In Search of the Truth

Michael O'Connell

• Publisher: The Collins Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781788410137
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique européenne

The British criminal justice system is not dedicated to the truth. It is concerned only with reasonable doubt. During the British Army campaign in Northern Ireland (1969-2007), security forces often dispensed with judge and jury, selected candidates for assassination, extracted false evidence from suspects, forced confessions from innocents and tortured citizens detained without trial.Recent inquests have disclosed a wealth of explosive, newly declassified information, which allows for a compulsive expose of abuses of power. Drawing on previously unseen material, Michael O'Connell, an experienced criminal lawyer, lays bare the chilling details of key cases in which the law was disregarded. He reveals how the truth was sacrificed to collusion, prejudice and corruption in notorious cases. Among them are the killing of Maire Drumm (Vice President of Sinn Fein), before which an army unit surrounding the hospital where she was a patient was withdrawn, and of Miriam Daly (a lecturer in Queen's University) in her home, where outgoing calls had been cut.Too often, the attitude of politicians is to leave the past behind.But without the truth and justice, there can be no reconciliation or forgiveness.In this careful examination of indisputable evidence, Michael O'Connell seeks to ensure wrongful convictions of the innocent will not be repeated

1 Past Events

COLONIAL POWERS DO not embrace the truth. On the contrary, they try to suppress it until those involved are dead, too old to remember, or too feeble to care. In addition, the political classes have an unlimited capacity to hide the truth. The legal and political establishment is too often prepared to conceal the truth on grounds of ‘national security’.

When it became apparent that 18 innocent people – the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven, the Guildford Four and Judith Ward – had been wrongly convicted, some of the highest-ranked members of Britain’s judiciary simply refused to accept that fact. How could these people be innocent? They were members of a suspect community – the ungrateful Irish.

There is a long history of troubles between these two nations, which share a common language but not much else. The old common law traditions in both jurisdictions no longer co-exist, and the Irish Free State (and later the Republic of Ireland) has enacted its own statutory provisions since 1922. Many of the differences, especially since that year, have led to communal violence, loss of life and damage to property. But did they do more than that? Did they cause irreparable damage to the reputation of the criminal justice system in England and Northern Ireland? Above all, was the system in both jurisdictions fair and impartial in its treatment of those accused of crime who were outsiders, ‘not one of us’, as Margaret Thatcher might have put it?

Britain’s policy in Northern Ireland was based on one simple principle: total opposition to the reunification of the island of Ireland. In order to counter nationalist aspirations, Britain concentrated on the management of the civil conflict and control of political unrest and was prepared to do that ad infinitum.

The first Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaign was launched in Britain in November 1920, when incendiary attacks on 19 buildings in Liverpool caused substantial damage. In the following year there were attacks on property on some 12 separate occasions in the north and northwest of England. Again the damage caused was very substantial.

The final act of violence attributed to the IRA prior to 1939 was the assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on 22 June 1922. A native of County Longford, he considered himself Anglo-Irish, and was treated as Irish in England and English in Ireland.

He had been appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in February 1918 but was not reappointed in 1922. Utterly disillusioned, Wilson left the army and went into politics. He was elected unopposed as MP for North Down in February 1922. A passionate supporter of the unionist cause, he became chief security adviser to the newly formed Northern Ireland government. He was suspected of failing to prevent, if not actually encouraging, sectarian violence against the minority Catholic population in Ulster, and he is also believed by some to have been involved in the Curragh Mutiny of 1914.

He was shot dead in the doorway of his house on Eaton Square in London by Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, both members of the IRA, who were tried at the Old Bailey on 2 July 1922. They did not deny what they had done, and the jury took only three minutes to arrive at their verdict. They were hanged side by side by the public executioner John Ellis at Wandsworth Prison on 10 August of that year. Forty-nine days from an indefensible murder to judicial execution. There was no delay in the law in those times.

Joseph O’Sullivan had fought on the Western Front and had lost a leg at the first battle of Ypres. The two men had walked to Eaton Square, and after the murder they tried to escape on foot. They had also shot and wounded three other men, including a detective and a uniformed constable and were detained a few hundred yards from the scene. O’Sullivan had no realistic chance of getting away because of his handicap; Dunne stayed with him, knowing that capture was inevitable. Their motive for killing a fellow Irishman will never now be known. Their execution may have had a deterrent effect, because the IRA did not make a violent return to the British mainland for 17 years.

In 1939 and 1940 the IRA renewed their campaign in England, causing deaths and damage throughout the country. On 24 July 1939 the home secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, introduced the Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Bill, telling the House of Commons that to date 66 members of the IRA had been convicted of serious crime; there had been 127 terrorist outrages, 57 in London and 70 in the provinces; an enormous amount of explosives had been seized by the police; there had been three explosions at electricity plants in the London area; and in the north and the Midlands many gas and electricity mains were damaged by bombing. In his book on the Provisional IRA, Gary McGladdery records that there were no fewer than 291 explosions in England during 1939, and even after the outbreak of the Second World War in September of that year the IRA continued to bomb shops in the West End of London.

On 25 August 1939 the IRA bombed Coventry. Five people were killed; 70 others were injured, 12 of them grievously. Two men, Peter Barnes, aged 32, a native of County Offaly, and 29-year-old Westmeath man James McCormack, who used the surname Richards, were charged with the murder of one of the five victims, Elsie Ansell. She was aged 21, newly engaged and worked as a shop assistant near the scene of the bomb. She was so badly mutilated that she could only be identified by her engagement ring and her shoes. Her marriage had been arranged for the following week, and she was buried in her wedding dress.

In the dock with Barnes and McCormack (Richards), jointly charged with murder, were Joseph and Mary Hewitt and Mary’s mother, Brigid O’Hara. Their junior counsel, Thomas Tempest Dineen, a native of Bandon, County Cork, told me some years ago that when prosecuting counsel Richard O’Sullivan QC opened the case to the jury he said that the bomb had been made at the ‘premises of Joseph and Mary’, stressing those names with their biblical connotation, before adding, ‘… Hewitt at their premises at 25 Clara Street, Coventry’. O’Sullivan was an eccentric character who after this case convinced himself, but few others, that the IRA were determined to kill him in a revenge attack for his participation in the trial. He died peacefully in his own bed many years later.

The bomb involved in the fatal explosion was concealed in the carrier of a bicycle that was being wheeled along the Broadgate Centre in Coventry when the person wheeling the bicycle suddenly abandoned it. It exploded shortly afterwards.

Peter Barnes had transported potassium chlorate from London to Coventry. He believed that the intended target of the bombing was an electricity substation and he never intended or foresaw that anyone would be killed or injured. His aim was solely to damage property. If it was true that he did not intend to kill or cause serious injury to anyone, one has to question the basis on which he was convicted of murder. He was in London on the day the bomb exploded, so he knew nothing of how the bicycle had come to be abandoned in a crowded public place.

James McCormack (Richards) had bought the bicycle and saw the bomb, but it was another man who constructed it, and yet another who left it on the bicycle in the Broadgate Centre. They were never charged with any offence arising out of this incident.

At the end of the trial Joseph and Mary Hewitt and Mrs O’Hara were acquitted by the jury. Peter Barnes and James Richards were convicted of murder and sentenced to death by Mr Justice Singleton.¹ They were hanged side by side in Winson Green Prison on 7 February 1940. Two Catholic priests accompanied them to the gallows.

According to Tim Pat Coogan’s widely acclaimed book On the Blanket, public opinion in Ireland was inflamed against Britain by the execution of the two men, no doubt on the grounds that they never intended to kill anyone but only to damage property. It may be worthy of note that in the course of the Troubles in Northern Ireland from 1970 onwards, in cases where a bomb was planted on premises, if the bomber fully and accurately informed the police and/or the army of the presence of that bomb, claiming that it was planted only for the purpose of damaging property, then in the event of someone being killed in a subsequent explosion, the bomber would be convicted of manslaughter, not murder, the assumption being that passing accurate information indicated that there was no intention to kill, only an intention to damage property. If this is correct, does that at least suggest the possibility that Peter Barnes was hanged for a murder of which, as he told the court, ‘I would like to say as I am going before my God, as I am condemned to death, I am innocent and later I am sure it will all come out that I had neither hand, act or part in it. That is all I have to say’?² James Richards thanked the gentlemen who defended him during his trial and said, ‘As a soldier of the Irish Republican Army I am not afraid to die, as I am doing it for as just cause. I say in conclusion, God bless Ireland and God bless the men who have fought and died for her. Thank you, my Lord.’³

That trial and those executions solved nothing. The IRA continued its bombing campaign in Liverpool, London, Southampton and Birmingham. Property was damaged, but there were no fatal injuries. Seven people were injured when a bomb placed in a rubbish bin exploded in Oxford Street, London on 28 November 1940. By this date the authorities in Britain had turned their attention to the war against Germany.

Within a day of internment without trial being introduced into Northern Ireland on 9 August 1971, men claiming to be members of the Provisional IRA held a press conference in Dublin in which they warned that they would bring their campaign to Britain in the coming months. They began by bombing the Post Office Tower in London on 31 October 1971. No one was injured in that bombing, but damage was extensive. A telephone caller claimed that the Kilburn battalion of the IRA was responsible. That may not have been entirely true. This incident was the first act of unlawful violence in England after the Troubles began in Northern Ireland in 1968 and Britain’s military response – Operation Banner – from August 1969 to July 2007 placed the criminal justice system under the spotlight as never before.

There were many civilian casualties on both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland and among the security forces, and many acts of wanton brutality, but did the state cover up the truth and resort to outright lying in criminal cases arising from the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’? Did the criminal justice system in the UK and Northern Ireland simply break down because of inherent failings, or was there a rush to judgement that blinded even the most careful and dispassionate participant in that system?

A Catalogue of Death and Lies; England, Ireland and Overseas

The year 1974 saw a terrible catalogue of horrendous acts of violence in Northern Ireland: 166 civilians and 50 members of the security forces were murdered in that year alone. The violence was no less brutal in England or in the Republic of Ireland. On 4 February 12 people died and 14 were seriously injured when members of the Provisional IRA placed an explosive device in the boot of a coach used by soldiers and their families returning from their homes in the Manchester area to Catterick military camp in Yorkshire. Among the dead were Corporal Clifford Houghton, aged 23, serving in the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, his wife Linda, also 23, and their two children, Lee, aged five, and Robert, aged two. The family were Catholics. Bombs do not discriminate against victims on religious grounds.

It is my view that, in revenge and retaliation for that most dreadful and unforgivable massacre, some elements in the security forces in Northern Ireland colluded with loyalist paramilitaries to bomb the city of Dublin and the town of Monaghan on 17 May 1974. On that day Northern Ireland was in the grip of sectarian threats and violence. The Ulster Workers’ Council had called a strike to undermine, perhaps even destroy, the Sunningdale Agreement, which envisaged power-sharing between nationalists and loyalists. The strike was savagely enforced by armed and heavily disguised men standing by road blocks on the streets. British politicians failed to order the army to confront the loyalists, perhaps fearing that the army might refuse to do so. (The situation was so serious that on 19 May the new Labour government declared a state of emergency in Northern Ireland.)

Around 5.30 in the afternoon of Friday 17 May three car bombs exploded in the centre of Dublin. All the vehicles bore Northern Ireland registration numbers and two had been hijacked in loyalist areas of Belfast earlier that day. Eyewitnesses saw two of the vehicles in the car park near the Catholic Church in the Whitehall district of Dublin, where a number of men were apparently tinkering with the cars. It is likely that they were arming the bombs. Twenty-two people died instantly and over 100 were injured, four of whom died. Among the dead were four members of the same family, John and Anna O’Brien and their two young children. Anna was wheeling her two little girls in a buggy when they were hit by the full blast of the first car bomb on Parnell Street. She was so badly mutilated that her sister was only able to identify her by one of her earrings.

Of the 26 people who died in the streets of Dublin on that day, 19 were women. One of them was 21-year-old Colette O’Doherty. She was killed in the second explosion in Talbot Street. She was expecting to go into hospital that evening for the birth of her second child. That unborn child died with her. Her first child, her two-year-old daughter Wendy, by some miracle survived the explosion and was found weeping in her pram some distance along Talbot Street, covered in the debris that cluttered the entire area. A young woman, still in shock, saw her, lifted her from the pram, and took her to a nearby hospital, where she was treated for what turned out to be minor injuries.

About 90 minutes after those explosions in Dublin, five others were killed instantly and 25 were injured when another bomb exploded outside a public house in the centre of Monaghan town, which lies about six miles from the border with Northern Ireland. Two other people, a man and a woman, later died of their injuries.

The final total death toll on that most dreadful day was 33. The killings led to the biggest unsolved murder inquiry in Ireland since independence. Anecdotal evidence from the time suggested that a Cabinet meeting called within two hours of the Dublin bombing by Liam Cosgrave, the Taoiseach in the Fine Gael/Labour coalition government, decided to relay a message to the British government, saying in effect, ‘We’ve got the message; we will crack down on the IRA.’ That is exactly what they did. Very little enthusiasm was shown by the politicians or the police to discover the identities of those who carried out the bombings. Media reports show that both Liam Cosgrave and the attorney general, Declan Costello SC, said that the IRA were morally responsible for the bombings. One wonders whether it might have been better to try to establish who was legally responsible, and bring them to justice, before apportioning ‘moral’ blame.

The Garda investigation, such as it was, was not a success. It is claimed that the names of some of those responsible are known, but there is insufficient evidence to put anyone on trial for murder on a massive scale. No one has ever been charged, let alone convicted, of any offence committed on 17 May 1974.

A judicial inquiry chaired by the retired Irish Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Henry Barron concluded in its report published in December 2003:

[T]here are grounds for suspecting that the bombers have had assistance from members of the security forces … The involvement of individual members in such activity does not of itself mean the bombings were either officially or unofficially state-sanctioned … ultimately a finding that there was collusion between the perpetrators and the authorities in Northern Ireland is a matter of inference.

When the journalist Peter Taylor interviewed the loyalist politician David Ervine, a senior member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which was widely believed to have carried out both bombings, he was told that the loyalists were ‘returning the serve’, which presumably means giving the people in the south of Ireland an insight into how it felt to be on the receiving end of the IRA terror bombing campaign.⁴ Like so many others, David Ervine misunderstood that the main source of political grievance was vested, not in the south of Ireland, but in the North, among those who felt themselves excluded and marginalised by a one-party state that allowed nothing short of unconditional loyalty to the British Crown.

Some take the view that it was those Irish who fired the first shots of the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916 who shattered the myth of invincibility and eventually led to the break-up of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. The Rising showed that it was possible to force the British to enter into negotiation with the very people responsible for the use of armed struggle for political ends. Moreover, it broke the appearance of over-whelming superiority that seemed to surround the military guardians patrolling those countries whose only link was their enforced allegiance to the Crown.

The Rising lasted only six days before Patrick Pearse surrendered to the Crown Forces at the scene of the heaviest fighting at the General Post Office on O’Connell Street, Dublin. The public response may have been hostile at the outset, but the summary trials and swift executions of the leaders of the Rising changed everything. The British had won the battle but lost the war. In the space of nine days, 14 men gave their lives for the political and economic freedom of their country, When the news of the executions by firing squad b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the author
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Past Events
• 2. Justice for Iain?
• 3. The Case of the Hooded Men
• 4. The Window Cleaners
• 5. The Troubles and the Truth
• 6. Can You be Irish and Innocent?
• 7. Defending the Innocent: the Guilford Four
• 8. Defending the Innocent: the Maguire Seven
• 9. The Judiciary on Trial
• 10. The Police on Trial
• 11. Covering up the Truth
• 12. Unlawful Killing
• 13. Killings Go On
• 14. Killing Without Question?
• Appendix 1: Decision of Information Tribunal 17 September 2009
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Imprint Page
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