An Irishman’s Diary about Germany’s wartime bombing of Monaghan

Chances are you’ve never heard of the German blitz of Monaghan during the second World War. I hadn’t either, until some years ago when I was given a tour of my ancestral homeland – the place my namesake grandfather had been born.

It was barely three miles from where I grew up myself, but a bit higher, and wilder, and more sparsely populated. So I was astonished when my guide, a neighbour called Mick (“Wee Mick”) McNally, picking out various landmarks in the panorama of drumlins, pointed off into the middle distance and said: “And there’s Daly’s, where the Germans dropped the bomb.”

In fact, as I’ve since learned, it seems there were two bombs, although some confusion still surrounds the issue, maybe because one went off in mid-air.

But according to the most authoritative versions of the story, Patrick Daly was reacting to the sound of a first explosion when he went to his door just in time to see the second bomb fall, with a noise “like an express train”, 50 yards away, shattering every window of the house, blowing plaster off the walls, and showering him with debris.

The bomb also broke windows in the home of a local blacksmith, Owen (“Oweny”) Finnegan, whose forge I visited as a child 30 years later. I’m told that, in a variation on the theme of turning swords into ploughshares, he improvised a mathematical compass – the one for drawing circles – out of shrapnel he collected.

Another local souvenir was the crater left behind in the townland of Bocks Upper. Fifteen feet deep and about 40 wide, it was still there until recent years. But if I had ever noticed the feature on the many times I passed, I must have thought it another leftover from the Ice Age, an anti-drumlin, maybe.

It was 8pm on a December Friday in 1940 when all this happened. And south Monaghan was not alone in receiving a surprise early Christmas present from the skies that night. Half an hour beforehand, two bombs also fell on Sandycove in south Dublin – one on a road, another in a back garden.

Remarkably, they didn't kill anyone either, although according to The Irish Times, a man named Patrick Carroll had been standing with his bicycle "10 yards" away from one, and was "half-buried" by the debris.

The paper’s coverage of the bombings had a curious footnote. It recorded that, in reporting the attacks the day afterwards, BBC radio had mentioned a broadcast from Breslau in which a German spokesman “indignantly denied” responsibility.

The curious part is that, according to the BBC, the denial had been at 7pm on the Friday – ie half an hour before the first explosion. Either that was the fog of war, or somebody somewhere was engaging in propaganda designed to influence Irish opinion.

Anyway, since nobody was killed or badly injured, the events could be shrugged off as an entertaining diversion in humdrum, Emergency-era Ireland. As The Irish Times report said of the Monaghan incident, it caused "much excitement [...] in the nearby town", ie Carrickmacross. And they weren't wrong there.

It’s part of Finnegan family lore that the aforementioned Oweny had so many visitors afterwards, official and otherwise, he had to wear his Sunday suit for two weeks. Only then was it safe to don the blacksmith’s duds again.

Most of the dozen or so wartime bombings of the Free State, of which the December 1940 incidents were among the earliest, did not result in fatalities. The deadliest exception, of course, was at Dublin’s North Strand in May 1941. But there was also the bombing of Campile Creamery in Wexford nine months earlier. Campile was the first German attack on southern Ireland, in fact, and unlike many of the others, it may have been deliberate. In a book on the subject, local historian John Flynn concluded that the creamery was targeted because it was sending butter to Britain. The attack was a “warning shot”, he suggests, to deter neutral Ireland even from supplying food to the enemy.

In any case, a Luftwaffe plane dropped four bombs on the village, in rapid succession, on August 26th, 1940. It was a Monday, at lunchtime, and it could have been a lot worse.

The restaurant of the Shelburne Co-Op, which was hit by the first and worst or the explosions, had been full minutes earlier. In the event, it was only three unfortunate young women – Mary Ellen Kent (30), her sister Kitty (26), and Kathleen Hurley (27) – who were in the wrong place when death came falling from a blue sky, 75 years ago today.

@FrankmcnallyIT