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Man on a mission

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“I witnessed Michael Kelly being shot dead two-and-a-half feet away from me,” he said on a recent visit to the U.S. It was Jan. 30, 1972, in Derry, Northern Ireland, and the 17-year-old Kelly was one of 14 victims of the day that would become known as Bloody Sunday. Mullan went on to write a book, “Eye Witness –Bloody Sunday,” that is widely held as an important steppingstone toward the reopening of the case. It led to a 1998 Irish government report into the events, which in turn helped bring about the current Saville Enquiry that the government of Tony Blair launched a few years after.
Not long after the Bloody Sunday book was published, the Irish artist Robert Ballagh suggested that Mullan look at the events of May 17, 1974. He met with some of the families who for years had regarded themselves not only as victims of the worst mass murder in Ireland in recent history, but also of what they saw as the extraordinary neglect of successive Irish governments in getting to the bottom of it. He was very impressed by the family of 39-year-old Edward O’Neill.
“They wanted to know the truth about how their father had died,” Mullan recalls. The long years since the murders had given them plenty of time to wonder also why it was that the Irish government and its civil servants had been completely unable to provide them with the answers they sought. As a result, for the last several years, the 47-year-old author has been pressing the Irish government for a public enquiry into the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, following his own book on the subject. It highlighted the accusations of a “hidden hand” behind the atrocities, which killed 33 people on that May day in 1974. He believes that the recently published Barron Report into the bombings has not answered the kinds of questions he and others have raised.
Last month, Mullan submitted his highly critical response to the report to the Irish government.
According to Mullan, when he looked at the case the first things that aroused his suspicion were the “100 percent efficiency” of the attacks and the issue of forensics.
“The three bombs in Dublin went off within 90 seconds of each other,” he said. The Dublin bombs used up all of their explosives — not a common feat in the history of the Northern Irish conflict, Mullan points out. Because of this, the debris left at the scene of the Dublin attacks on Talbot Street, Parnell Street, and South Leinster Street afforded few clues for the investigators. But the already difficult situation was made far worse by the conduct of the investigation itself. Because the state authorities did not have a forensics laboratory, material had to be sent north to Belfast for testing. Mullan discovered that it taken 11 days to deliver the evidence from Dublin to Belfast. For any chance of success, such evidence has to be examined within a few days of the crime or else it risked being subjected to contamination. The Belfast forensic scientist who examined the material, Dr. M.A. Hall, was highly critical of the delay. A report was subsequently issued on the findings and given to Mullan. However, even stranger and more difficult to explain than the delay was what Mullan found when, many years later, he went to interview Dr. James Donovan, head of forensics at the Garda headquarters.
“I was absolutely amazed that he had never seen the Belfast report,” Mullan said. “I had to give it to him.”
Donovan had to wait to receive a copy of the report from Mullan. How it came to pass that the state’s chief forensics officer had never received a report relevant to the biggest mass murder in the history of the state has not been satisfactorily explained.
However, Dr. Donovan had made a discovery of his own. He told Mullan he had detected some traces of ammonium nitrate in the debris from the Parnell Street bomb, which could have provided clues as to the origin of the explosives.
There was another anomaly that has never been explained away. According to the Belfast report, Det. Ted Jones delivered the debris from Dublin. Yet Jones later insisted to Mullan that he had not been involved with that job. The recently released Barron Report, which faulted the Irish government’s response to the attacks but did not find conclusive evidence of collusion between loyalists and British security forces, does not say who did take the evidence to Northern Ireland.
Mullan commends the “courage” of the Barron Report for drawing attention to other, serious problems in the state’s investigation into the bombs. The report revealed that important files relating to the murders are missing from the Department of Justice. As well, important Garda files are also unaccounted for.
For these and other reasons, Mullan is unhappy with the Irish government’s recent response and is still seeking a public enquiry.
In his submission to the subcommittee on the Barron Report, Mullan is highly critical of the fact that the report was the result of a “private” enquiry. For years, he says, the relatives of the victims, represented by the group Justice for the Forgotten, had been campaigning for a public enquiry.
“They . . . agreed to engage in a process which they understood was not a ‘Private Enquiry,’ ” he wrote in his submission. Yet the preface to the Barron report states explicitly “the Government decided to set up a Private enquiry.” With Mullan and the relatives insisting that they always stressed the need for a public enquiry, how did they get an enquiry described as “private”?
The government denied that it was ever made clear that a “public” enquiry was sought. But as early as August 1999, Justice for the Forgotten stated at a press conference that “We are, without reservation, deeply disappointed” that John Wilson of the Victims Commission had “chosen to recommend a private enquiry.” The relatives were subsequently mollified when the government promised to hold an investigation carried out by a prominent legal authority, which would then hand over its findings to the Dail Committee on Justice, Equality, Defense and Women’s Rights for possible further action. However, it now seems likely, according to Mullan, that the Barron Report will mark the end, not the beginning, of the investigation into the bloody events of May 17, 1974. It leaves, he thinks, too many questions without answers.
“The response [to the bombings] of the Irish government — either it was a complete exercise in incompetence, or something else,” Mullan said.
“Unless we deal with this in an open, transparent way, and see these guys cross-examined in public,” Mullan said, we might never know, for instance, “if holding back the forensics was deliberate, making a successful investigation impossible.”
A public enquiry is doubly essential, he thinks, to test the truth of allegations regarding collusion between the loyalist bombers and the Northern Irish security forces. Mullan points out that a former minister of justice, Justin Keating, and a former taoiseach, Jack Lynch, have both gone on record saying that they believe that British intelligence was involved in the bombings at some level.
“Huge planning and logistics were needed,” Mullan asserted. “The Justice Department should explain how thousands of files went missing.
“There are a lot of these questions that I don’t have the answers to. The families have the right to an open, public hearing, to judge the credibility of the investigation.”
He is far from optimistic, however, that they will get it.

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