Let’s tackle it now before a few bad apples rot the garda barrel

PETER CORY, the Canadian judge who was appointed to investigate suspected police collusion in eight murders in both the North and Republic, has produced his reports.

The British government had not released the judge’s conclusions in relation to four cases involving suspected collusion with loyalist killers in the North, but our Government has published his report raising serious questions about alleged garda collusion in the March 1989 murders of RUC Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan.

The RUC officers, the two most senior members of the force killed during the Troubles, were returning from a meeting with gardaí in Dundalk when they were ambushed shortly after crossing the border.

Reports from a British army mole within the Provisional IRA identified a specific garda as having passed on vital information about the movements of the two RUC men.

The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, who has been talking tough, has certainly made the right sounds on this occasion.

He promptly stated that the Government would implement Judge Cory’s recommendation for a sworn public inquiry into allegations of garda collusion with the Provisional IRA in the murder of the two RUC officers.

It will be surprising if the judge did not find similar cause for an investigation into some of the loyalist murders.

Nobody should really be shocked at police corruption in either jurisdiction because it has long been known that authorities have turned a blind eye to misconduct, and it was only a matter of time before people would conclude that some police had been allowed to get away with murder, both metaphorically and literally.

After Tiede Herrema, the Dutch industrialist, was kidnapped in October 1975, the gardaí arrested a suspected member of the kidnap gang, but he refused to talk to his Special Branch interrogators. He was therefore transferred to a Dublin prison.

“On the way the car stopped,” Conor Cruise O’Brien noted in his memoirs. He was a minister in Liam Cosgrave’s government at the time.

“The Special Branch escort started asking the man questions. When at first he refused to answer, they beat the shit out of him,” the Cruiser continued. “Then he told them where Herrema was.”

Was such conduct justifiable? The Cruiser apparently thought so.

“I refrained from telling this story to Garret (FitzGerald) or Justin (Keating), because I thought it would worry them,” he explained. “It didn’t worry me.”

It probably would not have worried most people in view of the satisfactory outcome, but the problem is that if you allow the police to take the law into their own hands you run the risk of ending up with a police state in which the most feared criminals are likely to be the police themselves.

Chief Superintendent Breen and Superintendent Buchanan were investigating smuggling when they were murdered, and that problem is as bad as ever notwithstanding the supposed removal of the economic borders within the EU.

There are criminals acting in the Border area under the cloak of a phoney patriotism, which has long been the refuge of the scoundrel.

While Fianna Fáil was in power in 1982 there was the appearance of criminal collusion between the gardaí and the RUC over the Dowra Affair, when a witness heading to court in the Republic was arrested and held by the RUC for no apparent reason, other than preventing him from getting to court in the Republic.

He was going to testify against a garda who happened to be a brother-in-law of the Minister for Justice, Seán Doherty. The assault charge was dismissed when the witness failed to turn up in court that day, but the injured man did subsequently receive civil damages.

Around the same time in the North there were allegations of a shoot-to-kill policy, after a number of people were shot down in questionable circumstances. John Stalker of Greater Manchester Police was appointed to investigate those killings, but he was doing too good a job as far as some police were concerned.

He recommended that eleven police officers should be charged with obstructing justice, but before he could finalise his report he was removed from the investigation for supposedly consorting with a criminal named Kevin Taylor.

Taylor had been arrested as a 12-year-old boy for stealing some potatoes during the blitz on London in World War II.

That was his only crime. As an adult he became a successful businessman. To undermine Stalker, the police fabricated allegations against his friend Taylor. It was alleged that his yacht had been used in drug running. The boat had, indeed, been used once to smuggle drugs, but that was long before he purchased it.

Kevin Taylor was cleared of all charges against him and was eventually awarded a record £1 million in damages in an out-of-court settlement, when he sued Greater Manchester Police for malicious prosecution.

Even though there was clear evidence that the eleven policemen identified by Stalker had obstructed justice, Sir Patrick Mayhew, the British attorney general, announced in January 1988 that it was not in the public interest to prosecute any of them. Mayhew was subsequently appointed secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

The RUC had been rotten for years. Sir Richard Pim, who took over as head constable in 1945 after distinguishing himself as an aide to Winston Churchill during World War II, had narrower escapes in the North than in the London during the blitz.

An attempt was made to poison him with mince pies laced with cyanide in 1955.

Later, while boating with his wife on Strangford Lough, Pim became suspicious of a noise and dived under the boat to find that a detonator had been set off by the heat of his engine and had ignited an under-water fuse that was attached to a gelignite bomb. He managed to cut the fuse before the bomb could go off.

The chief suspect was a disgruntled RUC district inspector, Malcolm Crawford, who was considered untouchable because of his unionist credentials.

He was the son of the man who had masterminded the Larne gun-running in 1912, and he was married to a daughter of the former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Sir John Andrews. With those credentials, the authorities just compelled Crawford to retire from the force on full pension.

The RUC became so lumbered with its own criminal baggage that it had to be replaced. Public opinion polls indicated that 90% of the Catholic population felt that the force should be disbanded, while 32% of Protestants thought likewise.

The collusion allegations surrounding the March 1989 murders of the two RUC officers should be kept in perspective. They involve just one garda, who may be totally innocent. Rotten apples in a force of over 10,000 are inevitable.

The frightening aspect in this instance is that such a serious allegation has been allowed to fester for so long. We know that one rotten apple can eventually contaminate the rest of the apples in a barrel.

When one considers the border areas it now seems that there are many rotten apples within the gardaí. This must be tackled now lest the force ends up like the RUC on the scrapheap of history.