The Northern Bank robbery in December 2004 by the IRA was just “a symptom” of the IRA’s criminality, the then taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, furiously told Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and other senior party figures.
“I had thought that we were working to genuinely to bringing IRA criminality to an end,” said Ahern, according to notes from early 2005 released by the Department of the Taoiseach to the National Archives.
“I am not trying to criminalise the IRA. The fact that the IRA continues to commit crime is what criminalise them,” he said, adding that claims that “the IRA decides what’s a crime and what isn’t” are deeply offensive.
Ahern said that he and British prime minister Tony Blair had worked hard to agree a text with Sinn Féin, where the IRA would commit to exclusively peaceful means and to accepting “the rights and safety of others”.
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“We thought it was agreed, and then we find on the day before myself and Tony Blair are due in Belfast that it is not acceptable to the IRA. What were we to make of that in terms of the genuineness of the efforts to resolve the issue of criminality?” he said.
[ From The Irish Times archive: Northern Bank raid made little senseOpens in new window ]
“And then we find shortly afterwards that the biggest bank robbery in the history of Ireland has taken place,” added Ahern, who said Sinn Féin had later tried to argue that the controversy about the bank raid was “a distraction”.
During a frosty meeting with Sinn Féin in early 2005, Ahern rejected Sinn Féin’s charges that the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Hugh Orde, had “weaponised” the Northern Bank raid to damage the party.
“I’m not going to go into all I know about the Northern Bank robbery. Hugh Orde has attributed that bank robbery to PIRA and, on the basis of the information I have available to me, I have no reason to dispute that assessment,” the taoiseach told Sinn Féin.
“The government doesn’t believe for one moment the claims that Hugh Orde is blaming PIRA because he has some political agenda, or he is being got at by “securocrats”. That just doesn’t make sense.”
Meanwhile, British officials believed the “top man” behind the robbery, which saw £26.5 million (€30.2 million) in cash stolen from the bank’s Donegall Square headquarters in central Belfast after the IRA had threatened the lives of bank staff and their families, would never be caught.
The mastermind would be “clever enough to avoid getting arrested”, they said, adding that the robbery would not be allowed to derail the peace process, but “the republican movement had knocked up the price”.
Downing Street chief of staff Jonathan Powell said he believed the PSNI would be able to make arrests quickly, adding that they were satisfied that the robbery had been carried out by people who were “very close to the Sinn Féin leadership”.
Senior Irish official Michael Collins agreed, saying it was “almost incomprehensible” that planning for the heist had taken place while the Sinn Féin leadership was involved in negotiations.
“The assessment on the Irish side was that the IRA remains a unified organisation; the Northern Bank was not a solo run,” Collins told the meeting, according to a note that is now lodged in the National Archives.
