Collusion on both sides of the border, Irish government and Garda have plenty of blood on their hands as well...
There was some Garda collusion in the Dublin Monaghan Bombings 1974 but they was helping British government commitments in Ireland, the top Garda in 1974 was working with the British MI6 OR MI5 other members of the Garda were also working with the British intelligence.
http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/Sunday_Times/arts2010/nov7_McCoy_wont_be_spooked__LClarke.phpby Liam Clarke, Sunday Times)
We got a blast last week when a retired member of the garda special branch, John McCoy, pleaded privilege when asked under oath if he knew Fred Holroyd, a former British Military Intelligence officer with links to MI6. A long story lies behind that question.
McCoy was giving evidence by videolink from Dublin in the trial at Belfast Crown Court of Gerry McGeough, who has denied the attempted murder of a UDR soldier 30 years ago. The former garda detective denied knowing Holroyd, but also claimed privilege. Asked why, he replied: "I didn't want to pursue it to protect the state."
He added: "My reputation has been linked to this man by numerous statements and articles in the papers and this gentleman said he knew me."
That is indeed the case. Holroyd has said that McCoy's British intelligence codename during the 1970s was "the Badger", and that he was regarded as a key asset who had regular meetings with military intelligence officers and "froze" border roads to facilitate incursions. McCoy denies all this.
However, in 2003, the Barron report into the Dublin/ Monaghan bombings did show an association between them, though it discounted some of Holroyd's claims and put an entirely different interpretation on others.
I don't believe that Garda McCoy was ever a British agent, in any sensible meaning of the term. In common with Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour party, McCoy suffered two strokes of bad luck. He had the misfortune to be listed, without his knowledge, as an agent by a foreign intelligence agency. And he was linked to an intelligence officer who turned on his own side.
In the case of Foot, it was the KGB who claimed him as one of their own in the late 1940s. Nowadays we remember that as Stalin's Russia, but at the time the USSR was seen by many as Britain's gallant wartime ally in the successful fight against fascism, and indeed an ally of progressive forces throughout the world. Foot was first editor and then managing director of Tribune, a left-wing Labour paper, and was naturally delighted when Soviet diplomats started to visit him, expressing support for the newspaper's editorial stance, and buying advertisements for bodies like British Soviet Friendship.
He didn't realise at the time that the only "diplomats" allowed to meet westerners were members of the KGB. His contacts were filing regular reports of his political musings – the sort of musings he would have shared with anybody – to Moscow and classifying him as an agent of influence.
They gave him the code name Boot. Nobody might have ever found this out if one of the KGB officers with knowledge of the files hadn't turned out to be Oleg Gordievsky, who defected to the West and wrote a book after the fall of communism. It was serialised in The Sunday Times. The newspaper consulted two retired KGB officers – Mikhail Lyubimov and Viktor Kubeykin – and published a story saying the KGB considered Foot their agent. Foot sued and received substantial damages.
The message seemed to be this: just because some spook claims you as his agent, it doesn't mean you have betrayed anything, or even knew a thing about it.
Mary McAleese, now the Irish president, suffered a similar, if lesser, embarrassment during her 1997 election campaign. Details of her frank exchanges with an Irish civil servant while she was a professor at Queen's University Belfast were leaked to the press. Her unguarded comments were reported back to Iveagh House in Dublin, and she was described as a Sinn Féin sympathiser before the IRA ceasefire. McAleese argued that her comments had been taken out of context. She had been talking about efforts to persuade the IRA to abandon violence in the light of Sinn Féin's political progress.
I believe something similar may have happened to McCoy. In 1987, when the Holroyd allegations surfaced publicly, he gave me an on-the-record interview in a bid to clear his name. He was worried because Rear Gunner, a gossip column in Republican News, was hinting that he was "the Badger", an as-yet-unnamed garda branded a British agent by Holroyd.
When I met McCoy he was stationed in Monaghan, though he was a native of Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland. He explained that he had chosen a career in the gardaí rather than the RUC because he considered himself a nationalist and enjoyed playing Gaelic games at a time when the GAA banned members of "crown forces" from their teams.
Nevertheless, as a northerner and a Special Branch officer in a border station, he was given the task of liaising with the RUC to improve intelligence co-operation. This was confidential work. Throughout the early Troubles, security and intelligence exchanges were politically sensitive. They were certainly not the routine matters they are today; people did not give press interviews and pose for pictures afterwards.
The Barron report looked in detail at McCoy's role, and the investigators interviewed both him and Holroyd. The report quotes a statement, from a garda chief superintendent, that at the time "all garda officers serving on the border were encouraged to cultivate intelligence contacts, and to protect the anonymity of those contacts even from their superiors".
Barron added: "The fact that Holroyd claims no money changed hands is further evidence that the relationship was one of mutual exchange of information, rather than one of garda 'agent' and British Army 'handler'."
In 1987, McCoy was worried that the allegations could affect his security or result in his being made a scapegoat. He showed me the Scott medal, a garda decoration, which he had received for saving the life of a republican. He insisted that his job was liaising with the RUC, though they sometimes brought Englishmen in plain clothes with them. These appear to have included Holroyd and Bunny Dearsley, a field intelligence officer who may have invented the "Badger" code name when reporting the meetings to his superiors.
McCoy also met a British bomb-disposal expert, whom he introduced to his Irish opposite number. The Irish officer later accused the Englishman of offering money when McCoy left them alone. Justice Barron found that "leaving aside the apparent offer of money, the idea of an exchange of information between British and Irish EOD [explosives ordnance disposal] officers was entirely in accord with the official policy of both sides at that time".
Which was more or less what McCoy told me back in 1987, though the interview caused a stir at the time. Sean Flynn, then The Irish Times's security correspondent, reported the following week that "in garda circles, the interview is seen as a signal to more senior officers that Detective Garda McCoy may be prepared to disclose further details of garda liaison with the British Army at that time, if any disciplinary action is taken against him". McCoy told me that, after the interview, he was warned not to talk to the press about these matters again. Which may go some distance to explain why this quietly spoken country constable remained tight-lipped about his brush with the spooks when it came up in Belfast's High Court last week.
November 8, 2010