You must remember this

You’re probably familiar with the case of Wendy Doherty. No? Well, John Dargle  then – you know about him. No again? I’d say that was odd except that it isn’t. Some victims of the Troubles we hear about again and again. Others, even their names are forgotten.

John Dargle died forty years ago today. He was an eighty-year-old Dublin pensioner who was killed when a bomb went off in Parnell Street. Wendy Doherty wasn’t killed. She was  twenty-two months old and was found wandering in a dazed state after a bomb went off in Talbot Street.  Her pregnant mother, Collette Doherty, whom she was with, was less lucky: she was killed. In all, thirty-four people died forty years ago today in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. No one has ever been charged with the killings.

Who was responsible? The Barron Report in 2003 (they rushed that out, didn’t they?) concluded that the loyalist Glennane gang was probably helped in carrying out the bombings by the RUC and the UDR, along with British army intelligence. It also criticised the Fine Gale-Labour coalition of the time for their lack of interest  in the case.  The Irish parliament’s Joint Committee on Justice called the attacks an act of international terrorism involving British state forces. Despite that, to date the British authorities have refused to release their files on the killings, so reinforcing suspicion of their involvement.

The Dublin-Monaghan bombings had long-term effects, beyond their impact on the grieving families. They reinforced in the population of the south the determination not to let violence from the north spill south across the border. It was a natural reaction: however much you might sympathise with northerners who were suffering in the conflict, better them suffering than you.

That deepening of the partitionist mind-set continues after violence has abated in the north. Now the southern population are encouraged to see the north as a place apart and northern politicians as a different and undesirable species. In the first – keeping violence from seeping into the south – Dail politicians were largely successful. In the second – keeping Sinn Féin out of southern politics – they’ve been less successful. Sinn Féin have gone, over the past few decades, from virtually zero support for their southern candidates to being the party which makes major gains with just about every election.

While it’s easy enough to be sympathetic with the southern population in wanting to keep northern violence from erupting in the south, it’s less easy to be sympathetic with the determination to stall Sinn Féin from entering southern politics. Those who imposed the famous Section 31 which prevented republican voices being heard on the airwaves are also less forgiveable. There’s little sense in urging people to enter electoral politics if they’re then gagged and demonised at every turn.

But in a few days’ time, all that may change dramatically. Sinn Féin may well receive the sort of electoral support that will leave them as major players in southern as well as northern politics.

Meanwhile, the families of the Dublin-Monaghan bombings go one seeking justice for their lost loved ones. And yet few of us, other than relatives,  even know the names of those who died. It’s not as if a warning had been given or those bombs had a military or commercial target. Their clear aim was to kill as many civilians as possible, and in that they were highly successful. Just as they were in stiffening the south’s determination to have as little to do with the north as possible. The bombs terrorised the southern population into thinking in partitionist terms.

Still, isn’t it strange that most of us don’t know who Wendy Doherty or her mother Collette was. Or seventeen-month-old Jacqueline O’Brien or her five-month-old sister Anne-Marie or their father John O’Brien (23) or his wife Anne (22), all of whom died in the blasts. No continual TV interviews or headline attention for their relatives or the relatives of the other twenty-nine victims. No repeating of their story, no arrests, no laws passed.

But don’t pretend to be surprised. You always knew that some victims are more politically useful than others.