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20 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 21
Not really Peter Keeley
Omagh was perpetrated
by Keeley, a psycho who
worked, mainly at least,
for the RUC’s CID
NEWS
Peter Keeley is a psycho killer, double agent
and manipulator of the truth who perpetrated
the Omagh bomb and the nutty Smithwick
Tribunal. The Garda should be prosecuting him.
Elusive Keeley
Over the years this magazine has focused on
collusion between the UK’s secret services,
loyalist paramilitaries and Northern Ireland’s
police services — sometimes even the Garda —
which largely escapes the mainstream
discourse. The name Peter Keeley has often
fi gured, mostly mysteriously.
Recently, after contact with informed
intelligence sources, Village is in a position to
locate Keeley’s centrality to key events in
Northern Ireland. These include the worst ever
atrocity there, the Omagh bombing, the murder
of the patently innocent Tom Oliver and the weird
instigation of the Smithwick Tribunal. But there is
much more on the hands of this deranged but
freewheeling MI5ocrat.
Peter Keeley, who uses the pseudonym Kevin
Fulton was born in Newry in 1960.
He joined the Royal Irish Rangers in Berlin at
the age of 18.
By Michael Smith
Undercover in IRA
From 1981, as an Army Intelligence Corps/Force
Research Unit (a covert military intelligence
unit of that Corps) agent, and then an MI5
agent, Keeley worked undercover in the IRA as
a civilian. He operated predominantly inside
the IRA’s South Down Brigade, and in South
Armagh and described his experiences killing
police and British soldiers in a self-aggrandising
book ‘Unsung Heroes’. He was to the fore in
pioneering the use of fl ash guns to detonate
bombs.
In 1990 Force Research Unit (FRU) dispensed
with his services, precipitating a long descent.
He was fi rst told to report to MI5. But when,
after he supplied the phones and a fl at to be
used in the operation, an attempted 1994
assassination of a senior RUC O cer in Belfast
went disastrously wrong for an IRA active
service unit and led to multiple arrests, Keeley’s
cover was blown. He claimed he was
interrogated after the débacle by Freddie
Scappaticci, who was also compromised.
CID agent
Multiply compromised himself, he walked into an
RUC police station in Belfast o ering his services
to one of its Criminal Investigation Department
(CID) o cers in 1996. From now on he would
inform to the CID. According to Deirdre Younge, a
former producer of RTE’s ‘Prime Time’ programme,
writing on the coverthistory.ie website: “As
dissident activity was funded by the proceeds of
‘ordinary’ crime Keeley wasn’t just an informant,
he also created many of the frauds and scams
used to entrap participants usually on the fringes
of Republican movements”.
In 1990, according to ‘Unsung Hero’, Keeley
was involved in one of three ‘human bomb’
events in Northern Ireland at Cloghogue that
involved the kidnapping and attempted murder
of John McEvoy who had served members of the
British Army in his petrol station.
In 1992, policewoman Colleen McMurray, 34,
was killed when the IRA launched a mortar attack
on her police vehicle. Her colleague, Paul Slaine,
lost both his legs in the attack but survived.
20 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 21
Keeley has confessed to the crime.
In its report, the Police Ombudsman was
critical of the RUC’s Special Branch unit for not
providing police colleagues with information
about Keeley. The Ombudsman, said that Special
Branch had “signifi cant intelligence about Person
A’s possible role in the development of detonation
technology and possible links to previous IRA
activity” and, therefore, this individual “ought to
have been treated as a suspect. I have not been
able to identify any legitimate reason why this did
not happen”.
Village’s FSS source alleges Keeley was also
involved in running brothels and ‘refuges’ and
that he raped and abused women who sought
protection and shelter.
In 2004, IRA torture houses in Omeath, County
Louth, were detailed in a document handed to the
Garda by a victim pressure group. It also
contained the names of eight IRA men who
allegedly supervised the torture, many of whom
were double agents including the head of the
IRA’s ‘nutting squad’, John Joe Magee, a former
British Marine; Stakeknife, Freddie Scappaticci,
his second-in-command; as well as Mooch Blair,
who along with Keeley is still alive. It is
extraordinary that there have been no
prosecutions in this jurisdiction against the
perpetrators of murder from these killing houses.
There is no justifi cation, legal or moral, for Garda
inertia.
Dissident Real IRA agent
After the 1994 IRA Ceasefi re, Patrick ‘Mooch’
Blair, Keeley’s mentor in the IRA, joined the
dissident Real IRA; and Keeley followed him.
Blair, former commander of an IRA Active Service
Unit in South Down. Keeley supplied Blair with
‘equipment’ and technical back-up. Both men
were bomb makers.
At the Smithwick Tribunal one of Keeley’s CID
handlers conceded he was “a Newry wide boy”
whose only “use as an informant was because he
would run with the wolves”. He also stated he was
a “compulsive liar, a fantasist, a con man of the
highest order and an intelligence nuisance”.
Smithwick Tribunal
The Smithwick Tribunal was set up in 2005, by the
Irish Government on the advice of Michael
McDowell, then Minister for Justice, as a perceived
sop to Unionists who were being leant on to
accept inquiries into loyalist atrocities. It sat in
public in Blackhall Place from 2011 until 2013,
examining the possibility of Garda collusion in the
deaths of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and
Superintendent Bob Buchanan, of the RUC who
were murdered north of the border in March 1989,
after a brief meeting in Dundalk Garda Station.
The Smithwick Tribunal ended up in 2011 with
a strange, abstract, fi nding of “collusion” in the
murders of the two RUC men. Though it found “no
smoking gun” in Dundalk, the Tribunal weakly
decided there was indeed less specifi c evidence
of “collusion by gardaí” in the murders. Dutifully,
Enda Kenny described these findings as
“shocking” and a public and media jaded in
a airs Northern determined rather vaguely to
remember that Smithwick was about a search for
evidence of collusion which it had somehow
found. What is extraordinary is that Smithwick
provided no name for the ‘colluder’, though it
clearly for a long time thought it was Owen
Corrigan – even though it wasn’t. One of the
reasons for this is that there may in fact have been
no Garda colluder, a big embarrassment for those
who felt a tribunal needed to be instigated and,
worse, for those who conducted the inquiry
without ever drawing attention to the inaccuracy
of the premise that led to it but who saved face by
continuingly, through the eight years of its
existence, pretending there was one, albeit with
less and less specifi city.
Smithwick was swayed into its collusion
abstraction by the PSNI (which succeeded the
RUC) giving untestable, very-late evidence to the
Tribunal privately naming a fourth garda who was
more plausible than Owen Corrigan as the
colluder.
Keeley’s evidence led to false
perception of need for Tribunal
Smithwick always focused on Corrigan as the
colluder because the Cory Inquiry, which
prompted the Smithwick Tribunal, unduly relied
on the 2003 evidence Keeley – now challenged
by a source who spoke to Village – that Corrigan
gave deadly information to the IRA about the
RUC men. Corrigan was subsequently beaten by
the IRA. Keeley told the Cory inquiry “I knew that
Corrigan, who was stationed in Dundalk, was
passing information to the Provisional IRA”. In
its report the Smithwick Tribunal stated [at
15.1.2]: “This statement was a key factor in
Judge Cory’s decision to recommend the
establishment of this Tribunal, and Kevin Fulton
was therefore an important witness before this
Tribunal”. In a 2020 article in Village, Deirdre
Younge, wrote “Village has concluded that the
evidence of {Keeley, who gave evidence to
Smithwick as Fulton] to Smithwick was intended
to confuse” and she noted “Even a benign
interpretation suggests Fulton misled Cory”.
Village’s sources say he boasts that he did this,
not in pursuit of some labyrinthine secret-
service agenda, but to “boost his own
credibility”.
Keeley murdered good citizen,
Tom Oliver
In any event, Keeley actually seems to have later
changed his story (when giving evidence to
Smithwick in 2011) to say that Corrigan gave
information to the IRA only about a 37-year-old
Cooley farmer, Tom Oliver, who called the Garda
— as a good citizen — about arms he found on his
land. An Phoblacht then accused him of passing
on information to Garda Special Branch. Oliver
was kidnapped, allegedly interrogated by
Scappaticci and subsequently murdered. Keeley
says he pulled one of the triggers. The FSS source
says in a statement he has made to police in
England, that Keeley still laughs about the
incident. The changed story was that Corrigan
gave information about Oliver, not about the
doomed RUC men; but even the changed story
was expressly and ignominiously disavowed by
Smithwick, under pressure in a High Court case,
to the extent it implied that Corrigan’s information
led to Oliver’s death. In other words, everything
Oliver was kidnapped and
subsequently murdered —
by Keeley — who, the FSS
source says in a statement
he has made to police in
England, still laughs about
the incident
Omgh: worst trocity of the Troubles
22 October/November 2023 October/November 2023 PB
related to Keeley collapsed, despite Smithwick’s
naive paean to him.
He gave a vivid description of the night of the
abduction and of how Oliver was carried in the
boot of a car (though apparently elsewhere he
has said it was a van) to his interrogators, the
IRA’s ‘Nutting Squad’, and his death.
Omagh Bombing
Despite massive surveillance, the so-called ‘Real
IRA’ bombed Enniskillen, Moira, Lisburn, Belleek,
Newry and Banbridge in 1998, intending to
destabilise the Good Friday Agreement of April
that year.
On 15 August 1998, despite surveillance
following a string of bombings detailed below,
came the so-called ‘spectacular’ – Omagh
bombing which killed 29 people and injured 200
others.
In 2021, Village ran a cover story saying the
Omagh bomb had been “prepared” by Mooch
Blair, Keeley’s IRA mentor, who Keeley said was
also a double agent. Keeley claimed he warned
his RUC handlers 48 hours before the bomb, that
Blair had prepared the bomb and that something
big was about to happen, indicated by the fact
that the potency of the bomb is lost after two or
three days.
The RUC claims the message got garbled both
in the chain of command in CID and between CID
and Special Branch, the people who would have
acted on it. Keeley says the reason for the failure
was to protect his identity.
He said he didn’t know the intended location of
the bomb but it was huge and imminent. The
destination of the bomb was apparently only
made known by the Continuity IRA to the Real IRA
bomb makers the morning of the explosion. That
morning too Keeley’s handler confi rmed to him
that he had put the intelligence into the police
system. Keeley himself not untypically claimed to
be in Tenerife on the day. However, this is belied
by Village’s FSS source who says he took a call in
Northern Ireland less than 24 hours before the
bomb went o .
In 2001, Keeley submitted evidence of his side
of the story to the Northern Ireland Ombudsman,
who championed his intelligence, called for a
public inquiry and also persuaded High Court
Judge Mark Horner to call for a new Human Rights-
compliant investigation into the bombing which
was conceded by Secretary of State Chris Heaton-
Harris in February 2023 and will be chaired by
Lord Turnbull.
The Ombudsman concluded that:
“Even if reasonable action had been taken, it
is unlikely the Omagh Bomb could have been
prevented on Fulton’s Intelligence alone”.
However, she has since said that she believes the
Omagh bomb could have been stopped. She
believed Special Branch had indeed received
Keeley’s intelligence and noted “with great
sadness”, that:
“The judgement and leadership of the RUC Chief
Constable (Ronnie Flanagan) and Assistant Chief
Commissioner, Crime (Raymond White) have been
seriously fl awed. As a result of that, the chances
of detaining and convicting the Omagh Bombers
have been signifi cantly reduced”.
As regards the perpetrators of the Omagh
atrocity, the late Colm Murphy, ‘Continuity IRA’
leader, was the organiser of the bombing. He was
jailed in the Republic of Ireland for it but released
when statements relating to his police interviews
were found to have been altered by two gardaí.
Seamus Daly, who allegedly drove the bomb
car to Omagh, was also found civilly liable,
though a criminal case against him collapsed in
2016. Several others were also found civilly liable
though no money has ever been paid to victims.
It has been widely acknowledged that Keeley
attended a meeting in Newry that planned the
bomb and that he drove the car south of the
border from where it had been stolen in
Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, in the
hours before the bomb exploded. According to
Raymond White MI5/GCHQ had the bomb team’s
mobile phone number or numbers weeks before
Omagh and listened ‘live’ to their conversations
as they drove North. White notes that although
the RUC had no capacity to intercept in the
Republic GCHQ did. Blair received a call on his
mobile from the Omagh bomb car within seconds
of the explosion, something he has described as
a “coincidence” but is unlikely to be. A source
from the Joint Services Group (JSS) which
superseded the FRU, told Village that a gathering
including Keeley’s wife and a number of others
listened in to Keeley, less than 24 hours before
the bombing, in a conversation from which
Village understands it was evident to all that
Keeley was being told to “get out of the way”.
None of these people including Keeley did
anything at that stage to stop the bomb. The JSS
source argues between driving the car and
making the bomb Keeley was the most central
force in the atrocity.
Post-Omagh investigations identified the
unique bomb methodology which is said to have
been defi ningly identical to that used, allegedly
by Mooch Blair, by the IRA in the 1998 pre-
ceasefi re London Docklands bomb. alive
The di culties fi nding the bomber derive from
Keeley’s intertwinedness with a miasma of secret
and other military and police authorities bound
to protect him. But it seems Omagh was
perpetrated by a psycho who worked, mainly at
least, for the RUC’s CID.
Keeley now
The Sunday Times legal team, defending the
newspaper against a libel action brought by ‘Slab’
Murphy which was heard in 1998, employed
Keeley to gather information for it. In 2014, the
Belfast High Court ordered him to pay damages
to Eilish Morley, the mother of IPLO member Eoin
Morley, shot dead at age 23 by the IRA.
Keeley’s allegations to the Ombudsman
shuttered his career as a double agent and he
currently lives in London – he recently moved
from Battersea – with his wife from whom he
claims to be divorced, in a fl at where he often
indiscretely entertains the media and others,
and boasts about his deeds. He lives a colourful
life. He has conducted surveillance on behalf of
far-right English anti-Islam activist, Tommy
Robinson. He claims to have run a brothel
opposite Newry police station and, separately,
women’s refuges. He ran a pornographic
magazine. He has sued the Crown, claiming his
military handlers cut o their connections and
fi nancial aid to him, though the PSNI pays for his
accommodation. He has never even been
interviewed about the Omagh bombing.
According to the Irish News in 2022 he faces up
to 25 lawsuits “in connection with a series of
paramilitary murders and attacks”. Some of
these are against the UK’s Ministry of Defence
which is settling many of them. KRWLaw, which
represents many of Keeley’s victims, has called
for a public inquiry.
The Good Friday Agreement certainly did not
provide any sort of amnesty for crimes which had
not been prosecuted, though the British
Government’s Legacy Crimes legislation is
nearing passage in Parliament.
The absence of criminal charges from the UK,
and even more notably from the Republic, is a
suppurating stain on our justice systems.
The absence of criminal charges against
Keeley from the UK authorities, and even
more notably from those in the Republic, is a
suppurating stain on our justice systems
October/November 2021 • Issue 75
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EXCLUSIVE Maria Bailey tells her story: treated unfairly by Fine Gael and Varadkar
Judge James O’Connor and misconduct in public office | Ray Bates, climate contrarian | Whistleblower legislation
Profile: Catherine Martin | Monk may take down retired superintendent | Plastic in Turkey | Roger Casement poem
Michael Smith | Frank Connolly | Frank Mulcahy | Suzie Mélange | David Burke | Deirdre Younge | Edmund Honohon
David Langwallner | John Gibbons | Gerard Cunningham | Conor Lenihan | Kevin Higgins | Tony Lowes
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CLOSING IN ON
OMAGH’S BOMBERS
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Prick ‘Mooch’ Blir mde bomb nerby, dys before
he wors rociy in he Troubles.
- Deirdre Younge on he Rel IRA, Fulon, Omgh, Blir, Smihwick nd Judge Mrk Horner
Village mgzine, October/November 2021
