Morris TribunalResponsibility for Garda operations ultimately rested with the commissioner, former Minister for Justice Mrs Nora Owen yesterday told the Morris tribunal. Mrs Owen was being questioned about the responsibility for intelligence-gathering in Border regions during the early 1990s.
Tribunal lawyer Mr Anthony Barr told Mrs Owen it seemed there was no designated intelligence officer in the Garda in Donegal at the time.
Retired chief superintendent Mr Seán Ginty had said that he thought it was the Border superintendent's job, but Chief Supt Denis Fitzpatrick, who was Border superintendent at the time, said he was told his primary role was to liaise with the RUC. Chief Supt Fitzpatrick also said he received no training for that role.
"Each thought the other was acting as intelligence officer," Mr Barr said.
"It wouldn't be the role of the Minister to be hands-on finding out who was reporting to whom and who was giving what document to whom in what circumstances," Mrs Owen said. "I'm afraid I can't expand any further than my own assumptions that I would have thought people could have briefed themselves and would have got some instructions."
"Whose responsibility was it to ensure that these things happened?" asked Mr Barr.
"Ultimately the commissioner for the gardaí was responsible for the personnel under his charge," Mrs Owen said. "That's where the buck stops and that's all I can say.
"My own basis on which I worked was that the information we were getting was the best and the truth and the honest situation as it existed in the Garda Síochána and nothing was ever given to me.
"I might have now and again wished I'd had slightly more information about some issues but I never felt that it was being held back from me in any kind of conspiratorial way but, generally speaking, I was well briefed."
Mr Ginty told the tribunal he was "influenced by \ Kevin Lennon's judgment" in dealing with alleged informer Ms Adrienne McGlinchey.
The former chief superintendent said when he spoke to Supt Lennon about whether it might be time to "disentangle from her", Supt Lennon said there might be a difficulty in dislodging her, that Ms McGlinchey "was determined to continue the contact". On balance, he felt it was worthwhile retaining her, he said, and he had conveyed his feelings to Supt Lennon, who he felt would contact him if the situation changed.
The tribunal is looking into claims that Ms McGlinchey, with Supt Lennon and Det Garda Noel McMahon, prepared explosives for subsequent use in bogus Garda arms finds. They deny those claims, and Ms McGlinchey says she was never an informer.
Discipline in the Garda was a "cold, legalistic, impersonal system", Mr Ginty told the tribunal.
He said of Ms McGlinchey: "Her information, while it may have been useful on a few occasions, wasn't all that important in the context of all that was happening in those times."