By David Burke.
garda
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A fortnight ago, I gave evidence at the Disclosures Tribunal. I spent almost four hours in the witness box in Dublin Castle over the course of two days. Most of what I said was the subject of a blackout by the establishment media, as I suspected it would be. For some time, I have been an outspoken critic of RTÉ and the Denis O’Brien media because of their close relationships with government and the Gardai which are so harmful to democracy and the public good. In 2012, before Sergeant Maurice McCabe came to public prominence, I got a call one day at my office in the Irish Independent from his father. He asked if I would be willing to look at allegations his son was making about corruption in the force. At the time, I was the newspaper’s Chief Features Writer and had been working on a number of cases of garda corruption, mostly unsolved murders. Mr McCabe explained this was why he had contacted me. My investigation into the 1985 death of Fr Niall Molloy had just led to the ‘re-opening’ of the case and my stories were generating interest among citizens who were having their own difficulties with the Gardai. Most of them were bereaved families who believed their loved ones’ deaths had been covered up by the force. My questions to the Garda press office and the Department of Justice about these cases were routinely ignored and I had become a thorn in the side of Commissioner Martin Callinan and his headquarters in the Phoenix Park. I was increasingly alarmed at the depths Garda management seemed willing to go to cover up serious crimes to protect powerful individuals and deny citizens their right to justice and the truth. So when I heard that a serving member of the force had finally decided to speak out, I was intrigued and relieved, and agreed to meet Sergeant McCabe shortly afterwards. Over the course of several weeks, I got to know him and his colleague John Wilson and found their testimonies solid and compelling. They were courageous, honest and driven by nothing but a desire to expose wrongdoing in the force and try to clean it up. All of their efforts to date had failed. I began my own investigation into abuses of the penalty points system, focusing on a number of high-profile individuals who had had speeding fines quashed. One of them was Martin Callinan. By then, it had emerged that certain judges, state solicitors and crime reporters had had penalty points cleared. But now there was proof that the person with overall responsibility for implementing our road safety laws had also evaded them for his own personal gain. At the time, Independent News and Media (INM) was undergoing a period of enormous transition as Denis O’Brien became the largest shareholder. Stephen Rae, former editor of the Garda Review, took over the reins at the Irish Independent. Almost overnight, a wave of fear seemed to sweep through the newsroom. The new regime was planning big changes and there was a strong sense that those of us involved in adversarial investigative journalism might be about to have our wings clipped. It was in this period, I came into possession of a Garda PULSE document identifying a Martin Callinan as the recipient of speeding points that had been quashed. My source believed this to be the Garda Commissioner but knowing my lawyers at INM would not accept this as sufficient proof, I went to the address on the printout to make sure the information was correct. I had a cordial conversation with Mrs Callinan which lasted no more than a few seconds. I told her who I was and asked her if the Garda Commissioner lived at the house. She said he did but that he was away. I jumped back into my waiting cab, looking forward to getting my story published. Little did I know it would lead to the end of my 17-year career at INM. Shortly afterwards, I had a call from Stephen Rae’s then-deputy at the paper, Ian Mallon. He was very hostile and said the Commissioner was furious and had made a complaint of harassment against me. In the days that followed, there was little appetite to publish my story about Callinan and I was subjected to a barrage of criticism and intimidation. I also learned that the then Managing Editor at the paper had been ordered down to Garda HQ over my story. One afternoon shortly afterwards, I was bluntly informed that my job was gone but that every effort would be made to make my departure as financially attractive as possible. When I said I would not be bought off, I was told I could stay on at the paper as long as I withdrew from the work I was doing on Garda corruption. I refused and was forced to take three legal actions against the company which resulted in a High Court apology from the company and compensation. When the Disclosures Tribunal was established in 2017 to investigate an alleged smear campaign by Garda management against whistleblower Sergeant McCabe, I wrote to the chairman Justice Peter Charleton and offered myself as a witness. I believed my testimony would be of interest to it and the public, as it would help to reveal the incestuous links between INM and Garda HQ, and the lengths they were willing to go to to harm those backing up Maurice McCabe’s claims. I have never been in any doubt that my support for his work led to the end of my career at the company. And as I told the Tribunal in early June, it is also my belief that the smear campaign against McCabe intensified after Callinan was exposed for having his points terminated. Shortly after that story was published in April 2013, the repugnant rumours that McCabe was a paedophile started to surface. The ‘Miss D’ allegations emerged and a file was created by TUSLA –
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Justice is not a motif found emblazoned around Donegal. Its outing accounts for much in my home town of Bundoran and elsewhere in the county. In particular the power the late sean McEniff had over local governance is very unsettling – through politics and wealth. He was Fianna Fáil’s longest-serving councillor and perhaps its richest man. His hotel empire extended to ten hotels countrywide including the Skylon in Dublin and the Great Southern in Bundoran. Journalist Gemma O’Doherty and others have alleged that McEniff interfered with the Garda investigation into the death in 1977 of six-year-old Mary Boyle, but it is the power his empire wields over the slot machines that have for fifty years dominated and blighted once-elegant Bundoran that particularly concerns me here. McEniff’s empire traces its foundation to slot machines. McEniff was by far the largest slot machine operator in the town, and ignored the law: his slots would make big pay-outs, just enough to keep the key punters, most of them poor or old – or both, hooked. In 2009 Bundoran town council adopted a submission from the slot-machine operators – McEniff being the largest – to the Department of Justice – as its own submission. the submission had been adopted by the council on the same day at a special meeting which had only three councillors present. The quorum for any meeting was four councillors to be present, though nobody called halt. The submission said Bundoran’s 1,000 machines were “an integral part of the overall Bundoran product, both on and off the season, and a key reason why visitors continue to be attracted to the town”. Growing up in Bundoran, I remember from a young age the dangers of gaming machines. A friend of my mother came down from the North on the bus with her wages on a Friday and rushed up to play gaming machines in the town. By Sunday evening she had to ask my mum for money to get back home, after losing everything. The 2008 Department of Justice report on ‘regulating Gaming in Ireland’ states “the committee is aware of the type of gaming machine which accepts €500 notes. The Act of 1956 provides a maximum stake in gaming machines of 6d and a maximum prize of 10 shillings. The Act is not being enforced and that brings the law into disrepute”. The Garda Síochána, the Revenue and the Council have long since abjured responsibility for enforcing the gaming laws. A 1985 ‘Today Tonight’ programme on RTÉ focused on Law and Order in south Donegal, particularly Seán McEniff’s gaming. Donegal county council sued RTÉ for defamation for what it said about the inappropriate relationship between Donegal [county] council and the Garda but a legal settlement saw it agree to remove the programme, on the steps of the High Court. One of the last convictions for illegal gaming in Bundoran was in 2000 after Charlie Bird did the exposé on illegal gaming here. The solicitor for McEniffs Bundoran Limited said to the Judge at the time that “Charlie Bird should be prosecuted” as he had played an illegal gaming machine. Poor Sean died last year but his empire remains in the family. I recently objected in the District court to renewal of the gaming licence to McEniffs Bundoran Limited. The first Judge and McEniffs’ solicitor removed themselves from the case, the solicitor coming off record after I raised a concern of conflict of interest. I objected as a member of the Public, though I have had my travails with sean McEniff when I was Bundoran’s traffic warden. When I objected that gaming machines accept notes while the 1956 act maximum is 20 cent, the solicitor for the McEniffs Gerry McGovern did not deny it. Instead he just noted that revenue issued certificates and that gardaí and fire officers had no objections. “If there was a difficulty, the gardaí and revenue wouldn’t be long moving in”, he said. But that is the core of the problem. As to my objection that there were too many machines in Bundoran, Judge Denis McLoughlin said that would only be valid in case of a new application. McGovern said it was an application that had been renewed umpteen times and hadn’t been changed. And in Donegal it seems that is the main thing. The Revenue’s webpage states that it up to the District court to “limit the amount of the stakes and prizes and limiting the number of gaming machines”. But Judge McLoughlin was not interested. I have been before the District, circuit and High Courts on occasion, always representing myself. In 2012 in Donegal Circuit Court, Judge Keenan Johnston highlighted that as a lay litigant “She`d be entering the court with one hand tied behind her back”. The dysfunctionality of Donegal from policing to planning to electoral fraud to unemployment to paedophila is now well documented. Sometimes you feel fighting for justice here leaves you very much alone. Patricia McCafferty
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Last month the early departure of another Garda Commissioner drew much media attention – probably more than it deserved, given that the wheels keep turning, the Gardaí still show up for work, and the ship of state creaks on. The change, if any, will be largely cosmetic. But the week before the Commissioner “retired”, a man was shot by a garda in Dublin city. The garda was off-duty. The man was unarmed. This came in the wake of revelations that have seriously damaged the credibility of An Garda Síochána, from the conspiracy to smear whistleblower Maurice McCabe, to the penalty-points fiasco, to doctored drink-driving stats. But there were no signs of concern in our media about the shooting of an unarmed man. Our journalists, instead of querying the chain of events that led to an unarmed man being shot by an off- duty garda, swallowed and regurgitated the Garda line without question. The victim of this shooting was smeared as “known to gardaí” before any inquiry, let alone court case. Due process, but not for the working-classes m’lud. The Sun asserted the victim was a “close associate of well known gangster”. Of course no source was cited for this information. Crime reporting still operates to a standard of citation that would not be acceptable in an undergraduate essay. One can only assume this information came from the Garda, but are they to be trusted? Forgetting the recent scandals that led to the “resignation” of the previous Commissioner, and calls for the current Commissioner to step down also, there are other serious questions about credibility. The Judge in the Jobstown trial, for instance, had to instruct the jury to disregard all Garda evidence . This is all well-known and on the public record, and should counsel caution when it comes to trusting versions of events put forward by our police force. In the case of a shooting, it is folly to accept without question an account that comes solely from the person doing the shooting. This is elementary, self-evident. There is far too much motivation to paint a picture that exonerates them. And unsurprisingly that is the picture that has been painted. Worse, this is the second time in just over a year this has happened. Last summer an unarmed man was shot in the face. This was similarly reported as an “accident”, before any inquiry, and without the remotest semblance of investigative reporting, or even critical thinking on behalf of our journalists. That very day, RTÉ News reported the victim of that shooting was a suspect in a spate of burglaries. This is not some tabloid, this is the national broadcaster. Similar stories were published in a other media. How did they know this to be true? Why do they feel justified in applying uniquely low probative standards? They didn’t say but one can assume they heard it from the Garda, the same organisation whose member carried out the shooting. So, before any inquiry the shooter was exonerated (it was “accidental”) and before any court case the victim was implicated (“known to gardaí”). Despite the fact An Garda Síochána are supposedly being subjected to an ever increasing level of scrutiny by politicians and media both, precisely the same events had played out again. The message this sends is that gardaí can shoot young men without any criticism from our press. Our media remain beholden to the Garda in a sort of dysfunctional symbiotic relationship. Gardaí continue to give them stories at individual discretion, which risks leaving journalists in thrall to a police force that has, we know, been compromised by scandal after scandal, many relating to honesty and veracity. The feudal bestowing of stories on favoured journalists makes a mockery of the concept of independent journalism. It is disgraceful that this situation persists given the ongoing revelations about An Garda Síochaná. No better is the near-silence of the liberal commentariat on this issue. Those who paid easy and empty lip service to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement couldn’t seem to care less when the poor people getting shot are from closer to home. Class remains one of the biggest predictors of life outcomes in this country. More people die of economic inferiority in this country every year than died in 30 years of the Troubles. Even when our police force are shooting unarmed men, Irish liberals side with the establishment, in untypical silence. This “must have deserved it” mentality is a mirror image of the prejudice which allows innocent black men to be killed in their droves in America. In Ireland, those who shout loudest for equality for races, genders and sexualities are hypocritically squeamish about…class. Frankie Gaffney
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An inquest into the death of an Omagh woman who was a domestic-violence victim heard evidence of major failings in Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) handling of events, and of how the the police have subsequently changed their procedures in dealing with persons who reported being assaulted. Thirty-six-year-old Mairéad McCallion died in hospital on February 24th 2014, the day after she told police that her partner Noel Knox grabbed her by the hair and knocked her head against a wall before throwing her out of the house. Knox then called the police because McCallion and another man were outside. It was a very cold day, and she was wearing neither shoes nor coat – and wanted Knox to give them to her. When police arrived, Mairéad McCallion reported the assault. Police saw clumps of hair had been torn from her head. They arrested Knox, and brought McCallion to the custody suite at Omagh Police Station for examination. A senior police officer told the inquest that procedures had now changed. Chief Superintendent Karen Baxter said that all victims should now be taken to an accident and emergency unit. “The custody suite is not a place of safety – it is a place of detention”, she said. Constable Catherine Kilkie, to whom McCallion had reported the assault, said she did not tell the Forensic Medical officer (a police doctor) who examined Mairéad about the blow to the head, or that Mairéad said “her head was a bit sore”. Kilkie told the inquest she did not pass this on as “the doctor usually takes an account from the victims themselves”. There was conflicting evidence as to whether Dr Paul Alleyway, who examined her in the police station, asked her if she had sustained a head injury. Alleyway said “on direct questioning, she denied having a head injury”. Civilian Custody officer Linda Carson who was present during the examination said “I just can’t recall” this question being asked. In his notes, Alleyway recorded having asked the question. These notes were completed on the following day. After the examination, the Custody Sergeant thought it necessary to bring in a domestic Violence officer to deal with McCallion. However, it was a Sunday, no-one was on duty, and he was denied authorisation to bring one in on overtime. There was conflicting evidence from two police officers about McCallion’s condition on the afternoon of the alleged assault. Constable Gareth McCrystal said McCallion’s face was “sloped like she had a stroke” when he first saw her outside the house. When he later returned after taking Knox to Omagh police station, he was “concerned she had changed so much from what I’d seen three hours or so previously” but not enough to call an ambulance. She was slumped in the reception area. Kilkie told the inquest she believed McCallion had deteriorated because she hadn’t taken her medication, and her difficulties in walking were due to wearing heels. In mid-afternoon McCrystal and Kilkie drove her away from the police station in a police car. They were taking her to a friend’s house. She only had the clothes she stood in, and none of the medication she needed. Kilkie gave evidence of only ringing the friend when they were on the way. The friend could not keep Mairéad. During the journey, McCrystal said McCallion was “not speaking but making noises in the back of the car”. When they reached the friend’s house, Kilkie went inside. McCallion began making retching noises. McCrystal asked her “if she could, could she please be sick outside the car”. By this stage, she was not speaking. He rang Kilkie, who contacted paramedics. Paramedics treated her on the scene, then took her to the South West Acute Hospital in enniskillen, where she died of a catastrophic brain injury. It would have been impossible to survive this injury. Mairéad McCallion did not fit the stereotype of a domestic-violence victim, or of an alcoholic. She had been a straight-A student at her grammar school, then went to university in Scotland. There she suffered mental-health difficulties and had to leave. Returning to Omagh she began training as an accountant. Then, in August 1998 she arranged to meet her friend Julia Hughes in the town centre one Saturday afternoon. The Omagh bomb exploded that afternoon: Julia was killed. This was another blow to Mairéad’s health. However, she continued to work. She moved to Coleraine and bought her own place. unfortunately, her depression and drinking worsened. Her mother died, and shortly after she moved back to Omagh. McCallion was unemployed. She drifted into a circle of alcoholics who gravitated around drinking houses in a couple of housing estates. She tried to fight her demons, and enjoyed periods of sobriety. She also formed a relationship with Knox, an unemployed alcoholic about a dozen years older than her. It was a controlling relationship. They lived together in Knox’s brother’s house, but she did not have a key. Knox has never been convicted of assaulting McCallion. He was charged with her murder, though the charges were subsequently withdrawn. Evidence was given that the screensaver on his phone was a picture of her with a broken nose and two black eyes; and that, when he rang her, this picture came up. Police logged five complaints from McCallion that Knox had assaulted her, though all were withdrawn. on one occasion she obtained a barring order against him. Under cross-examination during the inquest, Knox accepted physically putting her out of the house the day before she died. He admitted she fell in the front garden and may have hit her head on the grass, or on a metal manhole cover. That day, in the police station, she spoke to Linda Carson about being a domestic-violence victim. McCallion said “she was going to do something about it this time”. Her sister Josie and half-brother Marcus both told the inquest of seeing bruises on her. Josie said that one time: “it was obvious she had been beaten up, there were
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Twenty years ago, Letterkenny gardai sent a request to Garda HQ looking for selected phone records in the county. The request was part of the Donegal Garda inquiry into the death of cattle dealer Ritchie Barron, which was botched and complaints about which, from an extended family, the McBreartys, led to the Morris tribunal. Morris called for wide-ranging reforms in Garda management. These have mostly not materialised. In 1995 Telecom Eireann was busy preparing for privatisation as Eircom, and part of that process included major upgrades to the computer systems involved in recording and billing for telephone calls. Unfortunately for the Donegal gardaí, that meant their requests for phone records were taking forever. The law on Garda access to phone records was written in 1993, following repeated scandals over the bugging of journalists’ phones by Charlie Haughey and his slippery justice minister, Sean Doherty. In its first year, Telecom Éireann received 234 Garda requests for phone records. By 1997 the number of requests annually had grown to 1300. Michael Diffley, the Crime and Security chief superintendent assigned to phone traces, wrote to the company on 30 January 1997 to complain that 503 non-Dublin phone requests were still outstanding from the previous year. An internal Eircom memorandum on 10 February 1997 showed only 45 of 358 Garda requests had been processed between June and September 1996. Things looked better between September and December 1996, with only nine of 224 requests outstanding. However, from December to February 1997, 62 of 117 requests were not completed. The system was erratic at best. In Donegal, as everywhere else, the delays hampered investigations. After a senior officer at a conference on the Barron case complained about the delays, one garda spoke up. His brother-in-law worked at Garda HQ – maybe he could pull a few strings. “I contacted my brother in law, Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan, who is based in Crime and Security”, garda John O’Toole later told the Morris tribunal. “I explained the situation to him, that we had applied for these through the normal channels, and that we had experienced delays, and that there was frustration, and asked him if he could help us get the phone calls, about the information that we had sought”. O’Toole read off a series of telephone numbers and times to Nyhan, and “asked him if he could speed it up or if he could get the calls”. “And he said he would get back to me. And I think about a week later or a number of days, a week later, he contacted me by phone at the Garda station, and he asked me for the fax number, and he faxed me down information in relation to some of the phone calls. He did say that he was unable to get incoming calls, and was only able to get outgoing calls from some of the numbers”. The fax from Nyhan to O’Toole no longer exists. Since O’Toole did not intend to use it in evidence, and he “wasn’t that happy about the manner in which I obtained it and I didn’t want to hold on to it’ he and another officer ‘decided it be destroyed, and I destroyed that information”. Detective Inspector Patrick Nyhan was not called to give evidence at the tribunal, but he was interviewed by tribunal investigator Michael Finn on 5 October 2004, four days after O’Toole gave his evidence. Nyhan said he asked O’Toole if an official application had been made, and was assured it had. He took down the details, and went to see his chief superintendent Michael Dif ey to “give it a push”, but Diffley was not in his office when he called in. The 1993 Act required that any request for telephone data should come from a chief superintendent, and Diffley was the designated liaison with Telecom Éireann at the time. Nyhan called the GPO Investigation Branch. He spoke to “a fellow who was very helpful”, though he could not recall his name. A week or so later, he received an envelope with a compliment slip through the internal mail system and inside it was “a number of sheets with details of telephone calls”. Nyhan then faxed the sheets to Letterkenny. He said this was the only time he had ever contacted the Investigation Unit looking for telephone records. The word “illegal” is never used in the Morris report to refer to the O’Toole/Nyhan search for phone records. Neither is “unofficial” or “irregular”, both words used at tribunal hearings by barristers as they danced around what O’Toole and Nyhan had done. O’Toole’s own barrister merely referred to “procuring telephone records…through a fast track channel”. The strongest criticism of the operation came from Donegal solicitor Paudge Dorrian who, while questioning O’Toole on behalf of Sergeant John White, said the records were “illegally and improperly obtained”. In his report Justice Morris described the incident as an “informal enquiry”. The “fellow who was very helpful” in the GPO was never identified. Arising out of the incident, the Morris tribunal made two recommendations. Neither has anything to do with protecting customers’ data, as demanded by the Data Protection Act 1988, and safeguarded by the requirements of the Interception of Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages Act 1993. Instead, the recommendations call on the Communications Regulator to ensure that telephone operators respond quickly to Garda requests, and for the Department of Justice to look into storing phone records data from multiple telecoms providers in “an independent databank”. In other words, the lesson the tribunal gleaned from the bypassing of surveillance safeguards was that An Garda Síochána needed more surveillance powers. Whether those recommendations were needed is a moot point. In 2001, Karlin Lillington had revealed that telecom operators were storing phone records for up to six years, and chief superintendent Diffley had told the Morris tribunal that An Garda Síochána could often access call records within “minutes” of a call being made. The Morris report was published in May 2005, just as the Garda Síochána
