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The Guardian A report into the bloodiest day of the Irish Troubles is expected to reveal today that British security forces helped loyalist paramilitaries to bomb the Republic of Ireland. Three perfectly timed car bombs killed 26 people and injured hundreds more during rush-hour in Dublin on May 17 1974, in what was described as "daylight hell". An hour later a stolen car exploded outside a Protestant pub in the border town of Monaghan, killing seven people. It was the biggest mass murder in the history of the Irish Republic. No one claimed responsibility for the slaughter, and no one has stood trial. After years of pressure the Irish government finally gave in to calls for a wide-ranging investigation into the attacks, which security experts believed loyalist terrorists were incapable of carrying out unaided. The retired supreme court judge, Henry Barron, who has spent three years compiling his report, is expected today to draw conclusions on how British intelligence worked alongside the Ulster Volunteer Force to plan the blasts. At least three of the bombing team, all now dead, have been identified as paid informers. Mr Justice Barron is also expected to detail the botched investigation by Irish police, who are said to have had the names of 20 suspects within weeks of the attacks, but were frustrated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A source familiar with the investigation told the Guardian that the report was expected to raise the question of collusion, suggesting that loyalist paramilitaries did not then have the capacity to make such sophisticated explosive mechanisms. Proof that British security forces helped to plot the Dublin and Monaghan bombs would be even more shocking than the outcome of the ongoing Saville inquiry into the killings of 13 civilians in Derry by paratroopers on Bloody Sunday in 1972. If Mr Justice Barron suggests collusion, Britain would have to defend bombing another European state. Relatives of the dead are likely to demand a full public inquiry and perhaps take the UK to the European court of human rights. The bombs came at a time of political turmoil in Northern Ireland. Unionists had called a general strike against the power-sharing Sunningdale agreement, and four years earlier two Irish government ministers were forced to resign after they were suspected of trying to channel weapons to Catholics in the north, then under attack from loyalist mobs and the police. Many, particularly in Dublin, believe the bombings were a warning shot from British intelligence for the Irish government not to interfere in Northern Ireland. Jane Winter, the director of British Irish Rights Watch, a human rights monitoring group which made detailed submissions to the investigation, said: "Forensic evidence suggested that the bombs in Dublin were very much more sophisticated than any bombs loyalists had used before or since. All went off within one and a half minutes of each other - a technical achievement never matched before or since. The implication is that they had outside help in making these bombs." She said if collusion were found, there would be grave consequences for Britain internationally. "Here we are gaily telling the world how to run its own human rights affairs and holding ourselves up as an example of a developed democracy which doesn't do wicked things. But if Britain did collude with loyalists to bomb another country, that is an act of war." The 300-page report will be made public this afternoon after it goes before the Irish parliament's committee on justice, equality, defence and women's rights. |