A German bombing raid on Dublin in May 1941 killed 28 people

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Here's bit of history I didn't know. The caption for this photograph on Getty Images says:

Emergency services at work in a bomb damaged street in Dublin, Ireland, the day after a German air raid, which killed 34 people, 1st June 1941. The cause of the raid on neutral Ireland remains unclear. 

Wikipedia – it's strange how the advent of AI has changed that site from a near embarrassment to the last online redoubt of human judgement – explains what happened:

In the early morning hours of 31 May 1941, four German bombs fell on north Dublin. That night, a large number of German aircraft were spotted by Irish military observers and searchlights were put up to track them. It was noted that the aeroplanes were not flying in formation but independently in a meandering manner and some appeared to be circling. 

After the German planes did not clear the airspace over Dublin and continued erratically flying over the city, the Irish Army fired warning flares, starting with three flares representing the colours of the Irish flag to inform the pilots they were over neutral territory. followed by several red flares warning them to leave or be fired on. 

After fifteen minutes had passed, the order was given to open fire and Irish anti-aircraft guns began firing at the bombers. Local air defences were weak and the gunners were poorly trained. Although they had shells capable of destroying bomber aircraft, they failed to hit their targets.

Eventually, some of the German planes dropped their bombs. The first three caused many injuries but no fatalities:

The fourth and final bomb, dropped about half an hour later, fell in North Strand, killing 28 people, destroying 17 houses and severely damaging about 50 others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. Ninety people were injured, approximately 300 houses were destroyed or damaged and about 400 people were left homeless.

An article on the Maynooth University site agrees with the figure of 28 fatalities, so I have used that in my headline.

Though some saw the bombing as a warning to Ireland to remain neutral in the war, the most likely explanation is that the bomber crews thought they were bombing Belfast. There were also the inevitable conspiracy theories that Churchill had somehow caused Dublin to be targeted to save British cities from being attacked. Uniquely, in this case Churchill seems to have been their source himself:

After the war Winston Churchill said that "the bombing of Dublin on the night of 30 May 1941, may well have been an unforeseen and unintended result of our interference with 'Y'". He was speaking of the Battle of the Beams, wherein "Y" referred to the direction finding radio signals that the Luftwaffe used to guide their bombers to their targets. 

The technology was not sufficiently developed by mid-1941 to have deflected planes from one target to another and could only limit the ability of bombers to receive the signals.

You can learn more about this "Battle of the Beams" from the links in my recent post on the secret RAF base at Charley in Leicestershire.