Ex garda plotted to blackmail head officer

A former Donegal garda plotted to blackmail the county’s most senior officer by secretly taping a conversation with him over the IRA’s torture of an informer, it emerged today.

Disgraced ex-superintendent Kevin Lennon told the Morris Tribunal his one-time colleague John O’Dowd recorded a phone call with the head of the force in Donegal.

The inquiry heard O’Dowd warned his superior officer, former Chief Superintendent Denis Fitzpatrick, that the IRA had brutally tortured an informer and that there were fears for his life.

O’Dowd, booted out of the force last December, claimed his agent William Doherty had his back teeth pulled out and his genitals burned by a paramilitary punishment squad.

Lennon told the inquiry O’Dowd planned to use the tape against Fitzpatrick if the IRA murdered the informer.

“If anything happened to Doherty he was going to save himself,” Lennon said.

Tribunal Chairman Mr Justice Frederick Morris said it was more blackmail than self-preservation.

“This leads me on to an appalling situation,” said Mr Justice Morris. “Here was a member of the guards going to, if you like, blackmail the chief superintendent.”

“Well to that effect yes,” Lennon agreed.

Mr Justice Morris pressed the former officer if it amounted to an extortion attempt.

“Yes,” Lennon admitted.

O’Dowd had been probed by fellow officers over his role in a botched murder inquiry in Raphoe.

The shamed ex-officer, who faked IRA arms dumps across Donegal in the early 1990s, said in hindsight it appeared that O’Dowd had set up an elaborate blackmail scam to get back at the divisional chief.

“I think it was in the context of the discipline,” Lennon said.

“He just said that I have a tape recording of the chief in relation to Doherty.......... He was complaining that the chief was the man that appointed the disciplinary against him. That he himself had appointed the investigation into indiscipline against him.”

The contents of the secret taping only emerged after an internal garda unit headed by Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty was sent to Donegal in 1999 to probe the failed Richie Barron investigation.

Lennon claimed he had been set up as a fall guy over the botched murder inquiry by Fitzpatrick.

“I didn’t see it as blackmail, that’s what I see it to be now, but I did not see it then as blackmail of the chief,” Lennon said.

“If I knew that in 1997 or 1998 I certainly would have gone to the chief. I suppose you could say sir, that lines of engagement with me and the chief – the chief had ignored me from 1999.

“I was in a position that I knew sir, I mean I knew the chief had shafted me and that was it. I wasn’t going to go to the chief and tell him because he ignored me from 1999 on and I had no relationship with him after,” Lennon said.

The Morris Tribunal is examining allegations of corruption amongst the Garda in Donegal during the 1990s. The current module is looking into the death of Mr Barron in an apparent hit-and-run accident in Raphoe October 1996.