Former Justice Minister attacks Barron Report

FORMER Justice Minister Patrick Cooney wants a public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Dublin and Monaghan bombings because he believes his reputation has been “impugned unjustly” by Mr Justice Henry Barron’s report on the atrocities.

But Mr Cooney, Justice Minister at the time of the May 1974 bombings, argued that any public inquiry will meet the same obstacles as Mr Justice Barron, including the absence, through death, of senior gardaí who were involved in the investigation.

In a scathing attack on the Barron Report, Mr Cooney told a Joint Oireachtas sub-committee: “Inferences and conclusions drawn from unidentified witnesses and from hearsay are not worth the paper they are written on.”

He was responding to claims in the report that the government failed to show the expected concern for those affected and showed little interest in the investigation into the bombing.

“The inquiry could find nothing whatever to substantiate this stuff, but to publish it in the context of an allegation that the government caused the investigation to come to a premature end is outrageous,” he said.

The former minister told the committee he was kept fully informed of the garda investigation. The minister was never approached by the gardaí to put political pressure on the British to secure better co-operation. This was, he said, because there was already full co-operation between the gardaí and the RUC.

The names of the suspects were known at an early stage but there was never enough evidence to charge them, Mr Cooney said.

Mr Cooney said there were suspicions of collusion between maverick elements in the security forces and loyalists but no hard evidence. Most members of the RUC and the UDR were good and loyal officers, he said yesterday.

He conceded the judge’s task was formidable, not least because it was compiled “light-years removed from the fraught times of 1974”.

A public inquiry will face the same “insuperable obstacles”, Mr Cooney said.

Meanwhile, Sean Donlon, one of the State’s most distinguished diplomats, also appeared before the committee to give insight into the political and security situation that pertained in the North at the time.

Mr Donlon, a former secretary general of the Department of Foreign Affairs, told the committee of the disparity of treatment between nationalist and unionist communities in Northern Ireland.

He said the IRA were regarded as insurgents, whereby loyalist paramilitaries were left to their own devices, provided they were kept under some control.

He also proferred the view that there was a probability of collusion between loyalists and security forces and believed an international inquiry into the bombings should be pursued.