Two arrested over Garda surveillance

Two suspected dissident republicans were questioned today after surveillance equipment was seized in a hotel room overlooking a building housing the most secretive specialist Garda units in the State.

One man (32) has been released without charge this evening, gardaí said, and a file will be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions. The second man (41) remains in custody.

The men are known to gardaí for their links to dissident terrorism and were spotted in the streets around Harcourt Square, the Garda's Dublin metropolitan headquarters that houses units such as the Criminal Assets Bureau, Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation and the Special Detective Unit, which investigates terrorists.

When the men were spotted on Harcourt Street yesterday afternoon, they were placed under surveillance and investigations quickly established they had booked into the Harcourt Hotel across Harcourt Street from Harcourt Square.

The men had taken a room under a false name and had set up a digital camera to record the Garda city headquarters across the road, including the entrance where members of the force drive their own private vehicles in and out of the premises on their way to and from work.

When the equipment was found, it was taken for analysis, the results of which are still not known. The men were followed around the city centre and were arrested in the Grafton Street area, less than 1km from the hotel where the recording equipment had been found.

The suspects, from Dublin, were both detained under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act.

They were detained by members of the Special Detective Unit and are being questioned on suspicion of membership of an illegal organisation and providing assistance to an illegal organisation at Donnybrook and Irishtown Garda stations.

The purpose of the surveillance was not immediately clear, though car registration numbers would enable dissident republicans with good intelligence networks to establish the home addresses of some gardaí.

Such information has been used in the past to intimidate gardaí, with a pipe bomb - which exploded - planted outside the family home of a garda last year and a bullet left on the car of another member some years ago as a threat by an organised crime gang.

Fianna Fáil justice spokesman Niall Collins described the discovery of a suspected spying operation as a "sinister development".

“This is a very disturbing development as gardaí continue a major operation into organised crime in Dublin,” he said, adding "strong and united political leadership" was required to tackle criminal gangs.