A former government press secretary, Mr Muiris MacConghail, has expressed surprise that only one member of the government in 1974 has publicly defended its actions after a former Supreme Court judge criticised its response to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
Mr MacConghail said he was "taken aback" at the conclusion in the report by Mr Justice Henry Barron that the government showed little interest in the bombings. He did not believe that was the case and said the use of such words left open the possibility of distortion.
He said the result was that the press coverage of the Barron report "at a casual reading" suggested that the government of the time "somehow were to blame for everything".
The former minister for post and telegraphs, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, is the only member of that government to have made any public comment about the report.
Dr Cruise O'Brien, who is in hospital, was quoted in the Sunday Independent saying "by and large everything that could have been done at the Garda level and at government level was done to bring the bombers to justice".
The inquiries ran into a dead end "simply because people were afraid to talk on both sides", he said. Informants would not come forward.
He continued: "Yes, there were slip-ups. But I honestly believe that both police forces, the RUC and the Garda, hated all the paramilitaries who were murdering them all the time. There were bad apples in both forces who were doing things for money with both loyalist and republican paramilitaries."
The former Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who was then minister for foreign affairs, and the then minister for defence, Mr Paddy Cooney, declined again to comment yesterday.
Noting that he was a friend of Dr FitzGerald, Mr MacConghail said: "I'm surprised that the then government didn't take the opportunity to make a robust defence of itself, particularly Dr Fitz- Gerald."
Mr MacConghail spoke to RTÉ's Week in Politics programme and to The Irish Times of his reservations about the report.
He said any suggestion that the then government had "kow-towed" to the British authorities was wrong. He noted that the Fine Gael-Labour coalition had negotiated the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement with the Tory government led by Mr Ted Heath and was determined to defend it after the Labour government led by Mr Harold Wilson came to power.
Mr MacConghail said the judge did not show a knowledge of the political context in which the events occurred. The Labour government had an "ambiguous attitude" to the pact, which collapsed after the strike, because "it wasn't a child they had given birth to".
"They were so taken with the use of the word strike. Being a Labour government they presumably meant not to break them. It was pointed out to them that the Labour part of the \ government were familiar with the word 'strike' in the democratic use of that weapon and pointed out that this was not a strike but a coup d'état."
