Workers insist IRA tapping claims could not have been true

TELECOMS STAFF who spent most of their working lives in the Dundalk telephone exchange yesterday ridiculed magazine reports that the IRA had tapped private Garda wires in the exchange.

They claimed the methodology described in the article would have been unnecessarily difficult, technically near to impossible and certain to have been detected.

Retired senior telecoms inspector Tommy Commins told the Smithwick Tribunal the article contained a number of inaccuracies and a confused methodology which showed whoever supplied the information “hadn’t a clue what he was talking about”.

The article in Phoenixmagazine in 2005 claimed the IRA had cut into a cable containing 400 pairs of wires in a cable chamber underneath Dundalk exchange, to tap a line coming from Dundalk Garda station. The magazine claimed the IRA had used the tap to assist them in a number of killings in a three-year period from 1987.

Mr Commins said “my opinion of this [method] is that it is a load of rubbish”. He said if the cable had been slit in the manner described, an audible alarm would have sounded. He told counsel for the tribunal Dara Hayes that the chances of an IRA recording device being hidden in a “jointer’s” equipment box for three years “are nil”. On the possibility of such a box being accessed by the IRA every day, he said “it’s just not possible”.

Contrary to the article’s assertion, no staff in the exchange had been trained by British Telecom operators as a French digital system which was different to the British system was in use. In addition, suggestions that staff were interviewed over the alleged discovery of the tap were incorrect.

“Someone with very, very little knowledge of telecommunications or the infrastructure, or the knowledge of how to do it, contacted the journalist who wanted to write something that a lot of people would believe,” he said.

Technician Peter Clarke said a box containing a recorder “could not go unnoticed”.

A third employee, Fintan Nelson, said he had seen the cables after they had been installed and after it was alleged they had been tapped. If they had been tapped, the cut in the cable would have been visible. “Nothing I saw had changed,” he said.

The tribunal continues today.