CHAPTER 1

THE FAMILY BUSINESS

‘Where did the bomb hit?’

My father rushed to the telephone. He snatched up the receiver and dialled a number. When the call was answered he said tersely: ‘Where did the bomb hit?’ My mother and I, who were standing close by, went still, shocked to hear those words. At the other end of the line, his garda colleague was shocked, too, asking what bomb my father was talking about. Nothing had been called in. What did he mean?

My father returned the phone to its cradle. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing, sounding louder in our silence. He picked it up again, and listened as he was told that three bombs had just gone off in Dublin’s city centre, at Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street. From the higher ground of our house in Santry, he had heard the reverberation of the explosion and understood what it was before those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity fully knew what was happening.

It was Friday 17 May 1974. Three car bombs had been detonated on the streets of inner-city Dublin – claimed years later by the UVF. They had taken the lives of 27 people and injured hundreds more. I exchanged a look with my brother – because of a bus strike, our father had collected us from near Parnell Street just 90 minutes earlier. The no-warning bombs had been set to coincide with the evening rush hour, around five-thirty. Buildings were ravaged, windows blown out, debris strewn across the streets and cars left as skeletal wrecks as the emergency services raced to the scene.

My father got the details, as far as they were known, then he left to go and play a role in the Garda investigation. He was a detective superintendent in the Garda Síochána’s Central Detective Unit and to me it seemed he met every situation, no matter how frightening or tragic, calmly and coolly. His work fascinated me and I was intrigued by the stories he told us about it. From childhood I had a deep interest in Irish history, politics and public affairs, and the policing of the state was very much part of that. My father’s daily return from work, with theIrish Independent under his arm, was eagerly awaited. I would wait impatiently for him to read it and complete the crossword, when finally I could enter the fray to be the next family member to read it. Even at 12 years of age I would read it with great concentration from first column to last.

So I knew about the Troubles in Northern Ireland; I knew about bombs going off there. But this was a first for me. It wasn’t for my father, though. I knew why he had so quickly recognised the sound and sensation of the bombs going off. He was a fairly new recruit, about eighteen months in uniform, when the German Luftwaffe bombed Dublin on 31 May 1941. It was an event that would have a lasting impact. That attack killed 28 people, injured 90 and destroyed about three hundred houses. It was an unprecedented attack on Irish soil. But this bombing, to which I was now bearing witne