MEMORIES OF 1972 CLONES BOMBING SHARED AT COMMEMORATION EVENT

A plaque on the wall of the former Courthouse building in Clones recalls how novelist James Joyce would frequent such venues around Dublin early in the 20th century to listen to hearings and prospect for nuggets of character and plot. Now a community space, the old Clones Courthouse resounded on December 28 to recollections of a different sort of human drama as memories of the bomb which exploded in the town 50 years previously were shared, some given utterance for the first time.

The characters in this story were ordinary people from the town and its surrounds going about their early evening post- Christmas routine when they were caught up in a plot whose malign strands also touched Belturbet in Co Cavan and Mullnagoad, near Pettigo in Co Donegal. Three bombs exploded in quick succession that night, the first at 10.01 pm in Clones’s Fermanagh Street. The device, contained in a blue Morris 1100, seriously injured two men, Brendan Clancy and Luke McKiernan and, days later, on January 4 1973, was instrumental in the death of Clones man Patrick McCabe who sustained a fatal fall while assisting the community’s efforts to repair the physical damage to the town wrought by the blast.

At 10.28 pm, a bomb contained in a red Ford Escort exploded outside Farrelly’s Bar and McGowan’s Drapery on Main Street, Belturbet. Two children, Patrick…