In the early morning of Saturday 31 May 1941 German planes dropped bombs on central Dublin, the first on the North Circular Road at 1.30 am, causing little damage, the second half an hour later in the middle of the North Strand, demolishing twenty houses and caused serious damage to forty-five others.

A third bomb fell in Summerhill Parade. In the north inner city. There was substantial loss of life on the North Strand: twenty-seven people were killed outright and about eighty were injured.

Nearly all the victims were among the poorest of Dublin's citizens.

In Bombs over Dublin, the first book on the subject, Sean McMahon looks at the background to the bombings: Ireland's neutrality in what the country called the 'Emergency'; the Belfast Blitz of April and early May 1941 that was a forerunner of the Dublin bombing; why the bombing of neutral Eire happened; and the repercussions for de Valera's wartime administration and for relations between Ireland and the Allied and Axis powers.