A year ago the then opposition spokesman on justice, John O'Donoghue, promised that if Fianna Fail was returned to office after the forthcoming general election, the circumstances of the murder of John Corcoran would be "fully investigated".
John Corcoran was a Garda informer within the IRA who was murdered by the IRA on March 22nd, 1985. Another Garda informer within the IRA at the time, Sean O'Callaghan, has acknowledged repeatedly that he personally murdered John Corcoran in a field outside Tralee, but that before he did so he alerted gardai to the imminent fate that awaited Corcoran if they did not intervene.
John O'Donoghue is now Minister for Justice, and last week his Department was asked what had been done about the promise to ensure that this case would be "fully investigated". The Department responded by stating: "Within weeks of coming into office the Minister (John O'Donoghue) sought a full report on all aspects of (this) case from the Garda authorities. . . He (the Minister) understands that the report is imminent."
Any investigation of this case would require, as a preliminary, that an interview would take place with Sean O'Callaghan, the person who acknowledged as far back as 1988 that he personally perpetrated the murder and that he personally informed the gardai in advance of the murder. And yet, at least up to a week ago, no effort had been made by the Garda authorities to interview O'Callaghan at all. They had not bothered to attempt to get his mobile telephone number, which is freely available.
Indeed, for almost a decade gardai have made no effort to interview O'Callaghan, although from 1988 until 1996 he was in jail in Northern Ireland and they could have contacted him at any time. And the gardai are, apparently, persisting in this approach, in spite of an explicit instruction from the Minister for Justice to "fully investigate" this case.
So what is going on within the Garda to explain this extraordinary obstinacy? The answer may lie, at least in part, in the evidence of a complicity by gardai in the murder of John Corcoran.
SOME senior officers are dismissive of O'Callaghan's claims to have been involved in the murder of Corcoran. But even the gravest scepticism about the claims of O'Callaghan could hardly justify the failure to engage in the preliminary step of interviewing him, especially in view of the very explicit and detailed information he has already given about this murder.
This scepticism on the part of gardai is even more curious, given that they freely acknowledge that Sean O'Callaghan was one of their most valuable informants ever from within the IRA. Both gardai and O'Callaghan agree, for instance, that he (O'Callaghan) was the one who tipped gardai off about the attempted importation of arms on the Marita Ann in 1984. It is also agreed by them that O'Callaghan was the person who tipped off the authorities about an IRA plan to murder Prince Charles and Princess Diana in London in the early 1980s.
So how could the claims of a man whose information was once so highly prized now be dismissed so casually as not to justify even the minimal step of speaking to him about what he has said about the murder of John Corcoran?
If Sean O'Callaghan were not implicated in the murder of John Corcoran, why would he now be acknowledging - under pressure, in some media interviews - that he was. O'Callaghan is now deeply embarrassed by his previous revelations about his part in this murder, to the point of implicitly lying about it whenever possible.
For instance, in newspaper articles and interviews on his release a year ago from jail in Northern Ireland he referred to himself repeatedly as a "double murderer" - an acknowledgement only of his part in two murders, these being in Northern Ireland in the 1970s - for which he was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment.
He had acknowledged his part in the Corcoran murder to the Kerryman in 1986 and a few years later to the Boston Globe. Clearly, he later regretted this admission and has sought to gloss over it. But, on being pressed, he still confirms his involvement, although now he equivocates over having personally shot Corcoran. dead.
O'Callaghan has claimed to his new revisionist and unionist friends that since 1979 he was engaged in an attempt to subvert the IRA's plans to murder people. It would clearly be less embarrassing for him now to deny his involvement in this IRA murder of John Corcoran precisely at a time when he claims he was trying to prevent IRA murders. He is sufficiently ingenious to invent an explanation of why he once admitted to a murder he knew nothing about.
So his, albeit reluctant, acknowledgement of his part in the murder of John Corcoran has plausibility.
Quite apart from that, it would have been surprising if O'Callaghan had not had an involvement in this murder. At the time (in 1985) he was a leading member of the IRA in the Munster area. The murder of an "informer" in that region could not have taken place without the complicity of someone of his rank within the organisation at the time.
As for the claim that he informed gardai of the plans to murder Corcoran, O'Callaghan clearly has a self-serving motivation in now claiming this. But independently of this claim, how plausible is it that O'Callaghan would not have informed the Garda authorities of IRA intentions to murder an Irish citizen, given that he was regularly feeding information on IRA plans and activities to gardai at the time?
He himself in a recent interview has raised another even bleaker possibility: that gardai did not intervene to save the life of Corcoran lest by doing so they blew the cover of their most valuable informant, Sean O'Callaghan himself. If that is the case, the gardai and/or officials who took that decision were accomplices to murder.
But even apart from that, how plausible is it that, following the murder of John Corcoran, the gardai did not ask their then most valuable informant what had happened to Corcoran? And if it is the case that O'Callaghan then told them that he knew nothing about the murder why would they not say that now? Or if he told them then that he did know about the murder but was helpless to stop it, why would they not say that now?
O'Callaghan himself has raised the possibility that the gardai "sacrificed" John Corcoran. This is a theory also canvassed by a garda involved in the case and advanced (however self-servingly and hypocritically) by a person involved in the IRA in Munster in 1985.
We should be told if our police force was involved in murder.