Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

I do not want to anticipate a debate by having a half-baked debate on the subject today. The Dublin and Monaghan bombings were an atrocity and there is 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.

I am absolutely satisfied that the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform has given all the knowledge in its possession to successive Dáil committees and to Mr. MacEntee. It has held back nothing whatsoever. Therefore, I immediately reject the suggestion that State agencies are trying to hide the truth from anybody. As the MacEntee report points out, either reports were sent to the Department of Justice by the Garda Síochána and have disappeared or they were never sent. With regard to that proposition, it is not possible 30 years later for the incumbents in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform to throw any more light on the issue.

Mr. MacEntee and the committee in Dáil Éireann considered this issue and took evidence from Ministers in the then Government and senior gardaí of the time as to their recollection of these events. If they cannot get at the truth, the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform by itself cannot go further because it is not in a position to disprove a negative. All it can say is there is no record in the Department of this material and if it was in the possession of the Department at some stage, it has ceased to be so, in circumstances of which nobody has knowledge — if it was not, that raises other questions. Those questions fundamentally fall to be answered by the people who were involved in these affairs at the time.

Different people occupied the different ministerial positions at the time and, at this remove, I am not in a position to say why the Garda investigation was wound down so quickly, what happened to all the papers concerning the investigation or at what level it was discussed in Government. Only the people who were there at the time can throw light on that issue. Efforts have been made, as I understand it, to find out as much as possible from them, and Mr. MacEntee has produced his report. All I wish to say with regard to records in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is that the conclusion I personally have to draw from this, as the present Minister, concerns the need to ensure records are properly dealt with now, regardless of what happened to these records in the 1970s.

I am not in a position to say what happened in the 1970s. The people who occupied my position at that time should be in a position to do so but perhaps they are not. In all good faith, perhaps they are totally incapable of assisting with finding out what happened in this regard. Let us remember that senior gardaí were called before a committee of this House and asked to explain why that investigation was wound down. The public heard the explanations, unsatisfactory as they were, given that memory lapses over 30 years are very significant and people's recollection of events is very different. There is no intent on the part of the Government to conceal or hide anything.

With regard to the transnational and trans-Border aspects of this matter, I am absolutely satisfied the Government has done everything in its power to persuade the United Kingdom authorities to yield up everything in their possession. Whether they have done that to an adequate extent is a different matter, but nobody can level the finger at the Taoiseach and say he has not done his best, meeting after meeting — I have been present at such meetings — to raise this issue and attempt to arrive at the truth.

The year 1974 was the year of Sunningdale, of this murderous atrocity and of many other atrocities, including the Birmingham bombing and the miscarriage of justice which arose from it. Looking back over all of these events, the establishment of the narrow factual truth of each and every event is something which most people want but which is sometimes impossible to arrive at. More and more inquiry into one narrow focus, when other matters are left out of the equation, could sometimes be misleading to the public if it was suggested one could get to the absolute scientific truth 30 years later.

By way of a footnote to that, I will make the following point. People sometimes forget that in 1974 there was no extradition between the two parts of this country. It was the norm in this House in the 1960s and 1970s, and defended across the party divide, that there should be no extradition. Things have changed dramatically but we should not look back at historical events through rose-tinted glasses. They were different times and the Government was struggling for the survival of democracy. 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 had their way.

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