BACKGROUND:In the 1980s the IRA's campaign spilled over the Border and ultimately into Green Street court, writes DIARMAID Mac DERMOTT
WHEN THE then Irish Timesnews editor Gerry Mulvey sent me, a young freelance reporter, to cover a case in the Special Criminal Court at Green Street in March 1980, I had little idea that I would spend the best part of 30 years covering the fallout from the tragedies of the Troubles.
The courthouse, dating from 1797, and the scene of many trials of nationalists from the United Irishmen to Robert Emmet to the Young Irelanders and Fenians, is an imposing building. Around the corner from Dublin’s fruit and veg market in Smithfield, it is of a classic Georgian design, with an elevated bench where the three judges sit looking out over a table for barristers, the witness box, benches for lawyers and the press and the imposing dock, from where Robert Emmet made his famous speech in 1803 before the death sentence was imposed.
The 1980s were violent years, when the IRA’s campaign in the North, Britain and continental Europe spilled over into the Republic and consequently into the Special Criminal Court.
Many dramatic events, people and cases stand out: the shouts of “up the Provos” as Martin Ferris and four others were led from the dock to the cells below after Ferris was jailed for 10 years for his part in the Marita Ann gunrunning trawler, captured in 1984; Iris Robinson, wife of the North’s First Minister Peter Robinson, as she arrived under heavy Special Branch escort each day for the trial of her husband in connection with a cross-Border loyalist incursion into Co Monaghan in 1986.
Mr Justice Robert Barr remanded Robinson in custody overnight to Portlaoise prison, then housing 120 IRA and INLA prisoners. He was moved soon after to Limerick prison and fined for unlawful assembly.
Dominic “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, the INLA leader, was arrested after a shoot-out with detectives at Newmarket-on-Fergus in Co Clare on St Patrick’s Day, 1984. McGlinchey was extradited to the North, re-extradited to the Republic and put on trial in 1986 for the shoot-out. He listened intently throughout the trial and showed no emotion. His wife, Mary, appeared in the same dock later the same year and was cleared of a kidnap charge.
Perhaps the most chilling character ever to stand in the dock during my time was Dessie O’Hare – the so-called “Border Fox”. O’Hare, who boasted to a journalist of having personally killed 26 people, was put on trial in 1988 for the kidnap and mutilation of dentist John O’Grady.
Two of the trials that stand out from that period were in 1985 and involved the murders of two gardaí: Det Garda Frank Hand and Sgt Patrick Morrissey.
In March 1985 I sat on the press bench as Mr Justice Liam Hamilton handed down the following sentence to Thomas Eccles, Patrick McPhillips and Brian McShane: “The sentence and judgment of the court, as is directed and ordered, is that you be now removed from this court to the prison in which you were last confined, and there be detained in custody and that on Thursday, the 18th day of April, 1985, you suffer death by execution in the manner prescribed by law and that after such sentence is carried into effect your body be buried within the precincts of the prison.”
While the three men showed no emotion there was a hushed silence in the court as the death sentences were passed.
With the IRA ceasefire in 1994 there was increasing speculation that the Special Criminal Court would be phased out. The number of cases declined to a handful but events in 1996 were to give a new life to the court. In June of that year Det Garda Jerry McCabe was murdered by an IRA gang. Later that same month journalist Veronica Guerin was shot dead as she sat in her car on the Naas Road outside Dublin.
The series of trials connected with the John Gilligan gang and Veronica Guerin’s murder lasted several years and ended with just one conviction for the journalist’s murder, that of Brian Meehan. Gilligan himself was cleared of the murder but jailed for 28 years for importing cannabis. My abiding memory is of “supergrass” witness Charles Bowden. The trained sniper and former member of the Defence Forces was always immaculately turned out in sharp suits and double-cuffed shirts.
In recent years Green Street has been the scene of the State’s response to the growing menace of dissident republicanism.
Perhaps the highest-profile trials in recent years were those of Colm Murphy for his involvement in the Omagh bombing and of Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt.
The chief prosecution witness against McKevitt was FBI/MI5 agent David Rupert, a tall American who had managed to inveigle his way into McKevitt’s inner circle.
Diarmaid Mac Dermott runs the Ireland International news agency which provides court coverage for the national media