Criminal informer plan rejected by Government

SENIOR gardaí backed a proposal to run a reward for information programme through national newspapers but the Chief State Solicitor shot it down.

One chief superintendent believed the idea could help close the file on unsolved cases such as that of 10-year-old Bernadette Connolly who was murdered at Collooney, Co Sligo, in 1970.

Writing in a memo, Chief Supt Mulgrew of the Crime Branch in Garda Headquarters said the proposal “could prove successful in this type of case as it is believed that useful evidential information in possession of certain persons residing in the areas has not been disclosed to the gardai”.

The idea was based on the Secret Witness programme pioneered in the United States by the Detroit News evening newspaper in 1967 response to a spate of unsolved violent crimes in the city.

The Detroit News created a $100,000 fund, worked with the police to identify stalled investigations, offered rewards for assistance and set up a direct phone and box number accessible only by the paper’s Secret Witness crime reporter so that informers could pass on information without contacting the police.

Its success rate was such that Readers Digest ran an article on it which was brought to the attention of the Garda Commissioner and Minister for Justice Patrick Cooney in 1972.

Chief Supt Mulgrew acknowledged there would be problems, such a programme as US society differed from Ireland where people seldom volunteered information about crimes because of “fear of reprisal, factional sympathy, lack of civic spirit and disinclination to get involved”.

He also feared it might be viewed as “paying blood money to what are termed informers, an anachronistic view still adhered to by certain elements of the population”.

He noted too that a reward had been offered in the case of the shooting dead of Garda Richard Fallon during a raid on the AIB bank on Arran Quay in Dublin in 1970 without any result. He added, however: “I do not think that this should be allowed to damn the plan.”

Detroit’s Commissioner John F Nichols said it would work so long as the newspapers could be relied upon not to follow “an editorial policy of sensationalism” and the gardaí would undertake not to try to find out the identity of the tipster or pursue them.

The matter was referred to the Chief State Solicitor’s office for consideration, however, and the response did not come back favourable. Chief State Solicitor Donough O’Donovan wrote in June 1972, that while at first glance the Secret Witness ploy was attractive, on mature consideration “the smallness of this country and the traditional antipathy to informers” meant it “does not match up to the idea remedy”.

His successor, Liam J Lysaght, writing six months later, said: “It is clear that the methods in question could not be adopted in the investigation procedures in this country. The procedure in question would do violence to principles accepted here and indeed would defeat the intended purpose of criminal investigations.”