February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Jack Holland
Allegations that a prominent member of the Irish Freedom Committee in Chicago is an informer who is primed to give evidence against the alleged leader of the Real IRA in Dublin have sent shock waves through the Irish-American activist community.
The alleged informer, David Rupert, has been active in generating support for dissident republican organizations for more than two years. He was first associated with a Republican Sinn Fein support group, the National Irish Freedom Committee, but later became identified with the 32-Sovereignty Committee, which is linked to the RIRA. The London Sunday Times named him last weekend as a government agent who is to be the star witness against Mickey McKevitt, the man thought to have been one of the founders of the Real IRA, the group responsible for the Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people in 1998. McKevitt is currently being held in Portlaoise on charges of directing a terrorist organization.
The Times followed a story in the Irish Independent on Saturday which, though it did not name Rupert, alleged that a prominent supporter of the RIRA in the U.S. was working for the authorities.
Rupert remains something of a mystery man whose sudden rise within the Irish-American republican community was marked by disagreements. In April 2000, he was expelled from the National Irish Freedom Committee for "dereliction" of duty, including "raising funds in the name of the organization for any purpose other than as outlined in Article 11."
According to John McDonagh, a leading member of the IFC in New York, Rupert and his supporters were "raising money on false pretenses." McDonagh claims that Rupert was not sending money to where it was supposed to go — the dependents of imprisoned members of the Continuity IRA in Ireland.
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Rupert, along with some Irish Freedom Committee activists in Chicago and Boston, wanted to support also the families of RIRA prisoners. In New York, they were told that the best way to do that would be to form another organization as the IFC was linked to Republican Sinn Fein. However, Rupert and six others, five of them in Chicago and one in Boston, continued to use the IFC banner for their activities and were expelled en masse on April 29 last year. They are Evelyn Morgan, Joseph Dillon, Deirdre Fennessy, Frank O’Neill, Richard Wallace, and Owen Sullivan. They are all named on the IFC’s web site, along with their expulsion orders.
Reached at his home in Chicago, O’Neill, when asked about Rupert, said that he "didn’t know him that well. . . . I’ve known him for just a couple of years. People come and go. It’s one of those things." He defended their policy of support for all "political prisoners," whether they belong to the CIRA or the RIRA.
"We do things our way," said O’Neill, who is 78. "We believe in political prisoners." O’Neill said he has been an activist since the 1950s, and was a member of Irish Northern Aid for a long time.
McDonagh said that he met with Rupert several times between 1999 and his expulsion. He now wonders if it "was the FBI strategy to split the IFC. If so, it worked."
A spokesman for the 32-Counties Sovereignty Committee, which is linked to the Real IRA, said in Dublin that his group had "no comment" about the allegations surrounding Rupert.
Meanwhile, McDonagh says that he will read a series of e-mails from Rupert this Saturday on his New York radio show, "Radio Free Eireann," which show, he claims, that Rupert was planning to try to take over the New York Irish Freedom Committee.