History in Dundalk

It was a dark, cool and damp Friday night in Dundalk, Ireland on December 19, 1975. People were walking the from the Town Square down Crowe St. across from the Dundalk Town Hall not far from St. Patrick's Cathedral. Taxi cabs were lined up waiting to take weary Christmas shoppers home. Some men had stopped into the pub to enjoy a pint or two before they went home for the weekend. A car drove up in front of Kay's Tavern and parked. (Picture at left is of site today.)

Martin Clarke was 24-years-old, newly married and a part-time firefighter. He heard what he thought was a car crash. A few seconds later, he said he felt his house started shaking. He told his wife he needed to get to the fire station and took off running toward the sound.

Clarke, who had an injured hand at the time, checked in at the Fire Station and then ran the three blocks to the site of the largest and most memorable car bomb in Dundalk's history. "It was just chaos," Clarke said about seeing the bombing site. He said, the pub was on fire, the bottom floor almost completely blown away. People were pulling the injured from the wreckage on Crowe St. Others were inside the building trying to get survivors out before the second floor of the building collapsed, he said.

Two of the people pulling survivors out of the rubble were the grandfather and uncle of Mark Larkin, one of the Building Bridges participants who came to Missoula in 1997. Mark's uncle received burns on his arms and didn't like talking about the event. Just a few years ago, Mark found out that his grandfather had also helped drag people to safety. His grandfather, uncle, aunt and baby had hailed a cab but were having trouble getting the baby's carriage folded up and placed into the trunk of the cab when the blast happened. That delay probably saved their lives, Mark's father Gerard said.

Shrapnel from the bomb scarred the granite on the face of the Town Hall building. St. Patrick's felt the shock as some of the windows in the cathedral were shattered. Two people died in the car bombing in Dundalk. A plaque remembering the event and the two men has been placed on the Town Hall. The piece of public art down the street from the Town Hall (pictured left) was put in place on the 30th anniversity of the event.

Martin Clarke is now an archivist with the Louth County Museum. We spoke to him today about the car bomb and how security has changed for people living on the border areas of Ireland and Northern Ireland since the signing of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998, less than a year after the Missoula visitors returned home. In the past five years or so, he said the checkpoints as well as the lookout towers on the top of a number of hilltops and mountain tops near the border have been taken down.

At one time Dundalk was nicknamed "Gundalk" or "El Paso," but those names have now stopped. We have crossed back and forth across the border a number of times since we've been here. You would never know it. There are no border stops and no signs that says you're in one country or the other. The only way you know you've changed countries is to look at the speed limit signs. In the north, you see speed limit signs in miles-per-hour. Driving in the south, you'd see signs showing kilometers-per-hour.