'Bugged' conversations by troops found in Garda station

A cassette tape of "bugged" conversations in a British army barracks on Bloody Sunday was found in a filing cabinet at Buncrana…

A cassette tape of "bugged" conversations in a British army barracks on Bloody Sunday was found in a filing cabinet at Buncrana Garda station in Co Donegal, 25 years after it was seized from a Donegal Sinn FΘin councillor, the inquiry heard yesterday.

Mr James Ferry, a former county councillor and still a member of Buncrana UDC, said that after Bloody Sunday he was given the tape of phone conversations to and from Victoria Barracks that had been recorded illicitly. He was an organiser for Provisional Sinn FΘin and was managing the Bali-Sea public house at Bridgend, Co Donegal, at the time, where "an awful lot of people" from Derry called and he was "being handed a lot of stuff".

The tape, which was played to the inquiry last year, includes snatches of phone conversations by soldiers or officers, who describe the Bloody Sunday incidents as "a pretty good bloodbath" and also talk about "things going badly" and "the wrong people" being shot. Mr Ferry recalled that the tape was played at a Sinn FΘin press conference in Dublin in 1973 while the then British prime minister, Mr Ted Heath, was visiting Dublin.

He said the tape was seized in 1976 when his house was raided by Garda Special Branch officers, and a detective who listened to it had remarked: "That's powerful stuff". Mr Ferry said he did not know what had happened to the tape since. Mr Bilal Rawat, counsel to the tribunal, drew attention to a statement supplied to the inquiry this year by Det Sgt James Leheny of the Garda, concerning the seizure of the tape during a search of the Bali-Sea licensed premises on May 15th, 1976.

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Sgt Leheny's statement also said that, following requests from lawyers for the families of Bloody Sunday victims, he carried out a search of the detective branch office in Buncrana Garda station and found the tape in a secure filing cabinet.

Mr Rawat also quoted from a statement made by Det Supt John McGinley, in which he said that amongst items seized in the 1976 search of Mr Ferry's house were bomb-making equipment, a firearm and ammunition. He (Mr Ferry) had pleaded guilty and accepted responsibility for these items and had been sentenced by the Special Criminal Court. The witness agreed that this was correct. However, in reply to Mr Rawat, he denied that he was a member of the Provisional IRA at the time.

Mr Edwin Glasgow QC, for a number of soldiers, referred to an Irish Times report on the 1973 press conference in which the then president of Sinn FΘin, Mr Ruair∅ ╙ Brβdaigh, was quoted as saying that the telephone tap was "no longer in existence".

Mr Glasgow asked how Mr ╙ Brβdaigh had been in a position to give such a public assurance - "was that because it had been a Sinn FΘin authorised tap or, if there is any difference between the two organisations, an IRA tap?" Mr Ferry said he had been organising in Donegal, not in Derry. The people with whom he dealt were Sinn FΘin, not IRA.

The inquiry adjourned until January 14th.