Don Mullan's book on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings is an attempt to break the silence surrounding the bombings, to retell the events, if the events were ever "told" in any meaningful manner. The book gives considerable space to victims', relatives of victims' and bystanders' accounts, and as such is a retelling of the events "from below." But the book is also an attempt to retell the story in a more complete sense, to delve into the complex and uncertain story of the responsibility of the bombings, and to put forward at least some plausible hypotheses as to who planted the bombs, and who provided the crucial logistical and technical support which enabled the bombs to be so grotesquely "successful." In these two ways, the book attempts to confront the silence surrounding the bombings: to bring to light often painful stories of the effects of the bombs on individual lives, to give voice to people hitherto silent, but also to probe the official reticence regarding the bombings.

The numerous personal accounts retelling the traumatic events of the afternoon of Friday 17 May in Dublin and Monaghan clearly have a welcome cathartic function for the tellers themselves. Pat Fay, remembering his father, Patrick Fay, who died in the Parnell Street bombing, is not untypical when he relates how it had taken him twenty six years to talk openly about the bombing and his bereavement. For the reader, the detailed descriptions from a variety of points of view function also to give depth and focus to an event which, if remembered at all, has remained little more than a date, a place or a headline. The personal testimonies almost always include a description of "normal" life in Dublin on a Friday afternoon. Thus the cumulative effect of the personal narratives is to photograph a number of scenes that afternoon which would subsequently be cut in two by the bombs. These include the barber's shop, with customers being tidied up for a first communion the next day, the shoe shop, with the shop girls getting ready for their Friday night out, and the streets crowded with commuters on the way home for the weekend after a working week in Dublin.

The effect of these descriptions is to highlight the rupture in this narrative of everyday life caused by the bombings. For many, as they relate, the injuries, bereavement or shock experienced that afternoon represented a sharp interruption of the smooth progression of their lives. There is no need to elaborate on this in terms of the effects of the death of family members or of close friends, but the sense of shock also emerges in more subtle ways, in accounts of the lasting impression the bombings had on those involved. For some, for example, the bombings left a reluctance even to go into the centre of Dublin or Monaghan. Bernadette Bergin, a survivor of the South Leinster Street bombing, moved to Tralee in 1983 and, as she says, "jumped at the opportunity to leave Dublin. To this day I hate going to Dublin and am still very nervous in the shops" (p. 76).

The personal retellings of the experiences of the bombings, then, constitute in themselves a breaking of silence, a bringing to light of stories "from below." Stories of personal trauma, hitherto personal stories alone, come into the public domain and become, when put alongside the numerous other personal stories, a major act of collective remembering. As such they are cathartic on a personal level, but on a public level they constitute an important collective breaking of the public and official silences surrounding the events. And here the personal narratives and the larger historical and legal story of the bombings and their aftermath dovetail. As Sonia Askin, also remembering her father, Patrick Askin, a victim of the Monaghan bombing, relates, until recently the event was only remembered by those directly involved in one way or another: "It's like nobody else cares. It doesn't seem to be part of the history of Ireland at all. It's just blanked" (p. 125).

Don Mullan's book, then, retells the Dublin and Monaghan bombings through the personal accounts of the various sufferers. But it also attempts to break the silence by shedding light on the problem of responsibility for the bombing. As such, it works alongside the Justice for the Forgotten Campaign, founded in 1996, and the television documentary on the bombings, The Hidden Hand, broadcast on Yorkshire Television in 1993. As a direct response to the Hidden Hand documentary, in fact, the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force admitted responsibility for the bombings. There is, moreover, a general consensus that the direct perpetrators of the bombings came from the mid-Ulster brigade of the UVF based in Portadown. Don Mullan's book also reconstructs the historical context of the bombings, in particular the peace process in the north associated with the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 (the Belfast Agreement of 1998 was termed by Seamus Mallon "Sunningdale for slow learners") which was forcefully opposed by some loyalists with the Ulster Workers Council Strike in May 1974 who feared that Britain was preparing to "get out" of Ulster altogether. This context goes some way to explaining the motives behind the loyalist groups who planted the bombs.

But the issue of the responsibility for the bombings goes beyond indicating those directly involved. More controversial is the accusation, made by the Yorkshire Television documentary and backed up by other evidence in Mullan's book, of collusion on the part of the British armed forces (in particular the SAS operating in the Portadown area) and the British secret services, who had infiltrated the Portadown UVF. This collusion would account for the sophistication of the bombings both in terms of the logistics of the operation, carried out far from the loyalist bases, and in terms of the technology of the bombs themselves. The importance of this accusation should not be underestimated. "If true," as Don Mullan concludes, "the suspected involvement of British Military Intelligence in assisting loyalist paramilitaries to place no-warning bombs in the Republic of Ireland dwarfs Bloody Sunday in its implications" (pp. 20-21).

This possibility of collusion on the part of the British state (along with a potential embarrassment also on the part of the Irish government which, Don Mullan suggests, may also have been complicit in allowing large amounts of explosive to be stolen by the IRA from a factory in Meath in the Republic, explosive which later often ended up in the hands of the British authorities through confiscations) goes a long way towards explaining the official silences over the bombings. There was no effective investigation by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, although it was clear that the bombers had moved south across the border and then back again, and no explanation as to why no investigation had taken place. The Garda Síochána, too, have remained silent over the lack of response from the RUC to their demands for an investigation. The Irish Government has also been silent, in particular over the possible blocking of the investigation in the north, but also with regard to why there was no continuation of the case at a diplomatic or political level with the British government. Liam Cosgrave, the Taoiseach in 1974, answered the requests for information by Yorkshire Television with a brief letter in which he stated: "This is to confirm that I will not give an interview or answer questions" (p. 168). Under Bertie Ahern, the Irish government agreed to a judicial investigation into the events and their investigation by the Garda, but the private nature of the Barron Inquiry, strongly opposed by all those involved in the campaign to reopen the case, has only reinforced the general sense of silence and secrecy. Towering above all this, though, is the deafening silence of the British authorities in the face of the accusation that their own armed forces or secret services collaborated in murder.

The book, then, is about retelling, but it is also about silence, a silence which is to be found above all in Britain. Recently, there have been some cracks in the British tradition of secret government, some voices reaching out from within the institutions of its state, some hesitant appeals to notions of accountability to something beyond the "national interest" that still constitutes the cornerstone of the Official Secrets Act. The Macpherson Inquiry into the events surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and the lack of adequate police investigation concluded with a denunciation of the British police force as "institutionally racist." The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday has, at the time of writing, concluded its hearings and is preparing its report, and is the sole example in British history of a second public inquiry into a single set of events. Inquiries such as these may awaken hopes that silences can be broken, that official retellings of events can highlight unpalatable aspects of government or administration. Other inquiries, though, such as the Hutton Inquiry into possibility of exaggeration and media manipulation by the government over the supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and, indeed, the original and Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday held in 1972, may leave a contrary impression that a controlled and limited public airing of discordant voices within the overall structure of an authoritative judicial framework, far from being an effective retelling, functions instead to shield other, weightier silences.