Cormac Ó Dúlacháin, S.C. Address at 38th Anniversary Commemoration on 17th MAY 2012

17th May 2012

This is both a very private and a very public event.

You have come to remember a very dear friend and relative, to stand in solidarity with their memory, to remember who they were and what they meant to their family and friends. To grieve for the loss they suffered, to grieve for your own loss, that of your parents, brothers, sisters, to mark in this public place the deliberate and intentional taking of their life. You are joined by those who were injured, who lived that day out, but who carry their own scars and suffering.

To commemorate in a public space is not easy, it is not comfortable to be here in the eye of the public, but there was nothing gentle in the taking of these lives, a taking that happened in this public place, in the streets nearby, in the town of Monaghan and in like manner on previous occasions in this city in 1972 and 1973. There is a rawness and bareness that lasts the years.

That you gather in public is a reminder to others of the horror and cruelty that comes of conflict, a reminder that what still happens today on other streets in foreign lands also happened here. By your presence here you remind us all of the inhumanity of car bombings, you remind us of that each and every victim, was a person who loved and was loved, that each of them had a name, that each deserves to be remembered not by one of a number who were lost but as they them themselves.

Your gathering here is also a dignified protest, a protest that there is a full story yet to unfold. A protest at a partial unfinished enquiry. A protest that justice has not yet been done. A protest at governments who will inquire to a point, to the line in the sand where the questions and searching becomes uncomfortable. An uncomfortable diplomacy. An establishment consensus that portrays the troubles and the consequent suffering as a Northern event and arranges its political responses accordingly. So that you by your presence here today say these bombings are not a past event. That you still hold governments to their obligations to account for what they know, you challenge their claims of secrecy and you remind them that no person has been held to account for these events.

Your presence here today, the presence of this monument on this street, everyday of every year, may still touch the minds of those who can reveal the full story..