Dublin pressed to come clean on PIRA collusion
LAST week Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny said he would press the UK government, European leaders and American politicians for a public inquiry into the murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who was shot by loyalists in 1989.
The UK government has confirmed that there was state collusion in the killing but have rejected pressure for a full public inquiry.
Mr Kenny said on Thursday in Belfast that he would raise pressure for an inquiry “on every occasion that I have the opportunity with the British prime minister, and in due course with other European leaders when the current crisis facing the Eurozone has been dealt with”.
However the day after, Stormont ministers Danny Kennedy and Arlene Foster met Mr Kenny to hand over a dossier of 159 murders by republicans in south Armagh.
The move comes as unionists seek to highlight the Irish authorities’ attitudes to the Provisional IRA, including government sympathy for its formation, the later failure to extradite its terrorists and even instances of individuals providing support for IRA actions.
Until Mr Kennedy was able to approach the Taoiseach in person at the North-South Ministerial Council in Armagh on Friday, the UUP minister had been trying for months to get the Irish leader to engage.
Speaking weeks before meeting the Taoiseach, Mr Kennedy told the News Letter: “I have been attempting for some time to have a meeting with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and it is important that this takes place,” he said. “We must bring to light the failure of successive Irish governments to deal with the IRA and the possible collusion of some within the Irish state.
“The reason this is so important is because it is very clear the IRA [in south Armagh] was able to attack at will and use the border as a safe haven both for individuals and the storage of lethal weaponry. Some action needs to be taken by the Irish government. We need to have engagement.”
He said then he and others were compiling the dossier for the Irish government “that will prove beyond doubt” the issues he wished to raise with Mr Kenny.
“Apologies have been made by the British government for numerous cases but the Irish government cannot escape their responsibility, specifically when they are making noises about other [collusion] cases [in Northern Ireland].”
The unionists are saying that with every UK statutory investigation into Troubles related deaths, the history of the Troubles is being rewritten to portray British forces as the primary cause of bloodshed. But they point out that the IRA claimed significantly more lives than any other organisation during the Troubles — 1,778 in total — and that a much more balanced historical examination is critical to properly make peace with the past.
In 1970 Irish army captain Captain Kelly, along with former cabinet ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, were tried — and acquitted — for illegally importing arms for the IRA’s use in Northern Ireland. Their defence was that importing the arms had been authorised by the ministry of defence.
The Irish cabinet roundly rejected Captain Kelly’s claims that he had been acting as their spy, channelling money and weapons to create a new organisation to attack the British presence in Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA (PIRA). But after Kelly’s death in 2003, Bertie Ahern strongly defended Captain Kelly’s story.
“It is my belief that at all times during those difficult days in the early period of the Troubles, Captain Kelly acted on what he believed were proper orders [from government ministers],” Mr Ahern said. “Historians will make their own judgements about the events of that era. For my part, I have never found any reason to doubt his integrity.”
On page eight of today’s News Letter, University of Ulster Professor of Politics, Henry Patterson, says the Irish government must now put all documents relating to the arms trial into the public domain in the interests of an open and balanced history.
“Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney... used a substantial portion of the £100,000 which the government had allocated for the relief of northern Catholics displaced by the violence, for the clandestine purchase of arms on the continent,” Professor Patterson writes. “These were to be imported into the Republic for transfer to ‘defence committees’ in Northern Ireland. The committees were often controlled by members of the recently formed Provisional IRA.”
Solicitor John McBurney is acting for RUC relatives at the Smithwick tribunal in Dublin, which is investigating claims of Garda-IRA collusion in the 1989 murders of RUC Superintendent Bob Buchanan and Chief Superintendent Harry Breen.
He says that the second most senior officer in the Garda, Commissioner John O’Mahony, recently gave the tribunal evidence of political collusion in IRA matters as recently as the 1990s. One Garda sergeant, Finbarr Hickey, served 12 months for his role in supplying passports which ended up in IRA hands. The Garda commissioner said he pressed Hickey to testify against another individual, whom the accused said had put him up to the crime.
“But Sgt Hickey refused to testify against this individual due to what he said were their political connections,” Mr McBurney said. “I repeat, Hickey was not afraid of retribution from the IRA but from this individual’s political connections. That is what the number two officer in the Garda told the Smithwick tribunal in 2011. That makes the issue of PIRA collusion a very contemporary issue in the Republic of Ireland.”
He said that two issues that had to be brought out into the open were the Irish state’s frequent refusal to extradite IRA members for “the most heinous crimes” in Northern Ireland and the failure of the Garda to supply intelligence on the IRA to the RUC.
“I suspect there was much intelligence never shared in a timely fashion with the RUC,” he said. “Those who carried out the Kingsmills massacre went to ground in the Republic.” He said the Garda knew “quite a lot” about the individuals involved and “quite a lot was discovered” about their links to Kingsmills.
“But the PSNI’s Historical Enquiries Team report on Kingsmills never once mentions any Garda intelligence on those responsible. Why is that?”
Upper Bann DUP MP David Simpson says that the Irish state only extradited seven per cent of terrorists wanted in the UK from 1973 to 1997.
“In this period 113 extradition requests were made to the Republic of Ireland on terrorist related offences,” he said. “Over that 25 year period only eight people, or seven per cent, were actually extradited.
“This is in stark contrast to non-terrorist related offences for the same period in which 296 extradition requests were made to the Republic of Ireland; 124 people or approximately 42 per cent were extradited in cases where there was no terrorist connection.”
Irish extradition was governed by Part III of the Republic of Ireland’s Extradition Act 1965. However, victims’ campaigner Willie Frazer believes the fact that this legislation was created in 1965 demonstrates that Dublin had been planning to create and shield the Provisional IRA long before the Troubles began in 1969.
Unionists point to other factors, such as a BBC 1993 documentary which examined evidence that while Ulster Catholics were campaigning for civil rights, Dublin was financing a propaganda newspaper to convince them instead to embrace the “Brits out” mantra. Dublin’s aim, it is alleged, was not civil rights for Catholics, but to eject the British from Ulster and complete “Irish re-unification”.
The Irish government declined to make any comment on the allegations, except to confirm the Taoiseach had met Mr Kennedy.
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 29 May 2012
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