The discovery of the Clonaslee, Co Laois, bomb factory was probably the single most important blow to the IRA by the Garda Special Detective Unit (the Special Branch) in the 1990s. The discovery came two weeks after the IRA murdered Garda Jerry McCabe in Co Limerick.
The raid uncovered the IRA's main bomb and light mortar factory and caught its three main bomb-makers, Gabriel Cleary, John Conaty and Bryan McNally.
Cleary was one of the IRA men arrested on the Eksund gun-running ship in October 1987. He was a key figure in arranging the shipment of some 120 tonnes of arms, including six tonnes of Semtex, from the Libyan government to the IRA in 1985 and 1986.
He was one of the IRA members who were trained by Palestinian and Libyan military figures in the 1970s and 1980s in Libya and Lebanon. He led the programme to make the IRA self-sufficient in mortars and rockets during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Despite Cleary being such an active and important IRA figure, he had no serious prison record before being captured on the Eksund, along with the former travel agency owner, Adrian Hopkins. Cleary had known Hopkins from the early 1970s, when he lived in Bray, Co Wicklow, and became an active IRA member.
McNally had no serious prison record, having been convicted only once in the mid-1970s of IRA membership after being arrested close to a one-ton cache of explosives in Bray in 1974.
It is understood he supplied the light engineering expertise needed for machining parts of the improvised mortars and hand-held rockets. He was the owner of a small light engineering business, West County Engineering, in Ballymount Industrial Estate, Dublin, which made corrugated casing. He was a moderately successful businessman living in Foxrock, Dublin.
Conaty was a well-known IRA man who had apparently disappeared in 1988. Originally from Ballymun, Dublin, he had no IRA convictions and only two minor criminal convictions in the 1970s for drunk and disorderly behaviour. It is believed he spent the eight years before his capture under an alias acquiring and manufacturing weapons for the IRA.
It is not known what led the Special Branch to the Clonaslee factory. A squad of 13 men, led by Supt Basil Walsh, raided the isolated farm belonging to Thomas Conroy (76) on June 20th, 1996, and caught the three men refurbishing rockets for use against security forces vehicles in Northern Ireland.
There was a brief struggle between the officers and IRA men before they were arrested. The sheds where the men were working contained a fully-equipped small ordnance factory capable of producing significant amounts of light infantry weapons and explosive devices.
Conroy and his bachelor nephew, Michael Cully (47), farmed 26 acres on the slopes of Slieve Bloom. Cully had come home from England to live on the farm in 1988 and, two years later, carried out a major renovation of the bungalow where he lived with his uncle and two aunts.
During the renovation work above ground in 1990, it is believed the IRA built a 20-foot concrete bunker underneath the front of the house. This was accessible from a hidden manhole in the yard behind the house. The bunker was the best constructed of its type ever found by gardai.
The main manufacturing units were in sheds behind the farm. Cully initially claimed, under interrogation, that he had let these sheds to men he had met in a pub and that they were working on hydraulic machinery for other farmers. He told gardai he had no idea what they were working at when his farm was raided as he and a young local man were gathering turf.
Only on inspection by ballistics and ordnance experts over the next few days did the extent of the Garda discovery emerge. The three men had assembled parts for 36 bombs identical to the cache, also containing 36 bombs, found in an IRA safe-house in Tooting, London, in September 1996.
The Canary Wharf bomb, which marked the end of the first IRA ceasefire in February 1996, and the later Manchester bomb of June 1996, almost certainly contained components manufactured in Clonaslee.
Cleary, McNally and Conaty were also adapting and refurbishing Mark VI mortars similar to those used by the IRA to attack Heathrow Airport in 1994. They were also repairing and improving the PRIG (projected rocket improvised grenade) launchers which were regularly used against security forces vehicles. There were 60 PRIGs, 44 Mark VI, 40 kilos of Semtex and many mortar and bomb parts in the sheds.
Although Clonaslee was a blow to the IRA, it only temporarily stopped its arms manufacturing. Last September, a month after its last ceasefire, the Special Branch discovered another factory in a farmhouse in the north-west. Garda sources say they have no doubt other factories have been put in place to fill these gaps.