Tánaiste Michael McDowell has rejected any suggestion that State agencies are trying to hide the truth about the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.
He told the Dáil he was "absolutely satisfied" his department had given "all the knowledge in its possession to successive Dáil committees and to Mr MacEntee", the sole member of the Commission of Investigation into the 1974 atrocities. "It has held nothing back."
The Minister also said there was "every reason to believe that there was involvement at some level of the security forces in Northern Ireland with some of the people involved in that atrocity. That is a serious and grave matter, which I do not believe anybody now seriously discounts, bearing in mind what we know."
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte, who asked whether all State agencies co-operated fully with the commission, also asked if some agencies were claiming legal privilege over certain documents.
Mr McDowell said there were papers relating to one individual "who was apparently staying in Dublin over which a claim of privilege has been made".
He had not seen the papers and was not in a position to "to make any intelligent or reasonable comment on them but I understand the nature of the claim is to preserve the identity of the informant for good reason".
As Opposition parties called for a debate on the report, Sinn Féin's Dáil leader Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin said the Taoiseach had promised a full debate on collusion, and it was clear Mr MacEntee did not get access to all the information, not least the destruction of material held in Garda files and the absence of files which went missing from the Department of Justice.
Mr McDowell said the commission had interviewed ministers from the then government and senior gardaí about their recollection of events. "If they cannot get at the truth, the Department of Justice by itself cannot go further because it cannot disprove a negative." There was no record in the department of the missing records and "those questions fundamentally fall to be answered by the people who were involved in these affairs at the time".
Mr McDowell said he was concerned with the "need to ensure records are properly dealt with now, regardless of what happened to these records in the 1970s".
"The people who occupied my position at that time should be in a position to" say what happened in the 1970s "but perhaps they are not. In all good faith, perhaps they are totally incapable of assisting with finding out what happened in this regard."
He pointed out that there was no extradition at the time and this was defended on both sides of the Dáil. He added that "to attack the Fine Gael/Labour government of the time by suggesting it did not deliver an adequate response to those bombs is something which people can have the luxury of doing but it was in a fight to preserve democracy on this island and to save this country from a conflagration which would have involved tens of thousands of people being killed, if certain people had their way".
