From Smyth to Mr A: will we never learn?

IN 1994 a Government fell, and these were the circumstances. There had been growing tension between the parties in Government over a number of difficult issues.

These tensions came to a head over the wish of the Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, to appoint the then Attorney General Harry Whelehan as President of the High Court.

It was discovered, and reported in a BBC programme, that a warrant for the arrest of Brendan Smyth, a paedophile priest, and his extradition to the North, had lain unattended in the Attorney General’s office for months. When Whelehan was asked by the Government to explain the delay, he said in a report to the Cabinet that the official involved had been very busy, and that furthermore the case had raised a number of complex legal issues that had never arisen before. That was why the extradition papers had never been brought to the Attorney’s attention, nor presented to him for signature. So he had known nothing about it until the publicity after the BBC programme.