North Strand bombing memorial should include names of those who died, a councillor says

At the age of five, Seamus Stephenson was awoken in the middle of the night in his bed on Hibernian Avenue, in the North Strand.

It was a racket that nobody saw coming.

“I remember being in bed and being nearly lifted out of bed with the noise and, you know, the blast,” Stephenson said by phone on Wednesday.

The racket was a bomb, dropped by the Nazis, in the middle of North Strand in the early hours of Saturday 31 May, 1941.

It was one of four bombs dropped by German Luftwaffe – the Nazi’s air force – planes on Dublin that night. But the only one to claim lives.

The bomb that struck the North Strand took 28 lives, with seven from one single family, the Brownes.

The event has been marked in the area. 

In 2011, on the 70^th anniversary of the catastrophic airstrike, a memorial garden was dedicated to those who died.

But as the 85^th anniversary approaches this year, the memorial garden could do with an addition, says local Councillor Alison Field, of the Labour Party.

At Monday’s monthly meeting of Dublin City Council, she asked for the names of those killed to be inscribed on a stone column in the garden. 

“They deserve their memory to be remembered on this monument,” she wrote in her her question to council officials.

And now

There is something poignant about remembering the devastation that just one single bomb wreaked on the people of the North Strand in the context of what is happening in the world today, says Field.

In carving in the names of those who were killed, as individuals.

“Obviously, looking at Palestine at the minute. I mean, they're still bombing them, and God knows what else is going to happen,” she says.

It’s difficult not to think of all of those waiting on the next bomb to drop right now, she says – in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan.

The grim spectre of fascism is returning, says Field.

“Look at America right now too. It's definitely harkening back to those times. Knocking on doors and reefing people out of their houses and schools,” she says.

Inside the garden

The memorial garden is to the side of the North Strand campus of Cathal Brugha FET College and is owned by the college itself.

In the garden, there is a stone column. On it, an inscription: “In memory of all who lost their lives in the bombing of the North Strand on May 31^st 1941”.

In response to Field’s question, the chief executive’s reply said that the park “belongs to the Marino College of Further Education also known as Cathal Brugha FET, they may know who installed the stone”.

On Wednesday, the college’s principal, Patricia O’Keeffe, said that the college would absolutely support adding names to the memorial garden.

Students use the garden a lot, she says. “It can be very lively. There’s a great energy around it.”

Students of the Environmental and Biodiversity Studies course even use it for experiments, she says.

A local man helps to keep it maintained, she says. “A nice gentleman.”

The council has been excellent too, providing hedging and other help, she says.

Stephenson, who remembers the racket of the bombing, agrees that the names should be added in the garden, he says. “That’s how it’s usually done.”

Across towns in the United Kingdom, you’ll find memorials to locals killed in the World Wars, he says – and it should be the same for the North Strand victims.

Musician Damien Dempsey also supports Field’s idea, he says.

His own grandparents Freddie and Annie, and his aunty Carmel, were living in a tenement room when the bomb dropped near their window, he says.

“The whole house came in on top of them. Granda dived over my Granny and Aunty and took the brunt of the rubble and glass on his back, and damaged his leg,” Dempsey said by email on Tuesday.

Dempsey recalls a story his granda would tell of the night. Of a couple, who he overheard, as they ran out of the tenements as the bombs were dropping, he says.

The woman, Mary, apparently stopped and started to run back inside.

“Mary, where are you going?” her husband Michael asked.

“I forgot me teeth,” she answered.

“It’s not feckin’ sandwiches they’re dropping! Will you come on!” he told her.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Ray McAdam, a Fine Gael councillor for the area, was at the 70^th anniversary ceremony in the memorial garden in 2011.

He is supportive of the suggestion of adding the victims’ names to the monument, he said by phone on Wednesday, and planned to raise it with the council’s chief executive, Richard Shakespeare, at their next meeting.

Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.