A former detective garda who sat with the bodies of murdered Lord Mountbatten and Irish teenager Paul Maxwell in the morgue said it still haunts him after 40 years.
Eddie MacHale, from Co Sligo, was on guard duty when the bodies were brought in on August 27, 1979.
He was also there when a grief-stricken Prince Charles and Princess Anne came to see the carnage that had been inflicted by the Provisional IRA.
Mr MacHale said: “There are some things that never leave you and I will never forget looking at that poor young lad in the morgue.
“He looked so peaceful, young and innocent and what did he ever do to deserve this terrible end?”
Meanwhile Mullaghmore native and historian Joe McGowan said he had a fear of reprisals from loyalists in the immediate aftermath of Lord Mountbatten’s killing.
He said he checked under his boat for explosives in the year after the shocking bomb.
And he sadly revealed he had been fishing with Paul just a short period before the awful carnage.
Mr McGowan said: “It was scary, and I don’t know about other boats but after that any time that I would go out in the boat for a year or maybe two years after that I would check the floorboards because there was always the possibility that there would be a retaliation from northern loyalists.”
