February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Barron, he said, had “showed a lack of knowledge on a basic principle of law” in suggesting the attorney general could have taken an active role in the Garda investigation into the bombings.
Barron’s investigation was inadequately resourced and was based on “documents unknown and unpublished” and the untested evidence of anonymous witnesses, according to Cooney, who was Ireland’s justice minister at the time of the bombings. The investigation, he said, had reached speculative conclusions, sometimes based on “no evidence.” In doing so, he continued, the Barron inquiry had transgressed its own rules that it would “draw reasonable inferences from credible evidence.”
Cooney was speaking at the Oireachtas joint subcommittee public hearing on the bombings, following the publication of Barron’s report on them.
The subcommittee will report to the government in mid-March on whether it believes a public inquiry should be held into the events surrounding the bombings and possible collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and elements within the British security forces.
Cooney believes such an inquiry should be established so that the Barron report could be questioned and documents and anonymous witnesses on which it is based examined.
On the report’s conclusions on the 1974 government, he said: “We have been damaged and I resent that very much. [The conclusions] are wrong, totally wrong, and I reject them with all the vehemence that I can.”
He said he was interviewed by Barron during two sessions in 2001 and 2002. When he was sent a transcript of the conversation, he said, he was “horrified” to see it “did not fully represent what I said.”
Allegations had been made about him in the report, as a cabinet member, to which he had not been granted a response. “I can’t conceive of a more serious charge,” he said.
Barron was wrong, he said, in suggesting the government should have in any way sought to influence the Garda inquiry, because a police force should always be independent of government.
“If that’s not observed and there is political interference . . . you don’t live in a democracy, you live in a totalitarian state. That principle doesn’t seem to have impinged in the way it should on Barron,” he said.
There had never been a request from garda