Sir, - Regarding your letter to Dr Gerry McDonagh, Longford County Coroner, published in your edition of October 13th and referring to the publication in The Irish Times of the names of the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) members who gave evidence at the Abbeylara Inquest, I would like to make the following points:
Firstly, there is a precedent for their identities to be "concealed" - your word, not mine - and it was established in an appeal to the Supreme Court by the Dublin City Coroner against the High Court ruling mentioned by you.
Secondly, I would imagine that the members of the ERU themselves did not seek anonymity, presumably assuming that the media would respect the request of the coroner not to publish their names or photographs. Being aware of your intimate knowledge of Garda procedures from your past association with An Garda Siochana I was astonished that it was The Irish Times which "broke ranks", so to speak, in publishing the names of the ERU. How is the public interest served by publicising the names? Any objective member of the public I have spoken to has absolutely no interest in the names, but rather in the facts of what happened.
Thirdly, the duties of the members of the ERU include, inter alia, the security of the State. The publication of the names and/or photographs of members of the squad leaves those people, and indeed their families, in danger from a range of sources including subversives, serious criminals with a score to settle, and also from the insane who may just feel like having a go at someone who is in the news. Your statement that "there is no dimension of subversive or organised crime in this matter" is irrelevant - the members are now named and exposed.
The members of ERU, and indeed anyone in a similar area, should of course have anonymity because their very profession places them in routine conflict with a range of ruthless adversaries who will stop at nothing. Other individuals whose professional duties come under scrutiny do not have anything like the same level of routine exposure.
I do not feel that you have made a case which convincingly justifies your decision to publish. In the light of the subsequent publication and naming of photographs of members of the ERU, it looks from here suspiciously like just one more piece of the media upping the ante in the circulation war. Gardai everywhere are disappointed and let down. - Yours, etc.,
Joe Curran, BL, Deputy General Secretary, Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, Phibsborough, Dublin 7.
The Supreme Court judgment of last July said gardai might be identified by their initials. But it also determined that "in the event of any person" applying to a coroner, he may be obliged to furnish them with the names and addresses of the gardai. - Ed., I.T.