of such little account: an Italian man, a French woman and 32 Irish people, mostly working class, with no influence, no power, and no voice. Their lives, and the grief, confusion, anger and incomprehension of their loved ones, could be ignored. The waters of history would rise over this atrocity, and all trace in the public mind would be washed away. But as we now know, some of the people with no influence, no power and no voice would not let history eradicate what they could not wipe from their hearts.
Was there collusion between the loyalist terrorists and members of the British security forces? Some view the Dublin and Monaghan bombings with an agenda: they will be satisfied only when they hear that the attacks were master-minded by Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip drove one of the cars. Mr Justice Barron found no proof that there was any collusion: indeed, he pointed to the interception by the British army of a multiple loyalist bombing operation two months before. But there was turpitude to a disgraceful degree in not excising the UVF from the then UDR. In part, the two organisations, especially in Portadown, were synonymous.
According to David McKittrick's Lost Lives, one of the Dublin bombers was Harris Boyle, who was killed in the attack on the Miami showband a year later. He and a UDR accomplice had earlier been acquitted of having two firearms "without lawful authority". Wesley Somerville was killed in the same terrorist own-goal, and though Lost Lives does not say that he was in the UDR, I believe he was - both at the time of the Dublin bombings, for which he was also responsible, but also at the time of his death.
The Miami massacre - in which some UVF men were killed by their own bomb in the course of ambushing the showband in Co Down - prompted the government of the day to make formal protests to the British government about its failure to curb sectarian assassinations. Well and good: but the names of both Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville were on the list of those wanted for the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. I have a memory of reading a report that Wesley Somerville's fingerprint was also found on the knife used to kill railway worker Christopher Phelan near Sallins, Co Kildare, in what seems to have been a botched plan to bomb a train carrying republicans to Bodenstown: and that was a year after the Dublin bombings.
There would have been no Miami massacre, no attempt at Bodenstown, if the Irish government had done its duty: sought the extradition of men it knew from the highest sources in British Intelligence were loyalist terrorist killers.
It seems as if the deaths of Wesley Somerville and Harris Boyd then brought an end to the cross-Border terrorist instincts of the UVF, which henceforth contented itself with butchering harmless Northern Catholics.
It's too easy to blame the coalition government of 1974 for doing nothing; yet that was replaced within three years by Fianna Fáil, and it also chose to do nothing about the bombings. It was as if our political classes closed ranks around the unspoken e-word. Indeed, the issue might have become so deeply ingrained in the collective unconscious of Dáil Éireann that it never needed to be mentioned for a consensus to have been reached.
To bring the Dublin-Monaghan bombers to justice in the Republic would be to open this State up to extradition in the opposite direction.
And, as we were to see in the shameful decisions of the Special Criminal Court and the Supreme Court over the unfolding years, at the highest levels in this State there was a profound reluctance to tackle republican terrorism in a systematic and effective way.
So, no closure for the relatives of the Dublin and Monaghan dead; and none for the dead of La Mon, Birmingham or Bloody Friday either.