The Garda unit in last month's armed siege, in which a Co Longford man was shot dead, achieved poor results in a military marksmanship course.
Nine members of the unit participated in a four-week training course at The Curragh in the use of new Austrian sniping rifles acquired for gardai. It is understood that seven of them failed the course.
They were training with the new 7.62mm Steyr SSG-P sniping rifles, which have a range of 800 metres. The Garda is believed to have acquired nine of these.
According to Army sources, the members of the Garda unit had difficulty in a number of areas of the training, particularly the practice of regularly "zeroing" the weapon sights.
The course lasted for four weeks and the Abbeylara siege occurred in the middle of it. The gardai returned to The Curragh after Easter and completed the course.
The course was designed to help participants achieve a general marksmanship standard and involved judging distances as well as firing at targets. The general standard in marksmanship is achieved by a high percentage of infantry soldiers.
However, the Army also has a number of highly-trained snipers with much more refined skills. These soldiers, mainly members of the Army Ranger Wing, can hit very small targets at the upper end of their weapons' effective range. These personnel were not deployed at Abbeylara.
It is not known if any of the new rifles were deployed by the Emergency Response Unit at Abbeylara on April 19th. The weapons seen outside the Carthy home were German automatic assault rifles, sub-machineguns and an automatic assault shotgun which can be used to blow doors off hinges.
After a daylong standoff, during which John Carthy fired several shots, he was killed as he left the house and refused to surrender his shotgun.
Army sources have expressed surprise at the type of weapons deployed at Abbeylara. There were no "less than lethal" weapons, which would have badly injured but not killed Mr Carthy. Nor was tear-gas used.
By coincidence, on the same day that Mr Carthy was killed, the Army was engaged in testing "less than lethal" weapons at the Glen of Imaal firing ranges in Co Wicklow. These weapons include shotguns which fire hard plastic bullets. They are designed to temporarily disable and cause enough pain to render a victim harmless.
It is understood that Mr Carthy was hit by two bursts of fire from an assault rifle. Gardai say he was fired on after he pointed his shotgun at officers and refused to throw it away. The incident is the subject of an internal Garda inquiry headed by Chief Supt Adrian Culligan.