Landlord found terrorist materials in flat, tribunal told

The landlord of a flat in Buncrana, Co Donegal found terrorist-type materials when he called at his premises to check reports of a plumbing leak, the Morris Tribunal into garda corruption today heard.

Publican John Mackie, said he was “amazed” at what he found when he looked around the flat shared at the time – in 1994 – by key tribunal witness Adrienne McGlinchey and her then teenage friend Yvonne Devine.

He reported finding metal objects and bags of fertiliser granules that could be used to make bombs, and added: “I did not know what to think.”

After making the discovery, Mr Mackie called in Garda Tom Rattigan, who said to him: “We have got a bomb factory here.”

He said he made up his mind to ask the women to leave the flat because of what he had seen. Later though, he was approached by a man in a car – whom he believed to be a detective – who put it to him that he might “let the girls stay and we might catch a bigger fish”.

Ahead of Mr Mackie’s appearance at the tribunal, today entering its fifth week, preceding witness Ms Devine was questioned about her lapses in her memory.

Ms Devine, once a close friend of key witness Ms McGlinchey – who concluded 11 days of evidence last week – persistently maintained at earlier hearings that she could either not remember at all or had only hazy recollections of events in the early 1990s.

The incidents in question mainly involved occasions when Ms Devine, a nephew of prominent IRA man Pearse McCauley, then in her mid-teens and Ms McGlinchey were stopped by gardai and Adrienne McGlinchey was found to have terrorist-type equipment such as bullets and walkie-talkie radios in her possession.

She was pressed today by tribunal counsel Anthony Barr, about her failure to recall many of those occasions, yet had been able to tell the inquiry details of how she bought and fitted a padlock to a bedroom door in a flat she shared with Adrienne McGlinchey in Buncrana, Co Donegal, during the period concerned.

Ms Devine declared: “I was stopped so many times by guards around that time in my life that I blanked it out to move on.”

The tribunal is being chaired by former High Court President Mr Justice Frederick Morris.

Its current phase is dealing with claims that Ms McGlinchey, together with Detective Garda Noel McMahon and currently suspended Garda Superintendent Kevin Lennon, prepared explosives that were later planted in locations that figured in bogus successful finds of terrorist hauls by the gardai.