20‭ ‬January‭ ‬1973:‭ ‬A Loyalist no warning bomb went off in Sackville Place Dublin on this day.‭ ‬The bomb killed a bus conductor and injured‭ ‬17‭ ‬other people.‭ ‬It exploded at‭ ‬3.20‭ ‬pm on a Saturday afternoon,‭ ‬as Ireland were playing the All-Blacks Rugby team at Lansdowne Road.‭ ‬The man killed was Thomas Douglas‭ (‬21‭)‬,‭ ‬originally from Stirling,‭ ‬Scotland.‭ ‬He had been living in Dublin for just four months.‭ ‬His mother was a native of Achill Island,‭ ‬Co.‭ ‬Mayo.

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The car used in the bombing had been hijacked at Agnes Street,‭ ‬Belfast.‭ ‬While no organisation claimed responsibility for this attack it was generally accepted that a Loyalist gang carried it out.‭ ‬The location of the explosion was almost at the same spot of a bomb the previous month,‭ ‬which killed two other members of Dublin’s bus service.‭ ‬A man with an English accent telephoned a warning to the main telephone exchange stating that a bomb would explode on O'Connell Bridge.‭ ‬But the warning given was ten minutes before the actual explosion and the Gardaí concluded afterwards that it was a diversionary tactic.‭

The car, a Vauxhall Victor, which had been hired, was hijacked from its hirer that morning at Agnes Street, off the Shankill Road in Belfast. The driver was reported to have been held until shortly after 3 pm, about the time the bomb exploded. In almost all the details, the hijacking of the car that exploded in South Leinster Street, Dublin on 17th May 1974, resembled this earlier hijacking. There was a report that the car had been seen passing through Drogheda at about midday. However, many Northern registered cars were travelling south that day on their way to the rugby international.

http://www.dublinmonaghanbombings.org/home/20jan73.html

‭No one was ever caught for this crime but it followed a pattern of attacks on Dublin which bore the hallmarks of operators acting in the pay of agents of another State - ie Britain. But ‘deniability’ was the modus operandi of this operation  and to this day the identities and whereabouts of the perpetrators are unknown - as is who it was who sent them here.