Cooney says Barron conclusions are 'wrong'

BARRON REPORT: The former minister for justice, Mr Patrick Cooney, has told an Oireachtas sub-committee that Mr Justice Barron, in his report on the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings, had fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between government and An Garda Síochána.

Mr Justice Barron, he said, had "showed a lack of knowledge on a basic principle of law" in suggesting the Attorney General could have taken an active role in the Garda investigation into the bombings.

Mr Justice Barron's investigation was inadequately resourced, and was based on "documents unknown and unpublished" and the untested evidence of anonymous witnesses, according to Mr Cooney, who was minister for justice at the time of the bombings. The investigation had reached speculative conclusions, sometimes based on "no evidence".

In doing so the Barron inquiry had transgressed its own rules that it would "draw reasonable inferences from credible evidence".

Mr Cooney was speaking at the Oireachtas joint sub-committee public hearing on the bombings, following the publication of Mr Justice Barron's report on them.

The sub-committee will report to the Government in mid-March on whether it believes a public inquiry should be held into the events surrounding the bombings and possible collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and elements within the British security forces.

Mr Cooney believes such an inquiry should be established so that the Barron report could be questioned and documents and anonymous witnesses on which it is based examined.

On the report's conclusions on the 1974 government he said: "We have been damaged and I resent that very much. [The conclusions\] are wrong, totally wrong, and I reject them with all the vehemence that I can."

He said he was interviewed by Justice Barron during two sessions in 2001 and 2002. When he was sent a transcript of the conversation he was "horrified" to see it was inaccurate, inadequate, and "did not fully represent what I said". It was a cause of deep concern.

"Over a period of three years, if that was not a good record, when the inquiry came to talk to other witnesses it wasn't fully informed," he said.

Allegations had been made about him in the report, as a cabinet member, to which he had not been granted a response. "I can't conceive of a more serious charge."

Mr Justice Barron was wrong, he said, in suggesting the government should have in any way sought to influence the Garda inquiry because a police force should always be independent of government.

"If that's not observed and there is political interference ... you don't live in a democracy, you live in a totalitarian state. That principle doesn't seem to have impinged in the way it should on Justice Barron."

The Garda investigation had been conducted by some of the State's most senior detectives, who had a team of 40 at their disposal, he said. However, because the men who led the investigation were now dead it would be impossible to ever find definitive reasons why the Garda inquiry was unsuccessful or did not explore certain avenues.

There had never been a request from gardaí to go to the North to interview suspects detained by the RUC. Even if interviews had taken place and confessions extracted, it was highly unlikely extraditions would have followed because courts in the Republic were refusing to extradite suspected Republican terrorists to the North at the time.

While files relating to the bombings may have gone missing from the Department of Justice, that "did not happen under my watch", he said. The files were still in the Department as late as 1987.

He added that while "every conspiracy theorist in the world clicks into action" upon mention of missing files, most of the missing documents were copies of originals which should still be held at Garda headquarters, Dublin.