We all of us, the Garda Siochana in particular, want to see corrupt or evil gardai punished. So: what is the Government going to do about the retired member of the Garda Siochana, now contentedly living on a handsome State pension, who as an agent of the IRA was directly responsible for the murders of six RUC officers, the entire Hanna family from Northern Ireland, and Tom Oliver, a citizen and resident of this Republic?
While in the Garda Siochana he passed vast amounts of intelligence to the IRA, and even recruited for the IRA from within the force. When this betrayal of his force and of his country was uncovered - by the RUC - far from being prosecuted, the man was merely given a posting which minimised the danger he posed to others.
Who can say what other damage he managed to do while he worked with access to sensitive information? And as extraordinary as his activities is the purblind institutional pride of the Garda Siochana which caused the force honestly to believe it had no mole, and so had no need even to investigate in the possibility of there being one.
Cross-Border
And that really is perfectly amazing, because so many of the killings which he, in essence, organised, were identical, essentially involving cross-Border traffic, of which the Garda Siochana and the RUC had information, but virtually no-one else.
The first such operation took place in May 1985, when a Garda escort for a Brinks Mat security van passed responsibility for the vehicle to an unmarked RUC two-car patrol. Precise information about the intended hand-over had already been passed to the IRA by the rogue garda, and a bomb was detonated as an RUC vehicle passed it.
Four officers were killed. One was a 21-year-old woman officer, Tracy Doak. Her dead colleagues were Steven Rodgers (19), David Baird (22), and William Wilson (28).
This extraordinary compromise of cross-Border security did not provoke any internal inquiry within the Garda Siochana, but merely a public row with the RUC about the location of the firing point, with garda authorities strongly denying it was in the Republic. In fact, that is exactly where it was, but the magnificent irrelevance of the row must have assured the mole that he was safe; as he was and would be and, by God, still is.
Two years later, the information he gave the IRA enabled it to murder Lord Justice Gibson and his wife Cecily. Very possibly Lord Gibson had made life easier for his murderers by booking a holiday through Dun Laoghaire in his own name; but as was to be revealed within a year, the garda mole was vital. No travel agent's computer could have told the killers where precisely the garda escort was going to hand over responsibility for the Gibsons's safety to the RUC. The bomb was waiting there, and the two were killed instantly when it was detonated.
Wrong car
Surely, this should have started alarm-bells. It didn't. A year later, the IRA planned an identical murder - of Judge Eoin Higgins and his wife. But on this occasion, the IRA blew up the wrong car, wiping out the entire Hanna family: Robert (45), Maureen (44) and their son David, aged seven. The IRA's cover story was that its people had picked up the Hanna's car at Dublin Airport in mistake for that of the Higgins's, and that it didn't know the precise location of the hand-over. This was a cover-story to protect its source, who had told the IRA of the precise hand-over point.
But the Higgins couple were unexpectedly delayed. The Hanna's car resembled the Higgins car and passed the bomb at about the right time. Yet even that slaughter did not cause a hunt for the man responsible for so much murder. Two years later, RUC Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan were ambushed while returning from a liaison meeting with Dundalk gardai. In order to comply with the law of the Republic, they were unarmed; and so, unarmed, went to their deaths in an IRA ambush set-up by the garda mole.
Next target
If he had felt the warm breath of investigation on his neck, it does not seem to have inhibited his activities. His next target was Tom Oliver, who had passed on information about IRA activities in the Cooley Peninsula to the Garda Siochana. Nine years ago, this native, citizen and resident of the Republic, was abducted, tortured and murdered by the IRA. We can say two things about this death. One was that no member of the Fianna Fail Government attended his funeral, though the Fine Gael leader John Bruton did: the other was that even his murder did not trigger even a minor internal inquiry into the garda.
That occurred only when RUC intelligence discovered the identity of the mole and informed Dublin. The traitor was then posted to a relatively harmless station. To this day, he has never been before a court and was allowed to serve his time to a retirement from which he can at his ease contemplate the mountain of human misery his treachery caused.
Nationalist Ireland is happy to point accusingly at complicity-with-terrorism in the RUC: it is strangely silent when it comes to confronting similar betrayal of duty in the ranks of the Garda Siochana.