LONDON, 25 December 2003 — Thirty-four innocent people going about their business in the streets of Dublin were killed when car bombs blew up on May 17, 1974. This was the biggest terrorist outrage in all the troubles. Yet the governments in Britain and Ireland, both ostensibly committed to the war on terror, have been singularly reluctant to track down the Dublin murderers.
The report on the bombings last week by the former Irish Supreme Court Judge Henry Barron is a curious document. He had no doubt who carried out the bombings: Two “loyalist” gangs bent on smashing the power-sharing agreement reached at Sunningdale earlier that year. Some of these men, such as the serial killer Robin Jackson and William Hannah, who led a Dublin terror gang, are now dead, but others are living in Belfast or Portadown. In nearly 30 years not a single person has been charged. Why?
Two former British Army intelligence officers, Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd, and John Weir, a former Northern Ireland policeman who once went to prison for a sectarian assassination, told Judge Barron that in their firm opinions the Dublin bombers were in harness with renegade members of British security services. The judge concluded that the evidence of collusion between the authorities in Northern Ireland and the bombers “is not sufficiently strong”. But he also held that it would be “neither fanciful nor absurd” to find that individual members of the security services could have been involved.
Colin Wallace, who worked for British Army “psychological operations” in Northern Ireland in 1974, and was sacked for refusing to plot against his own ministers, is extensively praised in the report. He tells me he still believes elements of the security forces must have been involved. “It was a highly sophisticated operation,” he says. “There were roadblocks all over the place, and extensive surveillance. I simply don’t believe the gangs could have got away with it without help from inside the security forces.”
As the report also reveals, many of the bombers were active members of the British Army and police. Hannah was a member of a British Army regiment, the UDR, and the farm where the bombs were made and stored belonged to a serving member of the RUC. These British soldiers and policemen could hardly avoid colluding with themselves.
The Barron inquiry should be compared to the Saville inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry, two years before the Dublin bombings. Fourteen people were killed in Derry, less than half the dead in Dublin. An enormous mountain of classified documents has been disgorged to the Bloody Sunday inquiry by the Blair government.
Pressed for information on the Dublin bombings, however, the same government has been coy in the extreme. Eighteen months after he first asked for all relevant information held by the British government, Judge Barron got a 16-page letter from the Northern Ireland secretary — and no classified documents. It seems that the government is committed to the war on terror, but not so committed when the British Army, intelligence or police might be involved in the terror.
