McDowell urged to apologise to McBrearty family

Minister for Justice Michael McDowell should offer a personal apology to the McBrearty family for failing to help them, it was claimed tonight.

The Green Party said it was not enough for the family to receive a state apology from the state for the attempt by gardaí to frame them for the death of cattle dealer Richie Barron.

“Mr McDowell should apologise for resisting at every turn, as Attorney-General, demands for a public inquiry into the McBrearty case and consistently refusing, as Minister for Justice, to underwrite the McBrearty family’s legal fees, yet doing so for participants in the Lindsey Tribunal,” said justice spokesman Ciarán Cuffe TD.

He said there should also be an urgent review of the procedures for hiring and firing gardaí after the Morris Tribunal pointed out that many of the gardaí severely criticised in its first report were still serving in the force.

The growing pressure on Mr McDowell comes after he blamed the Rainbow government for the scandal.

Former Fine Gael TD Nora Owen, who was minister for justice in the 1994 to 1997 coalition government, said he should concentrate on settling the legal costs of the McBrearty family, rather than claiming that her government was responsible for a collapse of discipline and morale in the force.

She said: “For the minister to fudge the issue and imply somehow that I or any other minister should have done something different like taking a hands-on investigation role in the inquiry is wrong.

“He didn’t quite go that far but he did enough damage to fudge the issue by implying it was something to do with morale.”

Ms Owen said the appalling circumstances in Donegal, in which Frank McBrearty and his cousin Mark McConnell were framed by gardaí for the death of Richie Barron, were not because of low morale.

“It was because of bad Garda management and because there were police officers prepared to do dishonourable and dishonest things,” she told RTÉ radio.

She said Mr McDowell was “hurting” because the McBrearty family were blaming him for not acting on their complaints more quickly when he was Attorney General from 1999 to 2002.

She said he was doing a disservice to himself and to the McBrearty family, who had suffered so much.

“He should be concentrating on trying to solve the issue of the McBreartys’ legal costs. Then he should be exercising himself to reviewing the legislation that has been published to ensure this kind of thing cannot happen again or if it does happen again, it can be caught much earlier.”

Frank McBrearty Junior said he did not hold Nora Owen responsible for his family’s ordeal.

“It wasn’t until the Fianna Fáil/PD Government came in that the case got even more serious. We were constantly in the High Court seeking judicial reviews to stop the gardaí from harassing our premises. That wasn’t under Nora Owen’s watch.”

He said the Department of Justice did know what was going on, as well as Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy, who was deputy commissioner at the time and wrote a report on the case.

“The Department of Justice and the Garda Commissioner have to be looked at. Mr McDowell is trying to fudge the issues on the table.”

The McBrearty family employed Billy Flynn, a private investigator, to defend them against a Garda investigation which Judge Frederick Morris described as “prejudiced, tendentious and utterly negligent in the highest degree”.

Mr Flynn sent in 1,200 pages of evidence to the Department of Justice from 1997 onwards, including phone records to prove that an extortion phone call was made to a Donegal family from the home of a garda.

The internal Garda inquiry under Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty was not set up until 1999 and the Morris Tribunal was not set up until 2002.

The Morris Tribunal found in its report, published last week, that the Department of Justice had become far too isolated from Garda Headquarters in the Phoenix Park and recommended a total overhaul in the communications system.

“There must be strong, independent, effective and timely oversight. There must exist an authority which is empowered to react.

“Disasters such as that in Donegal should not, if they recur there or elsewhere, be allowed to fester over such a long period without intervention.”

It noted that the current Garda Bill 2004 contains draft legislation to improve the situation.