FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
Friday, May, 17 1974. I am sitting in my bedsit in Home Farm Road in Dublin’s Drumcondra. It’s sometime after five o’clock and I am cramming as students do when exams loom large on the horizon; cramming because I didn’t exactly haunt the library of Saint Patrick’s Training College, just down the road, where I had been doing a one-year, post-graduate course to qualify as a primary school teacher.
Suddenly, I hear a loud thud. I assumed it was the gas boiler in the bathroom which was erratic and prone to noisy eruptions. I check it out – nothing. About 15 minutes later the phone in the hallway rings. It’s my mother. “Ger,” she exclaims, “thanks be to God and His Blessed Mother. Are you alright?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Son, there’s been several bomb explosions in the city and I feared you might have been caught up in them. There’s a lot of people dead.” (27 people died, one a nine-month pregnant woman, as a result of the explosions while another seven would die when a bomb exploded in Monaghan some 90 minutes later).
I am shocked. My mother wasn’t ringing from home – she had just arrived in Hueston Station. My older brother, John, who was meeting her shared the breaking news about the bombs and she immediately rang me. Because my mother was in Dublin it brought the horror of the bombing much closer and made it more frightening for her. And now I understood the loud thud.
And, yes, I could have been caught up in it as I occasionally frequented Talbot S., Parnell St and South Leinster St where the bombs exploded, almost simultaneously, around 5.30pm.
That night my flatmate John Cleere (of Cleere’s Pub fame) myself and some mutual friends played cards and drank some cans but the cards, the cans were incidental, as the conversation kept returning to the bombs. Why? Who? And the senseless slaughter of it all! Looking back now, we were somewhat traumatised. Later that night Jack, John’s good friend, drove me across the city to Kenilworth Square to be with my girlfriend who was also traumatised by it all.
And I shall never forget that drive along O’Connell Street – it was deserted, bleak and so, so silent. It was absolutely eerie. My girlfriend, who I had been going out with for three years, and I hugged each other like we never hugged before. Tragedy brings us all closer, I believe, and makes us more appreciative of our togetherness.
Actually my girlfriend and I did hug each other as closely, more closely in fact, back in December 1972. We had decided to go to some film or other in the Corinthian Cinema (I think) on Eden Quay. We could get two tickets but not together! And so we crossed the road, O’Connell Bridge actually, to the Film Centre on Burgh Quay; during that film we heard, not a loud thud, but a loud bang!
Afterwards we learned that a car bomb had detonated in Eden Quay and a second bomb had exploded in Sackville Place (near O’Connell Street) Two people were killed and 127 injured. We had several stiff drinks that night in our local, well away from the city centre. And boy did we hug.
With all that’s going on in Gaza and the universities at the moment I can’t help but wonder if I were a student today would I be caught up in it all? Would I be out there waving a Palestinian flag, would I be confronting the hierarchy of UCD (where I was studying in ’72) I don’t think so. I was never a rebel student. Never a rebel. Full stop.
That said however, my then girlfriend and I did march on the British Embassy in Merrion Square back in February 1972 in protest at Bloody Sunday Massacre in the North January 30. We didn’t exactly march on the embassy but we were there among an estimated crowd of between 20,000 and 100,000. And as the embassy burned – a clear and vivid memory – someone was shouting: ‘Burn everything British except their condoms.”
All of which reminds me of when, and where, I bought my first condom. But that, as they say, is for another day.
