County Monaghan
Muineachán
- IrishMuineachán
- ProvinceUlster
- County townMonaghan
- Local governmentMonaghan County Council
- Area1,294 km²
- Population65,288 (2022)
- Highest pointSlieve Beagh southeast top, 373 m
The North Road
At about half past five on Friday the seventeenth of May 1974 three car bombs went off in Dublin without warning. Just before seven a fourth exploded on the North Road in Monaghan, outside Greacen's pub.
The Barron report says the Monaghan bomb killed six people, then lists seven: Patrick Askin, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Croarkin, Archibald Harper, Thomas John Travers, Peggy White and George Williamson. Seven is the figure the Taoiseach gave the Dáil.
Thirty three people and an unborn child died that day, the most of any single day of the Troubles. In 1993 the Ulster Volunteer Force claimed the bombings. By then nobody had been convicted, or even arrested.
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Clones
Saint Tighernach founded a monastery at Clones in the sixth century. In the 1140s it became an Augustinian abbey.
The round tower is sandstone, twenty three metres high, with its cap gone and its door a metre and a half off the ground. When the inside was cleared in the 1840s human remains were found under the floor, believed to be from a graveyard older than the tower.
The high cross stands in the Diamond. It is the head of one cross on the shaft of another, carved in the ninth century with Daniel in the lions' den, Adam and Eve, and the wedding at Cana.
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Patrick Kavanagh
Born in 1904 in the townland of Mucker, in Inniskeen parish, the son of a cobbler. The date is either the twenty first or the twenty third of October.
In December 1931 he walked to Dublin in his work clothes to call on George Russell, rather than take the train. He made the most of being a ploughman.
He moved to Dublin in 1939 and stayed. The Great Hunger, a poem of 759 lines, came out in 1942, and he later repudiated it. On Raglan Road became a song.
He died in Dublin in 1967 and was buried at Inniskeen.
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