Dublin, Monaghan and Boston

Forty years ago, loyalists from Northern Ireland went to Dublin on a busy Friday. The car they drove was packed with explosives.

The car bombings of Dublin, and then again in Monaghan, were part of a reign of terror instigated by a group that did not want their world to change. The Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland were fighting for their rights in a British colony where prejudice and outright abuse of Catholics was allowed to flourish. The Protestant loyalist who benefitted from the system were willing to murder innocent people to maintain the status quo.

Someone placed bombs on a crowded street in Boston yesterday.

Theories fly as to who and why, but the answers do not come quickly, even though we live in a time of instant news.

Authorities will ask who had a reason, who had a grudge against the United States government, who chose a violent message against the most defenseless? Who was so cowardly as to plant a bomb intended to kill and maim civilians?

Like Dublin and Monaghan, the bombing of Boston will have some political link, whether it is terrorism imported from abroad or grown at home. Someone held a grudge, or did not like the way the world was turning.

Boston and Dublin have long been sister cities, bound by Irish roots and traditions carried across the ocean by the Irish diaspora.

Ireland's history is replete with incidents of bombings used as a weapon to achieve political change.

Now the two cities share another commonality, one that will stir up memories for those who were shopping on a May afternoon in Dublin in 1974.

It is not a commonality that anyone would have wished to share in an age when the use of terrorism and hidden bombs are universally recognized as barbaric acts of senseless violence that achieve nothing.