John Carthy was a worried man when he took himself hostage in Abbeylara last April. He believed the world was out to get him. Had the killing been done by the RUC in Northern Ireland, citizens of this State would have been up in arms. But it happened in a tiny Longford village at the hands of the State's own forces. Challenging their actions is less easy.
The Abbeylara discussion has already moved away from the ethics and attitudes of Garda actions into a comparison of the relative merits and damage potential of different weapons. This assumes gardai had no option but to bring John Carthy down. That is debatable. The effect is to distract attention from issues that remain outstanding, even after the Garda's own report.
The public does not know why the chain of communication led to the decision to bring in the ERU, a force designed to fight terrorists and criminals. It does not know why John Carthy was shot twice in the back. It is unclear how he could have been standing upright when the fatal shot was fired, as gardai say, unless the State Pathologist, Prof John Harbison, was incorrect in stating to the inquest that the bullet entered his lower torso and exited his upper body at a 45-degree angle.
Today officials working with the Joint Committee on Justice, Equality, Defence and Women's Rights will start sifting through citizens' submissions on the tragedy at Abbeylara. Pat Byrne, the Garda Commissioner, said this week he had no objection to the setting up of an independent Garda complaints board, within limits. Cases such the Carthy killing, however, might not come under its remit.
The Carthy killing was followed by Garda and FBI reports, available on the Irish Times website, ireland.com Their net effect is to exonerate Garda actions completely and justify their use of force within the terms of absolute necessity laid down by the European Convention on Human Rights. This convention is still not part of Irish law.
The Culligan report is damaging to the reputations of John Carthy, his mother, Rose, and his sister, Marie. Both women are implied to be unreliable, with Marie being accused of having taken excessive drink, which she has denied. The date of Mrs Carthy's marriage to her late husband is given alongside John's date of birth two months later.
That report fails to examine certain key issues, or to seriously question the efficacy of Garda actions. Omitting positive character evidence from local people, it reads more like an apologia for the Garda and ERU teams than an objective assessment.
Many issues were asserted unambiguously in Angela Daly's and Mike Milotte's report for Prime Time. Using computer graphics to reconstruct the Garda evidence, they suggested a fundamental incompatibility between what gardai said and how that translated into forensic and time-based facts.
Whereas the Culligan report creates the impression that John was "advancing menacingly" on gardai, the computer reconstruction indicates he did not advance at all between the first and final shots fired at him.
Prime Time also revealed a serious time lag between the killing and official interviews with key gardai. Det Garda Aidan McCabe wasn't interviewed until 4 1/2 weeks later. Senior gardai were interviewed only after six weeks. Is the public to assume gardai did not discuss the matter with each other in the meantime or were not debriefed? If so, how is the public to be assured there was no collusion in their testimony?
John had three major concerns on Wednesday, April 19th. His house was about to be bulldozed by the local authority, which had built the family a new one on adjoining Carthy land. He felt unhappy because he couldn't afford to furnish it and couldn't help Rose raise a bank loan. Finally, John was still derided because of allegations that he destroyed the local GAA mascot, a toy goat. Local police had detained him for three hours on that allegation, and did not believe his protests that he was innocent.
From John's perspective, his territory, status in the community and reputation were under threat. Anybody would take such threats seriously. That threat inevitably heightened over a night and day holed up in an old house surrounded by armed gardai, deprived of sleep and refused cigarettes because of "non-co-operation". During the Garda siege, his requests for a solicitor were also unmet. Marie was physically restrained from going to him.
John's identification with the murdered solicitor Pat Finucane is telling. Finucane campaigned for human rights and civil liberties: in asking for Finucane's son, Michael, to be his solicitor, John's psyche was screaming to be heard.
Yes, there's a difference of scale between being wrongly accused of destroying a mascot, as Culligan confirmed, and being shot dead for pursuing justice, as Finucane was. But not when you're under siege, desperate for a cigarette and suffering severe depression.
If an independent complaints board is the trade-off for taking the Carthy investigation no further, then citizens are rightly concerned. The Carthy family and the Abbeylara community want an independent inquiry into why this vulnerable man was killed. Unless the Justice Committee takes an open view of their legitimate grievances, the family and the Irish public may never find out.