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Collusion ‘not proven’

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Between 5.28 p.m. and 5.33 p.m., three car bombs killed 26 people in Parnell Street, Talbot Street and South Leinster Street.
Then at about 6.42 p.m. another car bomb exploded in North Road, Monaghan, killing seven more. Limbless and decapitated bodies were scattered about the broken-glass littered streets, as buildings burned and vehicles were engulfed in flames and black smoke; dozens of wounded cried for aid, others stunned and dazed stumbled through the bloody rubble that the worst mass murder in the history of the recent conflict had left behind.
Twenty-nine years later, these crimes remain unsolved.
Last week, an Irish judge, Henry Barron, produced a report almost 500 pages long a result of a four-year investigation into the bombings and the circumstances surrounding them in an attempt to answer the questions that still haunt not only the victims’ loved ones. They still concern those perturbed by aspects of the case that raise disturbing issues about how the original investigation was conducted, the role of the Irish government of the day, and the part that might have been played by members of the Northern Ireland security forces.
Barron’s report is conclusive only about the first two: his findings indict the government headed by Liam Cosgrave for something like indifference and the Garda investigation for near incompetence. But on the question of collusion, he concludes the case is “not proven.”

Investigation hampered
A team of 40 officers was put in charge of the investigation. They worked under some major disadvantages, including the fact that the state lacked a dedicated forensic laboratory. As well, the large fires that the bombs caused had to be extinguished which meant forensic evidence was hosed away. However, some basic but crucial facts emerged soon after the attacks and Barron details them.
The three cars that were used in the Dublin bombings were all hi-jacked in Protestant areas of Belfast on the morning of May 17. The car used in Monaghan was stolen from a car park in Portadown. His report makes clear that several well-known members of the Ulster Volunteer Force were quickly identified as suspects. Three separate witnesses identified David Alexander Mulholland, as the man who left the car bomb in Parnell Street. (By a strange coincidence, Mulholland died of kidney failure on the day the Barron report was made public.) U.V.F. man Samuel Whitten was identified as being in the car that drove the bomb to Monaghan. Stewart Young and Ronald “Nikko” Jackson – brother of the notorious loyalist assassin nicknamed “the jackal” – were seen in the Portadown cark park from which that same car was stolen.
A little later, the Monaghan Garda investigation team received intelligence from the Royal Ulster Constabulary linking Jackson and Young to the attack. On May 26, just nine days after the bombings, the British army raided premises in Belfast and arrested a group of loyalists. On June 1, at a meeting between Irish Army Intelligence and British intelligence sources in London, the Irish were informed that at least two of the men arrested were among those responsible for the May 17 attacks. They had been interned.
Three months later, the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees informed the Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr. Garret FitzGerald “the people who bombed Dublin were interned.” But according to Barron, “the matter does not seem to have been pursued by the Irish Government”. A report on Monaghan bombing had been made on July 7, and on the Dublin attack on August 9.
“By the end of June 1974 it seems little further progress was being made with the Garda investigation… A number of further inquiries were carried out between 1974 and 1976, again with the assistance of the RUC, but nothing of consequence resulted,” said Barron.

Little forensic evidence
There was little in the way of forensic evidence. None of the three Dublin car bombs had left any explosive traces or remains of timing devices, which suggests the use of high-explosives; the Monaghan bomb had left some traces and a cog-wheel which was identified as belonging to a so-called “Jock Clock”, a type manufactured in Dumbarton, Scotland, and thought to have been used (as it had been before in U.V.F. bombs) as a timing device. Remains of a beer barrel in which the bomb might have been packed were also found. Barron concludes that the Monaghan bombing was typical of previous U.V.F. explosions.
Eleven days after the bombings, the forensic samples were sent to a laboratory in Belfast. But by then, Barron states the forensic analysis was “fatally compromised by the delay in getting samples to the laboratories and in the manner in which the samples were handled and stored”. To compound this problem, the Garda records of the forensics were lost.
“It is no longer possible to construct an unbroken chain of possession for the forensic samples between their collection and their arrival in Belfast. It is not known at what point these records became lost,” writes Barron.
The police were left mainly with eyewitnesses’ statements and the limited intelligence received from North of the border. Yet, an RUC offer to the Garda to come north to interrogate Mulholland was refused. The albums containing photographs of suspects have been missing since 1993 at least, according to Barron.
“The witnesses who saw the South Leinster bomber was not shown the photograph albums,” writes Barron. Files on the attacks also went missing from the Justice Department.
The Irish Government’s attitude comes in for strong criticism. At the time the Coalition Government of Fine Gael and Labor, headed by Cosgrave, was determined to stop the violence from Northern Ireland spreading into the south. It downplayed loyalist groups as a threat. In the eyes of Cosgrave and company the Official IRA was the main problem, followed by the Provisionals.
On the night of the bombings, Cosgrave went on Irish television and said that whoever planted the bombs, it was the IRA that was ultimately responsible for the violence. The government believed that the only way to prevent loyalist violence was to stop the Provisional IRA, whose campaign was seen as provoking loyalist retaliations. It was a view shared by the security forces and the British government.

Political framework
This was the political framework for what the report reveals was the remarkable lack of attention given by the Coalition government to the mass murder of its citizens. The most extraordinary example of this occurred in 1974, according to Barron, when Harold Wilson and his secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees informed Cosgrave and FitzGerald that the Dublin bombers were among a group of loyalists arrested and interned at the end of may. The Taoiseach did not even ask for their names. Nor was the matter referred to the Garda.
“Notwithstanding the information supplied in the course of these meetings, there appears to have been no follow through by any of those who became aware of it,” claims Barron. He concludes that the government of the day “made no efforts to assist the investigation…at a political level.” Its overall attitude was one of little concern.
Barron’s evaluation of the allegations concerning collusion between the U.V.F. and the security forces in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings has not pleased the conspiracy theorists. The U.V.F. has long claimed that it was capable carrying out the four attacks by itself. The judge agrees with them. The organization had already pulled off a series of vicious bomb attacks, including one of the worst in the history of the conflict, an explosion at McGurk’s pub in North Queen Street on December 15 1971, which killed fifteen people. The U.V.F. and the UDA were also responsible for a series of earlier bomb attacks in the Irish Republic, at least one of which, in Dublin in December 1972, could have been as devastating as the attack in 1974 had it not been for the fact that fewer people were in the area at the time. However, Barron states that his investigation was limited by lack of access. From some 68,000 Northern Ireland office files relevant to the attacks, Barron had to make do with a 10-page letter. “Little or no original documentation was supplied,” he notes. The NIO refused other information on “security grounds.”
This raises the suspicion that some of those involved in the attacks may have been also working for the security forces as informers. As a result, in order to protect sources, the material was restricted and insufficient to assess allegations of high-level collusion, which he concludes are “not proven”. However, there was evidence of individual members of the security forces – UDR and RUC – facilitating the U.V.F. operation.
The deadliest attacks in the history of the Irish state took place as a direct result of the crisis in Northern Ireland in 1974, as the power-sharing government was being crushed in the vise of loyalist industrial action and paramilitary intimidation.
They were meant to teach the Irish government a lesson that it should not meddle in affairs north of the border. Clearly, in spite of the devastation, they did not work. The current peace process is proof of that.

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