Martin Ferris (Kerry North-West Limerick, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I apologise I had to leave for 15 minutes. I pay special tribute to Ms Urwin on the tremendous work she and her group have done in keeping that terrible injustice alive and in the public eye and on the work they have done trying to highlight and get justice for the families of those who died, and I think it was said 150 people died in this State. Great credit is due to them. What is embarrassing, from a political point of view, is that the Government has failed to give any funding towards the continuation of the good work the group is doing. Like everybody here, we will make a representation that I hope does not fall on deaf ears, although that happens to be the case in many instances.
I read Ms Cadwallader's book, on which I commend her. She has done a tremendous service to truth and justice by putting pen to paper in this regard. What is striking and very annoying when one reads part of the 2003 Barron report is that the Irish Government showed little interest in the bombings, and when information was given to it suggesting British authorities had intelligence, namely, the bombers, it was not followed up. Again, a huge question mark surrounds the lack of follow through on information given to the Irish Government.
I read Lethal Alliesover Christmas. During the 1970s, in particular, Raymond Murray, Denis Faul and Cardinal Conway continually outlined what was happening in that area, which was known as the murder triangle, and brought it to public and political attention, but there was continuous denial about was happening. All of that has come to pass.
Robin Jackson, Ted Sinclair, James Mitchell, Kerr, the Somervilles and all those who were actively involved in killing innocent people, mainly of the Catholic persuasion, all had an association at one time or another with the so-called security forces and were allowed to continue to operate and carry out the killing of a large number of innocent people. They targeted people because they were Catholics. I read where the GOC encouraged people to use the UDA to protect their communities, irrespective of what it had done. What it was allowed to get away with was disgraceful.

People highlighted it at the time. I remember vividly that it was continuously brought to the attention of the Government here by Fr. Raymond Murray and the then Cardinal Conway. As documented in Ms Cadwallader's book, several meetings took place with the cardinal and members of the British Government at the time, yet nothing was done. It was allowed to continue. I will quote a passage from Ms Cadwallader's book regarding Robin Jackson:

Everything people have whispered about Robin Jackson for years was perfectly true. He was a hired gun; a professional assassin. He was responsible for more deaths in the North than any other person I knew. The Jackal killed people for a living. The state not only knew he was doing it, its servants encouraged him to kill his political opponents and protected him.

It is a major indictment of the British political system that nothing was done to stop this person. It is not that they did not have evidence. He had been arrested. They had raided Sinclair's house, one of the farmyards used in the killings in that area. They had found a silencer with his fingerprints on the gun. They had stopped him in a car and found a loaded gun in the car that was taken from a raid on a UDR station, yet they allowed him continue. To this day the British Government, as is the case with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings and other killings in the South, has not come clean about what happened. It has shut the door on it. As it leads right to its doorstep, it was sanctioned at the highest level that these people were allowed continue.
In one of our last meetings just before Christmas representatives of Families of the Disappeared came before us. One man had lost three brothers, the Reavey brothers who were killed. He met us individually and told us that a very senior RUC officer supplied the weapons that killed his brothers, and he continued to operate for many years after that incident. These were hired killers working for the state, in collusion with the state, to kill either political opponents or to terrorise a Nationalist Catholic community into submission. That is what this was all about.
I have one question for Ms Cadwallader. Regarding her research on which tremendous work was done and on which I understand she got a great deal of support, did she get any help from the Government in the South or from agencies of the Government in the South? It is a personal question but we are coming up against a blank wall. Everybody knows what happened. Everybody knows that the bombers left Mitchell's farm to come to bomb Dublin. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that Billy Hanna was the main person involved in that. Robin Jackson was involved in that but nothing has been done about it. That is from the mid-1970s when Weir and McConnell went public on it. Colin Wallace went public on it in 1997 or 1998 and named those involved in it, but nothing has been done about it. Despite the fact it has been asked to co-operate by two motions passed in the House of the Oireachtas, the British Government has done nothing about this. I would like Ms Cadwallader's comments on that. I thank both witnesses for the tremendous work they are doing and ask them to keep it up because the truth will surface eventually.