Reactions
In Northern Ireland, Sammy Smyth, then press officer of both the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Workers' Council (UWC) Strike Committee, said:
I am very happy about the bombings in Dublin. There is a war with the Free State and now we are laughing at them.
Party leaders in the Dáil (Irish parliament), sitting about 300 metres from the site of the South Leinster Street blast, commented on the following Monday. Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave recorded his disgust, considering further that –
....the blood of the innocent victims of last Friday's outrage—and of the victims of similar outrages in the North and in England—is on the hands of every man who has fired a gun or discharged a bomb in furtherance of the present campaign of violence in these islands—just as plainly as it is on the hands of those who parked the cars and set the charges last Friday. In our times, violence cannot be contained in neat compartments and justified in one case but not in another.
The opposition leader Jack Lynch was sickened by the "cruel" events, and also widened the question of blame –
Every person and every organisation which played any part in the campaign of bombing and violence which killed and maimed people and destroyed property in Belfast, Derry or any other part of our country and indeed in Britain over the past five years, shares the guilt and the shame of the assassins who actually placed these bombs on the streets of Dublin and Monaghan last Friday.
According to a Dublin newspaper in 2005, the then British Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, Arthur Galsworthy, noted the reactions in Dublin immediately after the bombings:
...there is no sign of any general anti-Northern Protestant reaction ... The predictable attempt by the IRA to pin the blame on the British (British agents, the SAS, etc) has made no headway at all. ... It is only now that the South has experienced violence that they are reacting in the way that the North has sought for so long.
The newspaper noted that "despite these feelings of schadenfreude", Galsworthy continued,
it would be ... a psychological mistake for us to rub this point in. ... I think the Irish have taken the point.
Read more about this topic: Dublin And Monaghan Bombings
Famous quotes containing the word reactions:
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—Leontine Young (20th century)
“In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.”
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