Businessman with past involving arms smuggling by sea

Adrian Hopkins, who died recently aged 76, was a businessman whose travel agency once challenged the major players in the Irish market.

Bray Travel collapsed in 1980, owing £300,000 to 1,400 disappointed customers and £50,000 to its staff. The failure led to compulsory bonding for travel agents to avoid a recurrence of the situation where families and couples going on honeymoon, typical Bray Travel customers, lost their holidays and their money. Some felt that Hopkins should have answered to the law over this financial catastrophe.

It was over his next business venture that the law caught up with him. Hopkins’s background was in shipping – he had trained as a radio officer in the merchant marine – and after his travel business collapsed he continued to trade in boats, buying, selling and leasing them. What Hopkins described as a charter – collecting arms and armaments from Libya and delivering them to the IRA – was his undoing.

In fact, he was picking up arms and armaments in the port of Tripoli, where Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy was providing them for the IRA, and depositing them on remote parts of the shore in Hopkins’s native Co Wicklow.

On his fifth such voyage – some say there were fewer – on October 31st, 1987, French police boarded a small freighter, the 237-ton Eksund being skippered by Hopkins near Brest. It was carrying two tons of Semtex explosive, a thousand AK47 rifles, a thousand mortar rounds, 600 Soviet F1 grenades, 120 RPG7s, 20 SAM7s, 20 DDhKs, two thousand electric detonators and more than a million rounds of ammunition. Other versions of that manifest exist, but by any measure it was a substantial and lethal arsenal. Initially jailed in France, he got out on bail, returned to Ireland and, in 1991, was sentenced to eight years in prison, five of which were suspended.

An internal IRA inquiry into how French customs came to know of the Eksund and its deadly cargo considered the possibility of Hopkins having been an informant. Evidence given by an IRA crew member on a previous voyage tipped the scales in Hopkins's favour and he escaped sanction from his erstwhile client.

Hopkins’s skills as skipper passing through the Bay of Biscay in 1986 at the height of Hurricane Charlie had saved the vessel and crew from a watery grave many times over a 12-hour period of appallingly high seas. Eyewitnesses have testified to his superb seamanship. But for the IRA command the question remained – if Hopkins was not the informant, who was?

If we look to historians for the answer to that question, we get different answers. Journalist Ed Moloney suggests (The Secret History of the IRA, 2003) that someone in the higher echelons of the IRA deliberately sabotaged the enterprise, with – in broad summary – an eye to Sinn Féin eventually joining the as-yet-unmentioned peace process. British journalist Toby Harnden (Bandit Country, 1999) in a very detailed account of the arms seizure does not go that far, but acknowledges that there was unease among senior IRA people about the trade-off between politics and terror.

Tripoli to Wicklow

In retrospect it seems unlikely that major arms shipments could continue to have made their way from Tripoli to Wicklow without some military intelligence flagging them using satellite surveillance, given the attention being paid by the West to Gadafy’s Libya.

Hopkins stayed out of these arguments. He served his relatively short sentence, returned to north Wicklow and settled there, living out his life with his wife and family “below the radar”, and dying recently of a heart attack.

An active and gregarious man, earlier when he failed to turn up for a foursomes match at a Greystones tennis club, he sent a message to say he had been “detained on urgent business”. It was preferable to saying he had been arrested for arms smuggling.

He is survived by his wife Stephanie (White) and his children Steven, Adrian, Tara and Neil.