Reports of IRA 'bugging' discounted

Magazine reports that the IRA had tapped into a secure line between Dundalk Garda Station and Newry police were discounted at the Smithwick Tribunal this morning.

Telecommunications engineer Tom Roddy who spent 37 years based in Dundalk said if the IRA had tapped the secure line by gaining access to the telephone in Dundalk “the evidence would be still there today”.

Mr Roddy told counsel for the Tribunal Dara Hayes that an assertion by Phoenix Magazine that the tapping – said to have been carried out over a three year period in the late 1980s was done by individuals trained by British Telecom was unlikely. He said he could not recall meeting such personnel in the exchange in those years and there was a recruitment embargo in place by the exchange operators Telecom Eireann.

Mr Roddy said the operation described in the magazine appeared to involve two areas of the exchange the lower level cable chamber and the main distribution framework above it. He said a tap placed on the wires in the cable chamber would have been a complex operation involving pressurised air seals as lines were protected from flooding by pumped air. When the seal was broken an alarm would sound.

He said interception would involve the opening of the chamber, the opening of an 800 wire cable, the identification of the correct wires, the identification of the ‘jumper wires’ to another part of the exchange as well as heating to seal the air lock. Equipment involved would have included testing equipment and cylinder of gas and a blow torch. The work would have taken about five hours, he said.

While it was clearly possible technically to carry out such work, he said it would have resulted in a “box” being visible in the cable chamber which he claimed would have been discovered. He said this was particularly the case if the interception had been in place for three years, as had been suggested by the article. Work on an interception in the main distribution framework section instead of the cable chamber would have been even more obvious, he said.

Mr Roddy also said suggestions in the magazine article that staff were interviewed about the interception were wide of the mark. He himself had never been interviewed about such a thing, nor was it ever discussed among the staff to the best of his recollection.

The Smithwick Tribunal is inquiring into suggestions of collusion, by members of Dundalk Garda or other employees of the State, into the murder of two RUC officers in March 1989.

Chief supt Harry Breen and supt Bob Buchanan were killed in an IRA ambush on the Edenappa Road in south Armagh minutes after leaving Dundalk Garda Station on March 20th, 1989.