Sixty-one year old Rooney worked as a lorry driver with the local urban district council. "He was a great man for doing somebody a good turn.

He loved set dancing and music. He never hindered anybody and he knew an awful lot about Dundalk, " his daughter Maura told the Oireachtas Justice Committee which last summer investigated the circumstances behind the bombing.

Margaret English . . . a daughter of 60-year old tailor Hugh Waters . . . recalled the traumatic impact of her father's death. "I always felt we were all so secure, really secure, and then when Daddy was murdered, it was like somebody got our little cocoon and just broke it." She added, "I would not look at the television because I was afraid of what I would see. Every time I heard about a bombing I was taken back to my life so I always kept that away."

The massive bomb caused huge physical destruction in Dundalk town centre. Two buildings on Crowe Street were completely destroyed.

In a news article in December 1975, the Irish Times reported, "The public house was known to have been frequented by Provisional Sinn Fein supporters. Sinn Fein's office in the town was nearby.

According to local people, the bar had been crowded with home-going drinkers."

Cover-up

Neither Jack Rooney nor Hugh Waters had any republican connections. They were in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In the award-winning book, Lost Lives, the attack on Kay's Tavern is attributed to loyalist paramilitaries. "Reliable loyalist sources said the Red Hand Commando were behind the bombing, the same group attacking a bar 10 miles away at Silverbridge in south Armagh three hours later.

Three people were killed in the second attack, " the book, edited by David McKittrick, states.

But there was another layer to the truth behind the Kay's Tavern bombing. Margaret English touched on that great unspoken when she addressed the Oireachtas Justice Committee. "I thought the Irish government would look after its citizens. It is actually breaking my heart to think that it did not. My thoughts are . . . I hate to say it and I hope Daddy is not looking from up there and saying, 'Margaret , that is awful' . . . that I honestly believe that the Irish government committed a worse crime than the people that killed my dad by covering it up. If it had . . . in the early 1970s . . . done something about what was happening with these bombings, my dad would not be dead."

Maura McKeever recalled the feelings of her mother, who was too ill to attend the committee hearings last summer.

"She said, as two citizens of the state, two innocent victims, they should have been treated more fairly. Nobody wanted to know. Nobody ever came near us to say anything.

My mother is now 89 and she is still waiting for somebody to come and tell her there was collusion."

In a fortnight's time the families of Jack Rooney and Hugh Waters will mark the 31st anniversary of their deaths.

Some justice finally came their way last week when the Oireachtas Committee published its report. The language in the report is stark. The conclusions drawn are deeply disturbing. "There was a period of time in which there was significant state collusion which was not limited to what might be referred to as foot soldiers, bad apples, or the occasional wayward RUC officer or UDR member. The sub-committee expresses its outrage that acts of international terrorism could have been colluded in by all levels of the British administration."

'Weapons losses'

The conclusions in the report are almost unprecedented in their directness. "We are horrified that persons who were employed by the British administration to preserve peace and to protect people were engaged in the creation of violence and the butchering of innocent victims."

There is criticism of the garda investigations for not delving further in search of the truth. Blame is, however, firmly directed at the highest levels in the British state. "The British cabinet was aware of the level to which the security forces had been infiltrated by terrorists and we believe that its inadequate response to this knowledge permitted the problem to continue and to grow."

The report refers to documents discovered in the British Public Record Office which were marked 'weapons losses' and which detailed from 1971 onwards each occasion when security force weapons went 'missing'. Behind a significant number of these documents on the right-hand side the words 'collusion suspected' had been marked. By 1973 the British knew they had a problem with the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment. Yet still, as the Oireachtas Committee report states, "just one year later, it was official policy to increase the UDR's role on the ground in gathering intelligence, despite the fact that up to 15% of the regiment's members were believed to be loyalist paramilitaries."

The car containing the Kay's Tavern bomb had been stolen on the Shankill Road in Belfast. Only the British authorities know fully about the assistance given by its forces to those who carried out the pub attack in Dundalk.

To date, the British government has been unwilling to allow the truth to emerge.

"Our experience has been that the British authorities have reacted to the issues that arise from the atrocities in a closed and defensive manner, " the Oireachtas Committee concluded.

The names of Jack Rooney and Hugh Waters are included in a list of 18 people in the report, all victims of loyalist violence which was assisted by British security forces. The attack on the Miami Showband in July 1975, which left three people dead, is probably best known. Three serving UDR members were convicted of those murders.

Among the other collusion cases identified in last week's report is the loyalist bombing at Dublin Airport in November 1975. Thirty-eight-yearold John Hayes, who worked at the airport, was married with three children. Monica Hayes told the Oireachtas Committee that her Kilkenny-born husband was "a big countryman who loved hurling and his job at the airport."

The couple had met and married in England but they were part of that generation of Irish emigrants who returned to Ireland in the increasingly prosperous early 1970s.

Retaliation

She also recalled the day her husband died. "He had been on his lunch break, went into the toilets to wash his hands and as he lifted up the toilet tissue the bomb went off. Apparently the toilets just fell in on top of him. I think he stayed alive for about an hour but he was not conscious, " Monica Hayes said.

Loyalists claimed responsibility for the attack which they said was "in retaliation for the murders of members of the security forces by the IRA operating unhindered from the haven of the Republic with the blessing of the Dublin government."

That statement is now deeply ironic given that those who killed John Hayes were helped by the British security forces. John Hayes's son, Brendan, came to the Oireachtas Committee to support his mother.

"Unfortunately I have no recollection of my father as I was only three years old when he was murdered, " he said.