The Troubles, legacy and the State: Silence or pointing north should no longer be an option
Edward Burke, The Currency, August 3rd, 2024
‘Department of Justice files relating to the Troubles are, with very few exceptions, closed. The absence of evidence feeds speculation and compounds grief for the families of the 121 people who lost their lives in the Irish state during the Troubles.’
In early October 1972 Taoiseach Jack Lynch received a letter from a man claiming to be a representative of the Inner Council of the loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association. The letter accused Lynch of allowing the Irish state to be used as a base for the Provisional IRA to carry out cross-border attacks. The UDA, it said, would now embark on a campaign of violence south of the border, including to eliminate IRA “safe havens”. Over the next four months the UDA carried out a series of cross-border attacks, killing seven people and wounding hundreds more.
Today the purported UDA letter can be read in the National Archives in Dublin. But the name of the person who signed the letter has been redacted. Families of the bereaved do not know who sent this threatening notice and whether the government believed it to be a credible threat at the time. Researchers and relatives of the victims who submitted freedom of information requests to learn more about the government and garda response to loyalist attacks received pages and pages of blacked out text – almost everything was redacted. Department of Justice files relating to the troubles are, with very few exceptions, closed.
At least 121 people lost their lives in the Irish state during the troubles. Yet there has never been a properly resourced, dedicated legacy investigations unit in An Garda Siochána. That should change. Victims and their families should not be at a disadvantage simply because a terrorist attack was carried out in Cavan instead of Fermanagh. Families are often slow to take a minister or a senior official’s word that collusion or systematic failures did not contribute to the murder of their loved ones and the inability to convict their killers. The absence of evidence feeds speculation and compounds grief.
If the government argues for more transparency in Northern Ireland, then should that principle not also apply south of the border? The collapse of the Northern Ireland executive, the fall-out over Brexit and the controversy over the Legacy Act, which seeks to block potential prosecutions for many Troubles-related crimes, means that both the British and Irish governments have failed to deliver legacy commitments made under the Stormont House Agreement of 2014. The agreement provides for a Historical Investigations Unit (HIU), aimed at completing unfinished troubles legacy investigations, including taking over cases from the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland.
Stormont House also established an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval to work across the UK and Ireland so that victims families’ could seek out information about the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths outside of the criminal justice system. Although no blanket immunity against prosecution would be granted to those involved in potential criminal offences, the commission would “not disclose information provided to it to law enforcement” – it would be made exempt from doing so under new legislation in both jurisdictions.
The legacy landscape is shifting once more. The UK Labour government’s election manifesto included a commitment to replace the Legacy Act “by returning to the principles of the Stormont House Agreement”. But a return to Stormont House – although welcome for many – will not satisfy victims’ groups whose relatives were killed in the Irish state. Under the current agreement, a new HIU will operate solely in Northern Ireland.
If the government is to offer similar levels of transparency as those that could be introduced under a rebooted Stormont House in Northern Ireland it will need to respond to increasing pressure from three different groups – those bereaved or maimed in the state by paramilitaries, republicans or suspected republicans and their relatives who were killed or injured while in state custody, and survivors or relatives of those killed in Northern Ireland who believe that the Irish state did not do enough, or may even have been complicit in, republican cross-border attacks.
Loyalist paramilitaries killed 50 people in the Irish state during the troubles. (Two loyalist paramilitaries also died while attempting to carry out attacks south of the border.) Hundreds more were badly maimed. The inquiry led by Mr Justice Henry Barron into loyalist bombings in the early 1970s, including the Dublin and Monaghan on 17 May 1974 in which 34 people lost their lives, did not publish any previously closed archival evidence – in contrast to the Saville Inquiry which was simultaneously investigating the fatal killing of 14 unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Campaigners such as Margaret Urwin from Justice For the Forgotten continue to petition the government for the release of garda and other state files relating to the bombings.
Due to the near-complete closure of Irish archives, historians and campaigners turn to files in London and Belfast where they can at least get British perspectives on cross-border attacks and security operations since many (but by no means all) Ministry of Defence, Home Office and Northern Ireland Office papers have been released. It was at the UK National Archives in 2019 where I came across a report that named the leader of a UDA border “commando team”, Billy McMurray, that British military intelligence believed to be responsible for a series of bombings south of border during 1972 and 1973.
McMurray’s name had never been passed by the British government or police to gardaí investigating the loyalist bomb attacks that killed six people in Dublin and in the border village of Belturbet or to the Barron Inquiry. In September 2020, Brendan Smith TD passed on an article I wrote on my findings to the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee. After further revelations about the Belturbet attack in an RTÉ documentary, the gardaí established a new investigation team to look into the murders.
British officials also had many complaints about security cooperation – or a lack of it – south of the border. But there were also many instances where British senior officials and military intelligence officers praised their Irish counterparts; some understood the political sensitivities and resource limitations in the south. They were far less understanding of the failure by the Irish state to extradite suspected Provisional IRA members to face trial. From 1982 to 1988, only 30 per cent of extradition requests in relation to terrorism offences were successful. However, British intelligence reports noted that gardaí often seemed just as despondent at Irish judicial decisions as the RUC – in one case in 1973, gardaí told their British counterparts that they believed that a senior judge was “an IRA sympathiser”.
Unionist political leaders’ criticisms of the Irish government’s role during the troubles are numerous and long-standing. Some relate to allegations of direct or indirect assistance to armed republicans. The Ulster Unionist Party leader Doug Beattie has called for the arms crisis of 1970 – the distribution of funds to armed republicans by a special government committee and the importation of weapons by a military intelligence officer for possible use in Northern Ireland – to be reinvestigated.
Unionists also point to a Dáil statement in 2020 by Fianna Fáil TD Seán Haughey that claimed that the first chief of staff of the Provisional IRA Seán Mac Stiofáin was a garda agent. (Mac Stiofáin may merely have been a Garda “contact”, an intelligence category which is a world away from that of an “agent”, the latter suggesting elements of direction, control and payment on the part of an intelligence service.)
Doug Beattie and other unionist leaders allege that there may have been far greater collusion within an Garda Siochána and the Defence Forces and that the Irish state is guilty of wilful blindness, refusing to revisit its own troubles past. There are already known cases of gardaí and soldiers who were dismissed from service because of alleged subversion. In 1972 a garda was convicted for attempting to persuade a colleague to steal explosives. Another garda was later sentenced for passing on information to republicans.
According to historian Patrick Mulroe, there were 36 discharges from the Defence Forces in one year alone – 1976 – and many more from the reserves due to suspected republican activities or sympathies. Between 1971 and 1973 there were a number of cases where Defence Forces’ weapons and some ammunition were stolen, although only a small amount were taken, and some of these were later recovered.
Both the British government at the time, and unionists since, have suggested that some gardaí in border areas such as Lifford, Clones and Dundalk colluded with republicans by tipping off local republicans about pending raids and carefully avoiding confrontation with paramilitaries who used the area to carry out bombing attacks and assassinations. The family of Ian Sproule, a County Tyrone man shot dead by the Provisional IRA in 1990, believe that a garda leak led to Sproule being targeted. Representatives of the families of those killed in the Kingsmills massacre – the murder by republicans of ten protestant men abducted from a minibus near the border in 1976 – complained that the disclosure of Irish intelligence to a recently convened new inquest into the murders was slow, piecemeal and ultimately incomplete.
In Dundalk key evidence relating to the murder of a British soldier in 1972 – a car seized during a cross-border investigation – was destroyed when a fire was deliberately started in a car park in the garda station in the town. Evidence relating to a weapon used in the murders of Royal Ulster Constabulary Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Robert Buchanan by the Provisional IRA in 1989 and South Armagh civilian contractor Terence McKeever three years earlier is reportedly missing.
The Smithwick Tribunal, established to examine allegations of garda collusion that may have contributed to the targeting of Breen and Buchanan, reported in 2013 that “on the balance of probabilities” a member of the gardaí in Dundalk had provided intelligence that contributed to both men’s killings. However, Mr Justice Smithwick did not find “direct evidence of collusion”. That seemingly contradictory conclusion – a finding without clear and specific evidence – did little to satisfy those making allegations about garda collusion. It also angered many retired gardaí who felt the force’s record of service against the Provisional IRA had been unfairly tarnished.
Patrick Mulroe argues in his book – Bombs, Bullets and the Border – that allegations of widespread collusion and deliberate neglect of border security in the 1970s are overblown. For successive British governments, directing criticism towards Dublin deflected anger away from their own security failures, a tendency that has lingering consequences for contemporary perceptions of the Irish state’s role during the troubles.
Both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael-led governments during the troubles understood the threat of republican violence to the state. IRA robberies were common; kidnappings and murders scared off investors. Mulroe concludes that the primary Irish security objective was to stop the conflict spilling over into the 26 counties. Ireland was a relatively poor state, struggling economically and facing a crime wave throughout the 26 counties that strained an already threadbare criminal justice system. At the outset of the troubles the Defence Forces were at one of the lowest ebbs in their history, lacking rudimentary equipment and short of manpower. Most barracks and units were located away from the border.
The shift in Irish security policy from 1969, although not instantaneous, was extraordinary in terms of magnitude. The number of gardaí stationed near the border doubled from 1973 to 1974. The defence budget soared; reinforcements were sent to the border and a new barracks was constructed in Monaghan in the early 1970s. However, gardaí struggled to contain a wave of republican sympathy in the wake of atrocities in Northern Ireland such as the killings in Ballymurphy during the introduction of internment without trial in 1971, Bloody Sunday, and as a consequence of the British Army’s blocking or “cratering” of border roads vital to everyday life.
There has been persistent criticism by relatives of victims in Northern Ireland that gardaí failed to make arrests or gather evidence during the critical hours after a Provisional IRA cross-border attack. Some explanations for such shortcomings can be made. Gardaí were mostly unarmed. Desperately short of vehicles, riot gear and radio equipment, gardaí were also poorly equipped to take on the sizeable number of IRA volunteers in the area in the early 1970s. When gardaí raided a caravan outside Lifford from which the IRA had carried out a number of attacks – following repeated complaints by the British government – there was a riot in the town afterwards. Gardaí armed themselves with hurleys to fight off their assailants. Remarkable stories of garda bravery and tenacity are not hard to find.
Gardaí also had good reason to worry about a leakage of intelligence to loyalist paramilitaries. There were successive incidents of RUC officers who were convicted of being involved in loyalist murders, including some who were connected to the notorious Glennane “murder gang” in County Armagh. Then there was the political factor. In order not to be accused of “collaborating” with British security forces during a time of intense nationalist anger, exchanges of operational information and intelligence were usually confined to occasional, and very discreet, meetings or telephone exchanges between police officers on both sides of the border. Military-to-military contacts on the border were – with few exceptions – forbidden by successive Irish governments. A cautious approach won dividends; a flow of intelligence from the community and the passing of the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act in 1972 facilitated the arrest and imprisonment of many leading figures in the Provisional IRA.
It is, however, impossible to test alleged garda failings in specific murder cases with a cross-border dimension. Allegations about the conduct of the so-called garda “heavy gang”, who are alleged to have severely mistreated suspected republicans in the 1970s and 1980s, will also not go away. The circumstances of the killing of Provisional IRA prisoner, Tom Smith, shot by a soldier during a mass-escape attempt at Portlaoise prison in 1975, have always been disputed – the jury foreman at the inquest complained that key witnesses were not called to give evidence.
In addition to establishing a dedicated historical investigations unit in An Garda Síochána to examine troubles cases, the government should also review the systematic failure to release historic records related to the troubles under national archives legislation. There is of course material that cannot yet be made public since it may cause significant harm to an individual or because it relates to sensitive intelligence, including that produced outside the state. Redactions can and should be made, but an emphasis should be placed on transparency to throw more light on state policies during the troubles.
Finally, the government should belatedly act in response to the commencement of a new independent inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland. As recommended by a high court judge in Belfast, a special investigation or inquiry with statutory powers should be established to review the intelligence and response of the state in relation to the deadliest atrocity in Northern Ireland during the troubles. Whatever the government chooses to do, silence or pointing north when it comes to legacy mechanisms should no longer be an option.
Edward Burke is Assistant Professor in the History of War at University College Dublin. He is the author of An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland (Liverpool, 2018) and Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 (Cambridge, 2024).
Dr Edward Burke is Assistant Professor in the History of War, School of History, University College, Dublin.
