Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I welcome the Minister for Defence to the House. I congratulate the Taoiseach for commissioning the Barron report which was a very worthwhile exercise. I also congratulate the Sub-Committee on the Barron Report and Senator Jim Walsh, my colleague, on the work in carrying the investigations as far as possible at this time. I echo the respect to the Justice for the Forgotten group for pursuing this matter and not allowing it to rest during what certainly appeared to be long years of either embarrassment or indifference.

I have a very clear recollection of the day the Dublin and Monaghan bombings took place. I was in Tipperary and I saw it on the news that night. The event made a deep impression on me at the time. It was a terrible event and those things never go away during the lifetime of those closest to the victims. Any one of us living in the jurisdiction at that time could have been among the victims.

We need to remember the political context. This happened towards the end of one of the more courageous political initiatives, known as Sunningdale. There was an Executive and there were to have been North-South bodies. The bombs in the South were an attempt to kill off that settlement. There was an Ulster Workers' Council strike going on in the North at the same time, with not very much active resistance from the security forces. The event was clearly an attempt to intimidate, from whatever source, the people of this State from pursuing any initiative of that kind. With the benefit of hindsight and more than 25 years later, it is still not fully in place. We have a settlement that is in certain respects and in respect of the North-South bodies not dissimilar to Sunningdale.

It is necessary to draw some distinctions. There has been some discussion of the actions of the Government of the time. As a junior civil servant in the Department of Foreign Affairs I was in Germany during the following years. I was a little surprised at how quickly the events fell out of the arena of discussion and debate. There are some reasons that happened. The Criminal Law (Jurisdiction) Act was only enacted in 1976. Once the perpetrators escaped back across the Border, there was no extradition arrangement and it would have been too difficult for the Government at that time to have sought extradition. The Government was very focused in a single-minded way on the threat from republican paramilitarism which was very real and perhaps was only secondarily focused on the threat from loyalism. Some criticism is justified.

Senator Ó Murchú referred in his contribution to the fact that some people, mainly Unionists, make the argument that one cannot dredge through these issues without upsetting the peace process and political progress. Like him, I agree that one should not be deterred by that type of consideration any more than one should be deterred from cleaning up rackets along the Border for fear of upsetting the peace process. One must do what must be done.

Some distinctions should be drawn between different types of atrocities. The atrocities at Enniskillen and Greysteel, for instance, were dreadful tragedies but relatively straightforward in that the organisations responsible admitted responsibility. Naturally enough, they did not say who precisely had carried them out. There was no suggestion from any other source that questioned or challenged that attribution of responsibility. At least people were clear that in the case of Enniskillen, it was the Provisional IRA which was responsible. I believe this is a slightly different case of collusion or alleged collusion, than in the Finucane case. In that case, it was local forces of various kinds that were involved.

The allegation in the case of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings is that there was assistance, participation or collusion by agents of the British state, by which I do not necessarily mean the local security forces. A person who presented himself to me as a former member of the UDR gave me considerable detail alleging precisely this and I passed a report on the matter to the Sub-Committee on the Barron Report.

As a member of the British-Irish Interparliamentary Body, I had the opportunity of meeting the Secretary of State, Paul Murphy, a few months ago. I put to him strongly that it was in the interests of the British Government to examine this issue and co-operate because serious suggestions have been made that an agent of the British Government who is still in high position in another part of the world was involved. Neither I nor Mr. Justice Barron have any means of knowing whether this allegation is true but it is a very serious one which should be properly investigated.

To return to the political context of the time, a minority Labour Government was in power during a period when the British security services were paranoid about the Wilson Government being semi-communist. This was, of course, pure paranoia. People involved in the security services have gone on record and provided substantial circumstantial evidence of efforts to destabilise the British Government of the time. However bizarre this may sound, part of these efforts involved the Northern Ireland network and part of the aim may have been to wreck relations between Britain and Ireland.

There is no point glossing over that the British Government is deeply reluctant to get involved in inquiries of this kind. While the case of Pat Finucane is a can of worms, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, of which no politician in office in Britain has any serious recollection, probably go even deeper. If this matter is to be cleared up, it will require much more active participation by the British Government than has been evident thus far.