The former Minister for Justice Patrick Cooney recently criticised the Barron report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974, saying the judge didn't understand the relationship between the Government and An Garda Síochána. He told an Oireachtas sub-committee that the coalition government of the time should not have attempted to influence the Garda investigation into the bombings.
A police force should always be independent of government, he said. "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 the way it should on Justice Barron."
Well, bless my soul: if that's the case, than it's not just the judge who doesn't understand the relationship between the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commissioner, because I don't either. I had always thought that the Commissioner was employed by the Minister. That the Minister paid his salary. That the Commissioner's force was ultimately answerable to the Minister through the Commissioner. That they had regular meetings to discuss policy, and so on.
Apparently, I was wrong. Apparently An Garda Síochána functions entirely independently of the democratically elected government of the day, and it decides policies and priorities without ever informing its employers. God knows what the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commissioner talk about during their many meetings. The weather, no doubt, and GAA. Then they run out of topics and gaze out of the window and count the ducks being run over in St Stephen's Green.
Are we really expected to believe this? Are we? That the Government never indicates to the Commissioner that it wants a case cracked, and it wants it cracked now? So when Don Tidey was kidnapped, and the Minister for Justice of the day would meet the Garda Commissioner, the name Tidey would no more cross his lips than a pluperfect subjunctive in Persian? And the same with the Dublin bombings: are we really expected to believe that the Cabinet was not allowed to say to the Garda Commissioner to do everything possible to identify and apprehend the murderers, pronto?
Moreover, Patrick Cooney's memory seems to be open to question. He told the Oireachtas sub-committee that there had never (my italics) been a request from An Garda Síochána to interview suspects detained by the RUC. Even if interviews had taken place and confessions had been extracted, he said, it was highly unlikely extraditions would have followed because courts were refusing to extradite Republican terrorists to the North.
Wrong in almost every detail, but I don't expect the sub-committee to have the nous to pick up on that. In January 1973, Oliver Boyce and his fiancée Briege Porter were murdered by UDA terrorists in Donegal. The Garda investigating team, led by Chief Superintendent John Courtney, was allowed across the Border and assisted the RUC in the investigation. A UDA man was extradited to the Republic, and was acquitted by the Special Criminal Court in Dublin - all this, a year before the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
However, where Patrick Cooney is indubitably right is that our courts were refusing to extradite terrorist suspects for trial in the North. Now, let's go over this again. Gardaí investigating the Dublin and Monaghan bombings were given names of the UVF men responsible by British and RUC intelligence. One was Wesley Somerville, from Dungannon. Another was Billie Marchant from Belfast.
Now, I know this. Furthermore, Judge Barron revealed that the British government had told our Government some months after the bombings that some of the suspects had been interned.
So, are we really expected to believe that not one person in the Cabinet who knew about the internment of loyalist suspects passed this information on to the investigating gardaí? Are we seriously expected to believe that gardaí had the names of the suspects, but no one in Government knew that? Are we seriously expected to believe that Ministers averted their eyes from the Garda investigations into the Dublin and Monaghan atrocities, as scrupulously as a games master outside the girls' changing room?
But Patrick Cooney was certainly right to mention the E-word. Extradition is the key. If the coalition government had really wanted the Dublin and Monaghan bombers arrested and brought to trial, it would have taken the necessary measures. Did Irish governments not repeatedly ask the British government to take more action to stop sectarian assassinations of Catholics in the North? Does this not suggest that politicians do direct police forces, contrary to what Patrick Cooney told the sub-committee? No attempt was made to extradite the Dublin and Monaghan bombers to the Republic, and for one reason. If those butchers had been successfully brought to trial in this State, this would probably have involved a quid pro quo; and there simply wasn't the political will to do that. On balance, and unspokenly, people preferred to let the Dublin and Monaghan bombers off the hook rather than to see IRA terrorists extradited to the North.
It's certainly not good enough to blame the refusal to extradite on the courts alone. Those courts would have been obliged to extradite if a government had created the necessary laws and judicial duties for them to do so. But no government did, because - if only sub-consciously - the majority of people in this State preferred for the Troubles to continue (provided they were largely confined to the North) than for the Irish State to confront the IRA, root and branch. And that, in a nutshell, is why the Troubles lasted 25 years.