Pádraig Mac Lochlainn (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As colleagues in this House know, a very serious story has broken today regarding the fact that the PSNI has withheld huge volumes of information from the police ombudsman in the North. This information is pertinent to matters of the utmost importance, particularly to the families who have lost loved ones.

I want to talk about the family of Councillor Eddie Fullerton from my hometown of Buncrana, County Donegal. On the night of 24 May 1991 a group of unionist paramilitaries crossed the Border into Donegal. They took over a family home about 1 km from Councillor Eddie Fullerton's house. They had intimate details and later took the car and a sledgehammer from that family home and made their way to Councillor Eddie Fullerton's home. They came around to the back of the house and knew they would have the ability to do that. They used the sledgehammer on his front door and made their way immediately to his bedroom where he tried to fight them off and he was assassinated. One of the people in that gang gave Eddie the coup de grace, a bullet behind his ear. I have the permission of his family to talk about it in these terms here today. These were not your usual loyalist killers. This was a very serious operation and from the get-go it pointed the finger right to 10 Downing Street.

For all these years the family of Eddie Fullerton have pursued justice, piece by piece, and thanks to the efforts of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, an investigation was commenced called Operation Medina. It has now become a much wider investigation into the activities of loyalists from 1988 to 1994, including, of course, the Greysteel massacre, the Castlerock massacre and the targeted killings of three Sinn Féin councillors and various Sinn Féin members at that time.

The weapons used were taken from a South African shipment, brought into Ireland by the British MI5, given to unionist paramilitaries who then worked in co-operation with British operatives to kill elected representatives on the island of Ireland. What must be of the utmost concern to our Government - whatever about the concerns in the North of Ireland - is that an elected representative from County Donegal, a member of Donegal County Council and a member of Buncrana Urban District Council was killed by operatives of the British state.

I am asking that the request of the family of Eddie Fullerton to meet with the Taoiseach is agreed to as soon as possible. The failure of the PSNI to provide all the documentation to the police ombudsman about covert police operations has delayed the publication of this report. This matter must be treated urgently. I am asking that the Deputy Leader request the Minister for Justice and Equality, Deputy Flanagan, to come before this House next week at the earliest opportunity to make a statement from the Irish Government in response to the serious developments today, particularly on the need to reassure the family of Councillor Eddie Fullerton about all of this.