Ms Amanda Fullerton:

Regarding Deputy Crowe's question about incompetence in the Garda, I would love to think that it was incompetence, but I firmly believe that it was not. Our experience has been more like contempt and complicity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a robust cross-Border liaison process between the RUC and the Garda Síochána. I had the Ombudsman's team investigate this matter for me to confirm what I already knew. Border liaison officers met on a monthly or weekly basis to deal with counter-insurgency issues, etc. They shared information on a formal and regular basis. I know who the Border officers for Donegal and Derry were.

There was a high-profile murder or assassination in the north west. The liaising was still happening and information was passing back and forth. The ombudsman is going to great lengths to uncover the exact level of information exchange. He is of the Northern Ireland authority, but this matter is incumbent on the Government of Ireland and the Garda, which has never been proactive in pursuing an investigation even at those times when the RUC pushed information in its direction. There were formal meetings, but the result was a blank. The issue was buried and went nowhere and the Garda turned a blind eye.

For us in north-west Donegal, this was happening to the backdrop of the Morris tribunal atrocities. A team of gardaí operating out of Buncrana in Donegal proactively and clandestinely buried arms caches, etc. They were subsequently investigated. I know that at least four of those who were indicted for being liars and corrupt by the Morris tribunal are key to the Eddie Fullerton investigation. It comes as no surprise that the investigation was proactively buried. I request that the Irish authorities get to the bottom of this. For some reason, this was allowed to happen in the case of Eddie Fullerton. It continues to happen.

I am grateful to the Ombudsman's inquiry in the North for digging deep into this matter and doing what it could to find out the extent and nature of the information that was provided to the Garda. At least that has established for my family for the first time some evidence that this issue did not die on both sides of the Border. Some sort of an investigation was ongoing. People were trying to uncover aspects of the assassination. We have a Garda that does not want to follow through with an investigation to this day and some committed members of the PSNI who are doing their job and providing information. We also have Border liaison officers who meet regularly. We now know that key information was exchanged at some of those meetings.

This is ongoing and forms part of the wider investigation that will conclude this year. I cannot say much about everything that I know, but we had a good and positive meeting with the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, in 2006. He assured us that there would be maximum co-operation from the Garda, his team and the North. My mother wrote to Tony Blair. She received a reply from Paul Goggins assuring her that there would be no problems and that there would be a streamlined facilitation of information exchange across the Border. For the first time, we believed that we had a green light to get real work done.

Any feedback that we received from the Garda, particularly in 1993, was to the effect that the Border presented a problem.

We now know that it never presented a problem; it just depended on who the victim was. I would say the Garda Síochána was complicit in some way in the flawed investigation that followed the murder of Eddie Fullerton.

I thank Deputy Pringle for his kind words about my father. We did have an investigative review and quite a few resources were thrown at it. I remember that at the time, in 2003 and 2004, teams of detectives were flown up to Donegal to go over and dig into the investigation. It was meant to be a review of the original investigation. After that dried up and after some campaigning, we received a report in 2006. This is the interim review to which I refer. The interim review was flawed from the outset. My father's name was misspelled on the front of it, for a start. As we mulled our way through the pages, we became so disappointed. It was half a page with double spacing. I have seen so many proper, thorough investigative reports, but this particular one was unacceptable. It is the kindest word I can say about it.

What did jump out from the review was a bit of information about ballistics about which we had never been told. Even though we knew there were convictions regarding this ballistic link to 13 other murders in the North, I had to query the detective chief superintendent and ask whether a follow-up interview with the people who were convicted was requested, but it was not. I asked whether this would be done on our behalf and I was told it would be. This is the experience I have had with An Garda Síochána. I visited Harcourt Street three times. After the meeting with Bertie Ahern, he appointed an assistant commissioner, whom I met three times at Harcourt Street. I drove those meetings. There was no proactive interplay. It was a case of me minuting them and following up the next time on whether they had followed through. To this day we have not received a report from that.

An historical investigation unit in the South would not work for my family. We have had experience of gardaí investigating gardaí and it did not work for us.