DUBLIN, May 15 (RIA Novosti), Mark Hirst – The British Government is to be sued by the families of victims of one of the bloodiest attacks ever committed during the Anglo-Irish conflict, the 1974 multiple car bombings in Dublin and Monaghan that killed 33 people and wounded a further 300.
Sinn Fein’s Gerry Kelly, a former senior IRA volunteer and now elected member of the Northern Ireland Assembly told RIA Novosti “Sinn Féin supports policing where no one is placed above the law and where investigations are carried out without fear or favour.
“However, that clearly is not the case when the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is dealing with issues connected to the past,” Kelly added.
Responsibility for the car bombings, which deliberately targeted civilians in the Republic of Ireland in May 1974, was claimed by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a pro-UK paramilitary group based in the British-administered province of Northern Ireland.
But during the intervening years, former police and British military intelligence officers have claimed the British army colluded in the bombings and linked the attacks directly to MI5, the British Security Service.
“The families of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in which 33 people were killed have been forced to take a civil action against the British government as a mechanism of last resort,” Kelly told RIA Novosti.
Margaret Urwin of Justice for the Forgotten, the group representing the victims’ families told RIA Novosti “we’ve tried to persuade the British to co-operate and held meetings with British officials, but that all ended abruptly in November.”
Urwin claimed the British were refusing to release documents detailing the level of state collusion in the car bombings.
“Two motions passed by Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament, urged the British Government to make the papers available to an independent, international judicial figure for assessment, but the British have just ignored that,” Urwin told RIA Novosti.
“We felt that after all this time there really is nowhere else to go but to take legal action against the British Government,” Urwin added.
“The British condemn other countries for torture and state murder and perhaps they are trying to keep up the morale of their own soldiers, but we know these kinds of abuses have been carried out in many of Britain’s former colonies,” Urwin said.
