http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analys...n-26284218.htmlSean South, UVF touts was all over this pub attack Martin Cahill
had jackshit to do with it.
RUC 'collusion' in replacing bomb gel with putty saved the lives of IRA men.
JIM CUSACK – 04 FEBRUARY 2007
IN OCTOBER, 1993, a package with a note on the back saying it was a book was posted from Belfast to the then Tanaiste, Dick Spring. It was a bomb, a fairly well constructed one that would have killed anyone who tried to open the package. It didn't reach the Tanaiste. It was intercepted at the Central Sorting office in Belfast and made safe.
On the evening of Saturday, May 21, the following year, over 50 members of Sinn Fein - along with members of the Dublin IRA - were enjoying a night of drinking and music in the upstairs function room of the Widow Scallan's pub in Pearse Street.
Downstairs, the public bar was packed, with dozens of local men watching soccer on the television. Around mid-evening, two men appeared at the side-stairs door to the function room. They shot dead the doorman, IRA member Martin Doherty, and planted a hold-all inside the hallway.
The location of the hold-all was significant. The men had been told exactly where to place it. It was a bomb - or so the two Ulster Volunteer Force members who planted it there thought it was. It should have contained around 20lbs of the commercial explosive, Powergel.
If the bomb had gone off, the following would have happened: the horizontal pressure of the explosion would have blown out the side wall of the pub. That wall supported the beams that held up the roof and first floor of the 19th century building. The roof and first floor - along with 50-odd republicans in the function room there - would have fallen downwards on to even more local people in the public bar.
The explosion would also have caused a fire-ball which would have burned to death many people in its direct path and then, almost certainly set fire to the building, killing everybody trapped inside.
A few months later, as the Belfast Enterprise train pulled into Connolly Station on the afternoon of September 12, an explosion occured in a packed carriage. No one was killed or injured but the inside of the carriage was covered in a strange grey, putty-like substance. It was putty, two kilos of it. Who would make a bomb of putty?
Unwittingly it was the UVF. But, in the background, British Army ordnance officers were almost certainly involved. It was they who had been brought a large cache of real Powergel explosive by RUC Special Branch officers and asked to take out the explosive and replace it with something that looked and even smelled like explosive but was harmless.
They then, probably, took the 'explosive' back to their agent inside the UVF agent who had given it to them in the first place and he, in turn, carefully placed it back in the secret hide in north Belfast from where he had stolen it.
The reason behind the RUC and British Army's actions were this: they had left the UVF with something they thought was explosive but was harmless, so they couldn't kill people.
In doing so, they saved lives, lots and lots of them - dozens of republicans and locals in the Widow Scallan's, maybe another dozen passengers on the train, maybe even the Tanaiste.
The Branch men's agent was probably Mark Haddock, the man referred to as 'Informant One' in Nuala O'Loan's "damning" report on the RUC. The report, met with a clamour of condemnation and indignation, has irrevocably sullied the reputation of the RUC in many people's eyes.
The report was accurate in portraying Haddock and his associates in the Mount Vernon unit of the UVF as a bunch of murderers who killed not only Catholics but local Protestants who somehow fell foul of them. The Ombudsman's investigation was a result of a campaign by Raymond McCord snr, whose son, Raymond, was murdered by the UVF men in 1997.
Taken in isolation, the failure to prosecute Haddock and others for this and maybe six other murders seems an appalling indictment, but only if taken out of the context of the environment in which the RUC was operating in the early Nineties.
Northern Ireland was, at the time, on the brink of civil war. The IRA had stepped up its campaign of terrorism to
'In the background, British Army ordnance officers were almost certainly involved'
levels not seen since the Seventies. It was setting off huge bombs aimed at the commercial heart of London. It massacred eight Protestant workmen on their way to work at a construction company in Teebane, Co Tyrone. In October, 1993 - the same month the parcel bomb was sent to Dick Spring - an IRA bomb exploded in Frizzell's fish shop on the Shankill Road, killing nine people. In March 1993, an IRA bomb exploded in a busy shopping street in Warrington, England, killing two children, Tim Parry, 12, and three-year-old Jonathan Ball.
Simultaneously, the IRA leadership was in talks with the Dublin Government and the SDLP in the lead-up towhat would become known as the 'peace process' and the first IRA ceasefire in 1994. The impression that a 'pan-nationalist front' of the IRA, SDLP and Irish Government was negotiating terms for some form of a settlement with the British and American governments was an alarming one for unionists and loyalist paramilitaries.
After more than a decade in which it had stopped bombings, the UVF had returned to carrying out explosions. It carried out attacks on Sinn Fein offices, including one in Monaghan in which, strangely enough, the bomb failed to explode.
The aftermath of the IRA's bombing of Frizzell's fish shop was one of the worst in the entire Troubles with over 30 people murdered in a month, including eight people shot dead by loyalists in the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel, Co Derry. The UVF planned to strike at the heart of the Republic's tourist industry by either blowing up or shooting up a coach load of American tourists.
Remarkably, almost none of this context was included in any of the commentary arising from the O'Loan report in the media here. The RUC Special Branch's undoubted protection of their valuable 'asset' - as such agents and informants are known - was viewed purely in a sense of there being proof-positive of 'collusion' between British state forces and loyalists. In fact, there was the opposite of collusion to commit murder against republicans. The Special Branch's actions in removing the UVF's explosive and replacing it with harmless putty, ironically, saved IRA and Sinn Fein lives as they were the main target of the loyalists.
And, at the same time, the Special Branch was running equally murderous 'assets' in the IRA who were also furnishing them with information and carrying out actions which were also saving dozens, if not hundreds of lives. It has since emerged that the head of the IRA's internal security unit, codenamed 'Stakeknife', was one of their agents, a man who oversaw the 'executions' of dozens of suspected or alleged IRA informers.
While retired RUC officers say they can handle Nuala O'Loan's report - accepting some of its criticisms as valid -they say that they are appalled that the report has, effectively, tarnished the reputation of an entire police force. Some 302 serving police officers were killed and 20 retired members were also murdered during the Troubles. Many were murdered by the IRA in front of their families.
The other aspect of the O'Loan report fallout is that it has played into Sinn Fein's prolonged campaign to reduce the role and function of the RUC to that of a collusionist conspiracy. For years it has been mounting various campaigns citing 'collusion' - from the murder of solicitor Pat Finucane back to the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings. It is part of Sinn Fein's strenuous efforts to rewrite the history of the Troubles in which its military wing played the most murderous role.
