Gardaí have good reason to fear politically sensitive investigations

FOREIGN Minister Dermot Ahern and MEP Proinsias de Rossa had a radio confrontation about extraordinary rendition during the week. To say they were arguing like a couple of fishwives would be an insult to women.

They interrupted and spoke over one another repeatedly and it was impossible to understand either of them much of the time.

The Foreign Minister insisted that gardaí have a right to inspect all planes at Shannon, so they were free to examine any of the 147 CIA flights that landed in this country.

Following complaints, they investigated five of the flights, but they found no evidence of extraordinary rendition. However, they did not inspect any of the five planes, so all we have is evidence of the minister’s extraordinary gullibility.

Any garda who exercised that right of inspection would have known he would probably be in Donegal with a flea in his ear by the following day, if he did not find a prisoner on board.

Three senior members of the Bush administration gave solemn, categorical assurances that Irish territory or airspace had never been used for rendition flights, and Tánaiste Michael McDowell essentially suggested in the Dáil that it would be an affront to question their assurances.

Ever since the Watergate scandal, officials in the US have been protecting themselves with the cloak of ‘plausible deniability’. If the CIA were using Shannon airport or Irish airspace, the officials would not want to know, so that they could honestly deny any knowledge of it.

This is not about American troops or even the CIA landing at Shannon — it is about not facilitating kidnapping and torture.

The gardaí can, and should, ensure it is not happening by engaging in snap inspections. The Americans would do it with any foreign planes.

The Bush administration does not want to know about the individuals the CIA has been snatching, nor about what it is doing with them, any more than the British wanted to know what their security forces were really doing on this island during the 1970s and 1980s.

Nobody was ever held accountable for their misconduct, but we are now being told we should collude unquestioningly with the CIA so that Bertie and the boys will be welcome at the White House.

The American people don’t trust the CIA. More than a few remain convinced it was involved in the murder of John F Kennedy, so why should we trust it?

It would be naive in the extreme to think we should rest easy about extraordinary rendition because the gardaí have the power to inspect any flight.

A veritable culture has developed in this country in which gardaí do not investigate things of a sensitive political nature.

In the 1960s, Donogh O’Malley was caught driving the wrong way on a one-way street. “Didn’t you see the arrows?”, the garda asked.

“I didn’t even see the f…ing Indians!”, O’Malley purportedly replied.

He was prosecuted for drunken driving, but the court engaged in a bit of fancy footwork to facilitate him. The judge rose, as if finished for the day, but returned after the journalists left.

O’Malley’s case was then called, and he pleaded guilty, accepted his punishment, and that was it. There were no press reports of the case.

Shortly afterwards, however, the garda who arrested him was transferred to new duties. He refused to move, arguing that he was being victimised, and he was given the option of resigning or being sacked.

When Fine Gael raised the matter, Justice Minister Charles Haughey responded with what sounded like a threat. “There are some ‘quare’ files in my office, too”, he said. Nobody pursued the matter any further.

It should hardly be surprising that gardaí have developed a habit of avoiding politically sensitive cases, especially when the more senior posts are all political appointments. A whole series of tribunals are currently investigating matters that should have been investigated by gardaí. Even the son of a murdered garda was again calling for an inquiry this week.

Finian Fallon has campaigned over the years for answers about his father’s murder in the aftermath of a bank robbery on April 3, 1970. “His sacrifice and its aftermath still raise questions as to the actions of the Government, at the time and today,” Finian wrote to the Irish Examiner in July 2002. “Yet no-one with the power to address this issue will listen to our call for the truth”.

Deputy Gerry L’Estrange of Fine Gael was asking pertinent Dáil questions within days of the killing. He said that on the night of the murder, a senior garda was refused authorisation by Justice Minister Micheál Ó Moráin to arrest suspects under Section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act.

He also said that “one of the men who murdered Garda Fallon” was brought to Greenore in Neil Blaney’s ministerial car to catch a boat for Ostend.

Barely a month after the killing, the Arms Crisis erupted and people on both sides of Fianna Fáil played politics with the Fallon murder.

On the day of the Arms Crisis, for instance, Taoiseach Jack Lynch tried to pretend that, instead of being sacked, the Minister for Justice had resigned on health grounds.

“I wish to state that Deputy Ó Moráin’s condition is not unassociated with the shock he suffered as a result of the killing of Garda Fallon”, Lynch told the Dáil.

Rumours of ministerial misconduct in relation to the murder were already so rife that the Taoiseach found it necessary to deny emphatically that any “attempt was made by this Government, by any member of it or by any person associated with it to ease up in any way on the hunt for the perpetrators of this foul deed”.

Neil Blaney complained to the Dáil in July 1970 about the behaviour of the gardaí. “I would query how active these forces have been in apprehending the murderers of Dick Fallon? The murderer was witnessed by some members of these forces, and yet the people involved in the murder have escaped the net”.

His taunting remarks must have been particularly galling for the Fallon family and colleagues in the force.

Des O’Malley —who was Minister for Justice when Blaney made his accusation — later told the Dáil, in July 2001, there were grounds for believing Garda Fallon was murdered “with a weapon that had been part of earlier illegal arms shipments into this State”.

He added that there was also reason to suppose “a prominent politician was fully aware of this earlier importation and had turned a blind eye to it”.

Investigators believed Pádraig ‘Jock’ Haughey had smuggled the guns in through Dublin Airport the previous September, and that the prominent politician referred to was his brother, Charlie, who was in charge of Customs at the time. In the run-up to the Arms Crisis Charlie Haughey actually ordered Customs not to inspect that shipment.

Gardaí who investigated the Fallon case have said they “were told to take it easy”. Some are still taking it easy.

The Department of Justice file on Garda Fallon’s murder was supposed to be opened in 2001, but it was withheld.

Why — to protect the murderers? Yea!

Dick Fallon was sacrificed in 1970, just as his family’s quest for answers is now being sacrificed on the same sordid altar of political expediency.