The Dublin bombings are recalled through images of their aftermath and revisited in conversation between Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew. The novel gives the attacks a stark public scale—bombs at three locations and eleven people killed on a street parallel to the couple’s hotel—while showing how news images and memorial flowers make the violence persist in private memory.

Background and News Montage

A year after electricity-supply workers began the strike that sought to dissolve the power-sharing government, Cushla watches a news montage that places the strike beside the Dublin bombings. A red, white and blue poster declaring “DUBLIN IS JUST A SUNNINGDALE AWAY” precedes an image of a Dublin pavement marked by the attack’s aftermath. The juxtaposition links political crisis and violence in the news sequence, without establishing that the strike caused the bombings.

The montage also shows paramilitaries openly parading and Brian Faulkner announcing the government’s collapse. Businesses and shops begin to close; pubs remain open at first, with Fidel joking that they are an essential service, before they too are ordered shut. As Cushla watches, rage rises in her. She wipes the bar counter slowly while observing the regulars watching the television, a quiet action set against the scale of the images and the difficulty of forgetting them.

The Site and the Reported Toll

Later, in Dublin, Michael leads Cushla along streets she has not walked before. They pass the parliament building and turn onto Nassau Street beside Trinity College. Bouquets wrapped in cellophane have been placed by a section of railings. Cushla recognizes the spot from the news a few days earlier, on the anniversary of the strike.

Michael tells her that bombs went off at three locations and that eleven people were killed on a street parallel to their hotel. The account establishes the scale and spread of the attacks, while the bouquets give the event a visible marker in the city. The scene does not identify those responsible or supply further circumstances of the bombings.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The event reaches the reader in two stages: first as footage that Cushla watches in a bar, then as a place she encounters with Michael in Dublin. In the earlier passage, the news images are bound to her act of remembering; in the later one, flowers and a brief factual account bring the violence back into the present of their walk. The shift from television image to marked urban site makes remembrance concrete without turning it into an explanation of the attacks.

The bombings appear beside the strike and the collapse of the power-sharing government in a sequence of public upheaval, but the novel keeps their relation associative rather than causal. Cushla’s anger, her silence, and the regulars’ attention to the television frame the news as something witnessed collectively and carried individually. The bouquets in Dublin offer a quieter form of witnessing: a public trace of loss encountered by two people moving through the city.