INTRODUCTION.

MI5 and MI6 enjoyed an excellent working relationship with the Garda intelligence unit known as C3, while Chief Superintendent Larry Wren led it, 1971-79.

Wren was moved out of C3 by Garda Commissioner Patrick McLaughlin in 1979. McLaughlin appointed Joe Ainsworth, an assistant Garda Commissioner, to take over from Wren.

Patrick McLaughlin ordered Joe Ainsworth to ‘find out what has been going on over there’ at C3.

Ainsworth was shocked by what he discovered inside C3, concluding it had been penetrated by British intelligence, and he began a mole hunt.

Sir Maurice Oldfield had many dealings with Ireland. He led MI6, 1973-78. Margaret Thatcher appointed him as Northern Ireland intelligence supremo, 1979-80. He died in 1981. Oldfield’s friend and biographer disclosed in 1984 that: ‘MI6’s main success was in establishing agents inside the Garda, the Irish army and government departments. One of the most vital informants was a senior garda officer [who] provided information on the activities of the former Irish premier, Mr Haughey, and other prominent political figures.’

Oldfield liked to celebrate his achievements and was indiscreet with his friends. Hence it is noteworth that Deacon said he considered the penetration of the government of Ireland as his ‘main’ success – not merely one of them.

There is confirmation that MI6 was spying on Haughey. In a letter dated 24 April, 1980, Humphrey Atkins, the UK’s then Northern Ireland Secretary, wrote to Margaret Thatcher, making reference to ‘two recent intelligence reports that throw some light on [Haughey’s] approach’ to forthcoming Anglo-Irish discussions.

Who was the mole?

Ainsworth soon became the victim of a pernicious smear campaign and a series of dirty tricks, the most sinister of which was the Dowra scandal.

In March 1984, Ainsworth made reference in an interview with The Irish Times to ‘a mole [in the gardaí] who should be rooted out‘. He added that the mole was ‘a danger to the State and continues to be a danger to the State because what happened once could happen again and again in many different ways’.

Contents

Dramatis Personae:

‘AGENT DUBIOUS’: an alleged British agent who operated with the Provisional IRA. S/he may not have actually existed and may have been created on paper to justify the unlawful arrest of James McGovern.

AINSWORTH, Joseph: Garda intelligence chief. Victim of a smear campaign after he began a molehunt for British agents in the Irish police.

BARRON, Mr Justice Henry: the retired Supreme Court judge who authored the Barron report.

BERRY, Peter: Secretary-General to the Department of Justice of the Republic of Ireland, 1960–70.

COSGRAVE, Liam: Leader of Fine Gael, 1966–1977; Taoiseach 1973–77.

COYNE, Thomas: Secretary-General to the Department of Justice of the Republic of Ireland, 1949–60.

CRINNION, Patrick: a member of the special detective unit (SDU) of An Garda Siochana assigned to C3, garda intelligence division. Agent of MI6. Arrested in 1972 and convicted in Dublin in 1973.

DOHERTY, Seán Fianna Fáil TD. Minister for Justice, 1982-83. Brother-in-law of Garda Thomas Nangle.

DOYNE-DITMAS, Harold ‘Hal’: An MI5 officer who occupied the post of Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (Northern Ireland) in 1982.

FIGURES, Sir Colin: Chief of MI6, 1982-1985.

FITZGERALD, Garret: Leader of Fine Gael, 1977–1987. Taoiseach 1981–1982; 1982–87.

FRANKS, Sir Arthur ‘Dickie’: Chief of MI6, 1979-82.

GANE, Barry: Senior officer of MI6. Head of a joint MI5 and MI6 station in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s.

GARVEY, Ned: Assistant Garda Commissioner, 1973-75; Garda Commissioner, 1975–78. Judge Barron disbelieved Garvey’s denial of contact with Captain Fred Holroyd who was working for MI6. Garvey was a target of Joe Ainsworth’s molehunt. Garvey spread smears about Dowra to the media.

HAUGHEY, Charles: Minister for Finance, November 1966–May 1970. Leader of Fianna Fáil December 1979–February 1982. Taoiseach, December 1979–June 1981, March 1982–December 1982 and March 1987–February 1992. Arms trial defendant.

HEATH, Edward: Conservative Party Prime Minister of the UK, 1970–74.

HERMON, Sir John (‘Jack’), Chief Constable of the RUC in 1982.

HOLROYD, Fred: a member of the Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU). He worked with MI6.

JOYCE, Joe: journalist and co-author with Peter Murtagh of ‘The Boss’.

JONES, Jack: the man who handled MI5’s dirty work in the 1970s and early 1980s, as deputy DG of MI5, 1976-81, and later as DG, 1981-85.

KELLY, Chief Superintendent Thomas: a member of the Intelligence & Security Branch (ISB).

KIRBY, James: official of the Department of Justice, Dublin.

LYNCH, Jack: Fianna Fáil politician. Taoiseach, 1966–73; 1977–79.

MURTAGH, Peter: journalist and co-author with Joe Joyce of ‘The Boss’.

NANGLE, Thomas: brother-in-law of Seán Doherty.

McCAUL, Michael: MI5 dirty trick expert. He served as liaison between MI5 and Larry Wren while the latter was in charge of C3.

McGOVERN, James: victim of the Dowra affair.

McLAUGHLIN, Patrick: Garda Commissioner, 1978-83.

MITCHELL, Jim: Fine Gael TD. Minister for Justice, June 1981 – February 1982. Opposition Spokesman on Justice, 1982.

OLDFIELD, Sir Maurice: Chief of MI6, 1973-79. Margaret Thatcher appointed Oldfield as Northern Ireland intelligence supremo, 1979-80.

PECK, John: British ambassador to Dublin, 1970–73. Founding member of the IRD, and director of the IRD, 1952–53/4.

SMELLIE, Craig: MI6 Head of Station, Lisburn, 1973–75.

SMITH, Howard: Foreign Office official appointed by Edward Heath as the UK Representative (UKREP) to the Stormont government of Northern Ireland. He later became the director-general of MI5, 1978–1981.

WALLACE, Colin: Psychological operations officer with the British army at HQNI in the early and mid-1970s.

WARD, Andrew: Secretary of the Department of Justice, 1971–86. Target of Ainsworth’s molehunt.

WILSON, Harold: Labour Party Prime Minister of the UK, 1964–70, and 1974–6.

WREN, Larry: Head of C3 in the 1971–79, and Garda Commissioner 1983-87. Target of Ainswodth’s molehunt.

Organisations, terms, locations and acronyms:

C3: Garda intelligence unit responsible for the analysis and coordination of information collected by the SDU.

Dáil Éireann: Irish parliament, located in Dublin.

DoJ: Department of Justice, Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin Castle: Headquarters of the Special Detective Unit (SDU) of An Garda Síochána.

FCO: The Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom.

Fianna Fáil: Irish political party led by Eamon de Valera, 1926–1959, Seán Lemass, 1959–66, Jack Lynch, 1966–79, and Charles Haughey, 1979–92.

Fine Gael: Irish political party led by Liam Cosgrave, 1965–77, who was succeeded by Garret FitzGerald, 1977–87.

G2: Irish Military Intelligence.

Garda Síochána/gardaí: the police force of the Republic of Ireland.

Garda Special Branch: The intelligence gathering apparatus of An Garda Síochána. It is also known as the special detective unit (SDU).

HQNI: British Army Headquarters NI, based in Thiepval Barracks in Lisburn.

IRD: Information Research Department. A propaganda and forgery department attached to the FCO.

ISB: Intelligence and Security Branch of An Garda Síochána (a combination of C3 and Garda Special Branch set up by Joe Ainsworth to bring C3 and the Special Branch under one command in 1980.)

MI5: Britain’s internal security service, active inside the United Kingdom and her overseas colonies. It is attached to the Home Office.

MI6: Britain’s overseas intelligence service, also known as the British secret service. It is attached to the Foreign Office. It is often referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

MoD: Britain’s Ministry of Defence.

NIO: Northern Ireland Office.

Provisional IRA: the wing of the IRA which emerged after the IRA split in December 1969 with the intention of ending British rule in Northern Ireland.

PSYOPs: Psychological Operations.

RTÉ: Radio Telefís Éireann, the national television and radio broadcaster of the Irish state.

RUC: Royal Ulster Constabulary, the police force of Northern Ireland.

SDU: special detective unit or special branch of An Garda Síochána

TD: Teachta Dála or member of the parliament of the Republic of Ireland.

USEFUL IDIOT: a term used by intelligence services for people to whom they can, inter alia, pass disinformation. The ‘useful idiot’ accepts the information at face value and relays it to others without appreciating that he or she is furthering the agenda of the intelligence agency.

1. THE MASTERS OF THE DARK ARTS, THE MEN IN CHARGE OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE IN 1982.

MI5 is a department of the Home Office and operates within the UK. In the past, it was also active in Britain’s colonies.

MI6 is attached to the Foreign Office and operates abroad.

Contrary to the general rule of MI5 operating at home and MI6 abroad, Ireland became an exception, with both agencies ultimately extending their operations to both sides of the Irish border.

Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s ambassador to Dublin at the outset of The Troubles, put it well from the British Intelligence perspective when he described how,

‘For subversive purposes, Ireland is one island.’

The men who ran British intelligence operations in the 1980s, and their subordinates in Ireland, were well-versed in the dark arts of their sinister profession.

John ‘Jack’ Jones was the man who handled MI5’s dirty work in the 1970s and early 1980s, first as deputy DG of MI5 and later as DG, 1981-85.

According to Christopher Andrew  –  the official historian of MI5 – Howard Smith, the Director-General of MI5, 1978-1981, was perceived inside MI5 as someone who had a ‘distaste’ for some of the operations MI5 were carrying out. One of his senior officers told Andrew that Smith was resented for the manner in which

‘”he kept far away from A Branch and left it all” to his deputy, John Jones, who was a former Director of A Branch. According to this source, Smith regarded “it all as dirty work”.‘

One shudders to contemplate the type of ‘dirty work’ that repelled Smith. Assassination was not off limits for him. He did not shirk from the plotting that led to the brutal murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. See Congo CIA. Perhaps Smith found MI5’s exploitation of the paedophile ring that swirled around Kincora Boys’ Home too much, even for him.

A Branch, which reported to the deputy D-G, was responsible for surveillance. It had been involved in the observation and sexual blackmail of a Soviet diplomat called Oleg Lyalin.

Jones took over from Howard Smith in 1981 and served as Director-General until 1985.

Sir Arthur ‘Dickie’ Franks led MI6, 1979-82. His successor was Colin Figures, 1982-85.

Franks was a veteran of MI6’s ‘British Middle East’ office in Cyprus in 1952. He was involved in the planning of Operation Boot, the successful Anglo-American operation to topple Mohammed Mosaddegh, the secular prime minister of Iran, from office. His predecessor, Sir Maurice Oldfield, was also involved in that operation.

MI6 and the CIA worked closely with treacherous Iranian military figures, convincing key military leaders to support the Shah and oppose Mosaddegh.

A medley of dirty tricks was unleashed. Military officials and political figures were bribed to switch their allegiance from Mosaddegh to the Shah.

Key figures were intimidated with a variety of threats.

Disinformation was spread to create chaos and unrest, presenting the coup as a necessary action against a purported communist threat.

The CIA and MI6 worked with pro-Shah factions to organize protests and demonstrations against Mosaddegh, creating a public outcry that facilitated the coup.

As MI6 Chief, Franks oversaw the secret bugging of the Rhodesian delegations at Lancaster House for Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington, something that assisted Carrington in securing a settlement of the Rhodesia issue.

Sir Colin Figures joined MI6 in 1951, beginning his career in London before transferring to Germany. His service included a posting in Amman during the Suez Crisis, followed by a period in Warsaw. He was in Vienna during the Prague Spring before returning to London. In 1973, he transitioned from Eastern Bloc espionage to oversee MI6 operations in Northern Ireland, eventually becoming deputy head of MI6 in 1979.

Harold ‘Hal’ Doyne-Ditmas of MI5 occupied the post of Director and Co-ordinator of Intelligence (Northern Ireland) in 1982. He was a veteran of MI5’s D Branch.

Barry Gane CMG OBE, was head of a joint MI5 and MI6 station in NI. His obituarists in London have provided a rather soothing account of how he engaged in ‘intelligence diplomacy’ involving ‘local special branches, police and military intelligence’ who had often been ‘too intent on guarding their patches to contribute as well as they might to the general good’. Gane was a far more sinister and ruthless figure than this portrayal of him.

Gane, born on 19 September, 1935, died of a stroke on 10 December 2024. His official resume alleges that he was a ‘diplomat’, a description that masks his true role as an MI6 high-flyer. Also concealed is the fact that he served in Ireland in the early 1980s. By the time he reached these shores, he had been involved in a myriad of questionable activities around the globe.

Gane joined MI6 in 1960 and was blooded in Laos, 1961-63, while MI6 and the CIA were helping the Laotian monarchy in its struggle against communist forces led by Pathet Lao.

Gane was next posted to Sarawak, Malaysia, 1963-66, in what his obituary in The Times of London described as the ‘first of a number of paramilitary roles’. One of these was the deployment of ‘skilled local trackers’, a polite euphemism for the use of ‘pseudo-gang’ or undercover assassination teams. These units had been developed by Frank Kitson in Kenya and Malaya in the 1950s. Gane was rewarded with an OBE.

According to the Diplomatic List, in 1966 Gane returned to the Foreign Office in London; spent 1967 in Poland; then went to Kampala, Uganda, where he stayed until 1970.

Gane then returned to London. His next overseas assignment was to Hong Kong, where he became ‘Controller Far East’, i.e., intelligence overlord of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan and China. More bloodshed and mayhem ensued. The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in 1979. In response, Gane played a vital role in MI6-CIA operations supporting the Mujahideen. He forged an alliance with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Mujahideen in the Panjshir Valley. The support for the Mujahideen backfired later when the movement became the sworn enemy of the West.

The Times’ obituary comments without elaboration that Gane was a ‘meticulous and effective planner of covert operations’. The best known ‘covert operation’ at this time was a shoot-to-kill programme involving former British soldiers, RUC officers and MI5. The combination went on a shoot-to-kill spree in the early 1980s. It was investigated by John Stalker of the Manchester police. One of those murdered was Michael Tighe, aged 17, who stumbled across an IRA arms cache in a hayshed in Co Armagh in November 1982. The barn was bugged by MI5. Armed undercover officers stormed it, killing Tighe and wounding his companion. Tighe had no involvement with the IRA. MI5 refused to hand over a tape recording of the incident to Stalker because it contradicted their version of the event. After Stalker kept pressing them for it, he was vilified and removed from the investigation by a dark array of forces. Gane returned to London and continued his ascent of MI6’s blood-soaked pole to become Deputy Chief of MI6.

He resigned in 1993 and joined Group 4 in the private security sector. 

These were the take-no-prisoners gang in charge of Britain’s sprawling community, the night a fight broke out in a bar in Blacklion, Co Cavan, as Christmas 1981 fast approached.

2.   THE INCIDENT AT THE BUSH BAR.

As midnight approached on 15 December, 1981, an off-duty garda officer, called Tom Nangle, assaulted James Francis McGovern at the Bush Bar in Blacklion, Co Cavan. McGovern was a thirty-three-year-old joiner from across the Border at Marlbank, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. The gardaí were called after the incident.

There was no cover-up. On the contrary, Garda Nangle was arrested immediately by his colleagues in the best tradition of An Garda Síochána.

Meanwhile, McGovern was taken to Erne Hospital, Enniskillen, where he was detained overnight.  The gardaí proceeded to secure witness statements from Vincent McGovern, the proprietor of the pub, and his son Thomas, neither of whom was related to their namesake, James McGovern. The gardaí obtained one from James McGovern the following night at Blacklion.

Garda Nangle was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm. His looming trial became a talking point in Garda and political circles because he was the brother of Maura Doherty, the wife of the Minister for Justice, Seán Doherty. Some local gardaí would even arrange for their cases to be listed at Dowra District Court, Co. Cavan, on the day of the prosecution, so they could enjoy the spectacle.

Kevin Doherty, a solicitor and the brother of Seán Doherty, was retained by Garda Nangle to defend him against the charge.

3. SEÁN DOHERTY ASKS JIM KIRBY ABOUT ‘TERRY’ McGOVERN.

As the date of the Garda Nangle trial drew closer, James McGovern came under scrutiny at the highest levels of the security establishments on both sides of the Border. On the Northern side, MI5 and the RUC would behave in an unprecedented and most peculiar manner.

Nine months after the incident, 15 September 1982, Seán Doherty asked his PA to ask someone in his department to find out if a man called McGovern of Enniskillen was in the IRA.

Doherty’s PA sent a note to Jim Kirby, a senior official at the DoJ. In turn, Kirby rang Chief Superintendent Thomas Kelly of the Intelligence and Security Branch (ISB). [At this point, C3 had become part of the ISB, along with the Special Branch and certain task forces, all under the control of Ainsworth.]

Hence, Doherty and at least three people [his PA, Kirby and Kelly] were aware of the request. These were hardly the actions of someone who was engaged in a deeply clandestine manoeuvre, the precursor to a conspiracy involving a series of serious crimes, including kidnap, false imprisonment, perversion of justice and interference with the administration of justice.

Clearly, Doherty was not much bothered about secrecy.

Chief Superintendent Kelly’s reaction to the request was to tell Kirby that Enniskillen was a large place and he would need a more precise address before he could make his inquiries. 

Kirby sought a few more details from his Minister.  According to Kirby, Doherty

‘picked up the phone and called somebody, but he didn’t get through, and he told me that it was something like Marlbank or someplace else.’ [Irish Times Saturday 29 September, 2012]

Doherty referred to McGovern as ‘Terry’ which confused matters further as did the erroneous description of his address being Laurencetown.

Seán Doherty did not ask Kirby to ask anyone to contact the RUC.

Doherty passed away in 2005 and never had the opportunity to give his side of the story to the judicial inquiry that his political opponents promised to convene but never set up. It is likely that he would have testified that he never contemplated that Kirby would contact a member of the gardaí who would ring the RUC with his query about ‘Terry’ McGovern.

The issue soon dropped from his mind. Decades later, Kirby recollected that:

‘For some reason, possibly pressure of work, I never went back to [Doherty] about it. He never came back to me, I think, so I never bothered going back to him either. I didn’t know what it was all about anyway.‘ [Irish Times interview.]

The following week, events took a bizarre turn when an alleged RUC informer made several misleading allegations about James McGovern. For reasons that will become apparent shortly, it is likely that the agent either {i} never existed or {ii} was an MI5 puppet used as a conduit to feed a tissue of lies about McGovern through the system. For ease of reference, I will refer to him as ‘Agent Dubious‘.

MI5 is the only organisation which could have deployed ‘Agent Dubious’ to manipulate the RUC. The joint MI5-MI6 liaison group run by Barry Gane could have brought MI6 into the planning of the steps choreographed for ‘Agent Dubious’.

I don’t believe Sir John Hermon, the Chief Constable of the RUC, was part of this cabal of skullduggery, nor was Trevor Forbes, the new head of the RUC’s Special Branch.

According to Hermon’s autobiography, during the week commencing Monday 20 September 1982, ‘Agent Dubious’ gave an RUC Special Branch chief inspector, ‘specific intelligence’ about subversive activity in County Fermanagh, allegedly involving McGovern. At the time, the RUC Special Branch operated under the direction and control of MI5.

The British military also ran agents inside the IRA through the FRU. MI5 worked closely with the FRU as well, something confirmed by Operation Denton in December 2025, despite years of denials by MI5 about their involvement with Freddie Scappaticci.

According to Hermon, the purported intelligence from ‘Agent Dubious’ raised ‘a question’ concerning the ‘possible involvement’ of McGovern and his brother, Philip, a lorry driver from Florencecourt, County Fermanagh, on the periphery of Republican activities.

Hermon’s use of the phrase ‘possible involvement’ does not accord with certain ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’ internal UK state papers which were written the following year with a view to explaining why McGovern was arrested. They were circulated to UK civil servants and politicians. They were generated when the Nangle Affair had become a contentious issue between Britain and Ireland, culminating in discussions between the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, and the UK’s Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The information in them would allege McGovern had long been suspected of Republican activity.

For clarity, the 1983 ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’ papers, are assertive and definite about McGovern’s links to paramilitaries and contradict Hermon’s less strident account of McGovern’s ‘possible’ activities. Both cannot be right.

The ‘secret’ and ‘confidential’ UK records implicating McGovern in wrongdoing bear all the hallmarks of fabrications designed to smear McGovern and conceal the truth about the Nangle Affair.

These contradictions also have the air of yarns being made up on the hoof and altering to suit changing circumstances.

I believe the strings were being pulled by MI5 and MI6 from London. The ultimate purpose was to protect Oldfield’s agents in Dublin from Ainsworth’s molehunt by (a) setting up the circumstances in which McGovern could be arrested while (b) making it look like Joe Ainsworth requested the RUC to make the arrest.

If this sounds ambitious, it is a fact that steps were taken in 1982 and 1983 to frame Ainsworth as the person who requested the arrest of McGovern. Along the way, it is possible to detect the shadowy presence of actors who fed lies to the media and other interested parties.

The existence of an MI6 network in Dublin, reporting to London on aspects of Irish government policy, was one of MI6’s most sensitive secrets. It was the type of information that London did not need to share with the RUC. If the arrest of McGovern was part of an operation to destroy Ainsworth – who was investigating MI6’s Dublin network – there was no need to reveal this to the RUC. Hence, the intervention of ‘Agent Dubious’ to procure the arrest of McGovern without revealing the underlying motivation for it.

In his autobiography, ‘Holding The Line‘, Hermon recorded that in the period 1980/81:

‘It was also a source of personal satisfaction that the Commissioner of the Garda Siochana [Patrick MacLaughlin] kept in regular contact with me. Following the appointment of Assistant Commissioner Joe Ainsworth [as intelligence Chief in the summer of 1979] there was a noticeable increase in the attrition rate against terrorists in the Republic of Ireland. Within the resources available to the Gardai, which had been considerably enhanced by Commissioner Patrick MacLaughlin in 1980/81, co-operation between the two forces was extremely good.’

Hermon was not the only person who was impressed. According to a confidential brief prepared by the Northern Ireland Office on 15 May 1980, the security forces of Northern Ireland and the Republic were

‘making substantial inroads into the terrorists’ supplies and are restricting their ability to mount operations. But despite this the Provisional IRA in particular still has the capacity to attack and destroy but they are turning increasingly to soft targets. .. The Garda and the RUC seem to be working together well in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, we have no cause for complacency. The terrorists still have a considerable capacity to disrupt the lives of ordinary citizens on both sides of the border with the aim of undermining the policies (presumably of both governments) .. It seems to me that the best way forward is to maintain the present pattern of professional liaison between the Garda and the RUC, without undue publicity; the results will speak for themselves. We both continue to reassure (the Irish) of our support, but let them get on with the practical business of prevention and detection.

‘RUC/Garda cooperation works at various levels. The Chief Constable and Commissioner meet every few months. The Joint Consultative Committee (of their deputies and others) has more formal sessions every six weeks or so, keeping the system under concerted review. On the ground is a network of ‘Border Superintendents’ either side of the border; they are in regular liaison, and deal directly with any cross-border incidents.. Some of the results of cooperation are shown in the appended list of recent Garda finds.‘

On 9 April, 1980, Britain’s ambassador to Dublin, Sir Robin Haydon, in a profile of Taoiseach Charles Haughey, stated that Haughey’s

‘accession has not harmed security cooperation between the RUC and the Garda which seems, if anything, to have improved’.

Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior told the Commons on 10 December 1982:

‘It is also true that the recent level of co-operation and effort in the Republic towards combating terrorism has reached a new and most welcome level. It reflects a substantial development of attitudes in the South. Of course there are issues such as extradition and more could be done. In that connection, however, I note with interest the decision of the Irish Supreme Court on 6 December (1982) to order the extradition of an IRA man to Northern Ireland to face a murder charge.‘

Hermon was not without blemish. He was involved in the RUC’s shoot-to-kill programme, the one that led to the Stalker inquiry. The targets of that lethal project were Republican paramilitaries who were killing Hermon’s officers. When John Stalker, the Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester, was assigned to investigate the shoot-to-kill programme, Hermon bullied Stalker and took part in the machinations to derail Stalker’s inquiry.

Ainsworth’s unprecedented success against the IRA and INLA was helping to save RUC lives, whereas Stalker was establishing that RUC officers were engaged in premeditated murder.

It would have been a brave MI5 officer who would have asked Hermon to participate in an illegal operation which could have cost him his livelihood and reputation; moreover, one designed to maliciously destroy his ally Ainsworth, who was seriously getting to grips with the IRA and INLA.

By way of comparison, the Provisional IRA had emerged – and thrived – during Wren’s tenure as C3 chief. Christopher Ewart-Biggs, Britain’s ambassador to Dublin, had been assassinated in 1976. America was tapped successfully as a reliable source of arms and funds. On the international stage, Col Gaddafi had become a supporter of the Republican cause. On top of all that, there had been a series of embarrassing prison breaks in the Republic, all on Garvey and Wren’s watch. (After McLaughlin and Ainsworth left the force in February 1983, the garda offensive against the IRA and INLA would suffer a series of severe blows under the new triumvirate of Wren, Stephen Fanning and John Paul McMahon.)

(See also: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/vincent-browne-garda-dysfunctionality-is-nothing-new-1.3031115

Unless or until evidence emerges that Hermon was guilty of plotting against Ainsworth, I will proceed on the basis that the English plotters in MI5 and MI6 did not include Hermon in their scheme against Ainsworth.

6. THE ARREST OF JAMES MCGOVERN, A DEPARTURE FROM THE NORMALLY CAUTIOUS APPROACH TAKEN BY MI5 AND THE RUC.

Something else was afoot.

In any event, armed and uniformed RUC officers descended upon McGovern’s family home early on the morning of Monday, 27 September 1982. It turned out their prey was elsewhere.

McGovern’s brother Philip was at the house and he was whisked away.

James McGovern’s car was at the garage, and he had gone to stay with his cousin John McNulty at Belcoo, near the Border, so he could shorten the time it would take to travel to the trial at Dowra the following morning.

A Ford Cortina with armed RUC officers was dispatched to fetch him. It arrived at 6.30 a.m. One of the officers went to the front door while McGovern was asleep upstairs. His cousin answered the call and an RUC officer gained entry, climbed the stairs and told McGovern he was under arrest as a suspected terrorist. An astonished McGovern responded: ’You must be joking’ and proceeded to treat the intrusion as a joke. And why wouldn’t he? He was an entirely innocent man.

The RUC officer assured him he was under arrest and would have to get up and go with him. When McGovern protested that he had to appear in Court in Dowra, he was told he would not be giving evidence that day.

McGovern was conveyed to Gough Barracks, Co. Armagh, where he was detained until about 7.30 p.m. under the Emergency Provisions Act. He was not charged with any offence, hardly surprising since he had not broken any law.

The real purpose of the charade was to prevent him from reaching the District Court in Dowra and create a scandal which would be used to vilify Joe Ainsworth and derail his investigation into the British spies who had penetrated C3, Garda Intelligence.

Seán Doherty would become caught in the crossfire, but he was not the primary target of the dirty trick operation; that was Joe Ainsworth.

7.   THE ATTEMPTS TO ADJOURN THE TRIAL AT DOWRA.

According to Sir John Hermon of the RUC, the RUC officer in charge of the snatch squad which lifted James McGovern, dropped into Enniskillen RUC station en route to Armagh, where the officer, or one of his colleagues, asked the policemen at the station to inform the gardaí about the arrest of McGovern so the various parties at Dowra District Court could be made aware that McGovern would not be able to attend the Nangle trial.

There is, in fact, no reason to question the reasonableness of McGovern’s intuition at this stage. He was the victim of a dirty trick operation.

McGovern was also asked about the IRA, H-Blocks and Kieran Doherty, who had been elected as a TD in 1981 but had died while on a hunger strike.  His brother Philip McGovern was also questioned. Were these questions worth risking the life of an MI5 informer? Is it not more likely that they were nonsense gossipy questions asked to pass the time and try to afford some respectability to the proceedings? The real purpose of the masquerade was to detain McGovern and thereby prevent him from appearing at the trial, rather than to acquire information from him.

Members of the IRA did not engage with RUC officers. Typically, they chose a point on a wall, perhaps a light switch, and stared at it while remaining completely silent.

‘Meantime, south of the border, Detective Sergeant ‘W [of the Garda] in Cavan had noted the message as it was given to him by [RUC] Detective Sergeant ‘A’ from Armagh.  [Garda]  ‘W’ then rang Dowra Garda station and spoke to Garda X, asking him if he would deliver a message to the court. W read the message as he himself had understood it. It was easy for [Garda] X to deliver the message, as the Garda station and the court shared the same building in Dowra.

‘The message Garda X gave his Superintendent [Joseph Noonan] was that McGovern would not be attending court that day, and that this information had come from the Gardai at Cavan, after a message from the RUC at Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh, phoning from Armagh. He omitted to mention to Superintendent [Noonan] that McGovern had been arrested by the RUC.

‘Aware only of McGovern’s non-attendance at court that day, not the reason for it, Superintendent [Noonan] went on into the courthouse. There, he joined the State Solicitor, who was presenting the case against Garda Nangle. [Noonan] gave the State Solicitor the concise message as he had received it from Garda X, and this of course did not contain any reference to McGovern being detained by the RUC. Neither the Superintendent nor the State Solicitor considered it necessary to advise the Presiding Judge about McGovern’s inability to attend court. Consequently, the whole purpose of the series of RUC telephone calls early that Monday morning had been defeated at the last hurdle! The State Solicitor even proceeded to call the injured party, James Francis McGovern, to come forward. He did not, and could not, appear. If the judge had known of the main witness’s detention by the RUC, he might have felt obliged to adjourn or postpone the case until McGovern was available.’ (140)

The RUC Special Branch in Belfast also alerted the gardaí in Dublin about the arrest. They had a well-established line of communication which connected them directly to the ISB’s HQ at the Phoenix Park, Dublin.

Ainsworth was not present when the message was left with the ISB at Phoenix Park, but was told about the arrest a short while later. In response, Ainsworth contacted the RUC and spoke to a senior Special Branch officer at Knock Road who confirmed to him that they had McGovern in their custody. Ainsworth wanted to know what they proposed to do with him, and was told he would remain in custody. Ainsworth was unaware that the RUC team in the field had alerted the gardaí in Cavan and determined to find a way to get the news to his garda colleagues at Dowra so they could request an adjournment.

Ainsworth had sought a modern communications system for the ISB, but it had not been delivered. At the time, telephone communications were often slow and frustrating. Dowra was in northwest Cavan, not far from the Border. In those days, phone calls to places such as it from Dublin had to be routed through various exchanges by hand, something that was unreliable and time-consuming. Ainsworth feared he would not be able to reach Dowra in time to warn the gardaí at Dowra. A flash of inspiration struck him: there was an RUC station close to Dowra, so he asked the RUC to contact it via their then state-of-the-art radio network to send an officer in a car across the Border to Dowra to alert the prosecution to the arrest.

The case at Dowra proceeded without James McGovern.

1.   Direct dialling between the Republic and the UK did not become a reality until later. On 18 January, 1983, Mr Alan Corbett, Director of Telecommunications Service (Customer Relations and General Branch) of the Department of Post and Telegraphs, announced that subscribers attached to automatic exchanges would be able to dial directly to all UK numbers within six months. He expected that by 1984, all subscribers would be able to dial directly. He said he expected the direct-dial service would considerably reduce the number of operator-assisted calls handled at Dublin exchanges and free operators for other work.

The authorities on the northern side of the Border were not aware of this slip-up. They believed the prosecution had been told of the arrest, a fact which is much more important to the story than might appear at this point in the narrative.

9. A HEADLINE SCANDAL.

McGovern’s arrest sparked a political storm in the Republic. Rumours swept the country that Seán Doherty had colluded with the RUC to have McGovern arrested, thereby preventing McGovern from crossing the Border to testify against his brother-in-law.

No doubt the reputation of Doherty’s brother, Kevin, also came under assault by the gossip mongers who were avid for scandal. Yet, as he confirmed to me when I met him, he first learnt that McGovern would not be attending the trial while he was seated in Dowra District Court. He had been as surprised as everyone else when it emerged that McGovern was not going to appear.

If Seán Doherty had arranged the arrest of McGovern (which he did not), he would hardly have kept his wife and brother out of the loop before the event, and remained tight-lipped ever afterwards; indeed, right up to his death in 2006.

Kevin Doherty has since passed away too. Both he and Maura Doherty endured decades of unfair comment because of the lies surrounding Dowra.

Who bears ultimate responsibility for this cesspit of deceit?

10. SOMEONE CONTACTS RTE TO POINT A FINGER AT AINSWORTH’S ISB IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE TRIAL IN DOWRA ENDED.

Rather than blow away like a wisp of smoke, the Dowra rumours grew thicker with each passing hour.

Someone contacted RTE with an astonishing allegation that the arrest had been ‘requested or procured by Garda Intelligence and Security Branch’, i.e. the ISB. Note the specificity of allegation: the ISB was allegedly involved, not any other section of the force. The ISB was a new department that Ainsworth had set up to place C3, the Special Branch and certain task forces under his command. It was one of the reasons for his success against the IRA and INLA.

11. JIM MITCHELL’S MISLEADING PRESS STATEMENT IGNITES A POLITICAL STORM.

People were busy on the political front, too. A source sprang from the traps like an agile greyhound to make contact with Jim Mitchell TD of Fine Gael.

The message for Mitchell must have originated from a source drawing on information from MI5 or the RUC.

Mitchell had served as Minister for Justice in the previous Fine Gael-Labour coalition government, from June 1981 to early 1982, and was now the Opposition spokesman on Justice. He led the charge on Dowra with a hard-hitting statement on Wednesday, 29 September 1982. It was based on the erroneous MI5-RUC assumption about what had happened, i.e., that the full message about the arrest and detention of McGovern had reached the prosecution team sitting in Dowra court.

‘This information was unknown to me at that time, and I believe it was also totally unknown then at RUC Headquarters.’

Yet Mitchell asserted that,

‘In the Dowra court case of Monday last, a prosecution, which in the absence of the alleged injured party was doomed to failure, was allowed to proceed. This in spite of the fact that the RUC had informed the Gardai that the witness was detained by them, and would not be able to attend.

‘Because of the failure to apply for an adjournment or inform the Court of the reasons for the absence, the merits of the case were never considered by the Court and the prosecution was dismissed.’ (Wednesday, 29 September 1982)

How was it that Mitchell heard the precise version of events which the RUC and MI5 erroneously believed had transpired at Dowra?

Who was his source?

12. FORMER GARDA COMMISSIONER NED GARVEY AND MI6.

The version Mitchell promoted was consistent with what the RUC and MI5 believed had happened, i.e., that news of McGovern’s detention by the RUC had reached Dowra District Court. But that was not what had happened. What MI5 and the RUC Special Branch had not yet discovered was that the crucial fact of McGovern’s arrest had not reached the court. This means that Jim Mitchell was relying on a source with connections to MI5 and RUC Special Branch.

There is no doubt that former Garda Commissioner Ned Garvey was briefing journalists in the background about Dowra. One reporter confirmed to me that Garvey was his source – his direct source. There was no intermediary. I did not ask him about Garvey. He offered the name without prompting.

Crucially, Ned Garvey was a figure of suspicion in Ainsworth’s probe into MI6 activities (a detailed story for another day).

Unfortunately, two things can be stated about Garvey without fear of contradiction. First, according to an inquiry run by a Supreme Court judge, he had at least one meeting with Capt Fred Holroyd, who was working for both MI6 and British military intelligence. Second, Garvey denied it, but the judge found his recollection inaccurate.

Capt. Holroyd was attached to the Special Military Intelligence Unit (SMIU) of the British Army, in its 3 Brigade area, which included Portadown.

Holroyd also worked for Craig Smellie, the MI6 head of station, based at Lisburn, Northern Ireland.

It was MI6 that put Holroyd in touch with a network of gardaí stationed along the Border who cooperated closely with MI6, including Vincent Heavin (stationed in Castleblaney), Colm Browne and Patrick McCoy. The gardaí were acting with the knowledge of at least some of their superiors, including the then assistant Garda commissioner Ned Garvey (later Garda Commissioner). Garvey was in charge of all Garda intelligence operations.

In April 1975, Holroyd was dispatched to Dublin to visit Garvey at the force’s HQ at the Phoenix Park. Browne and McCoy organised the assignation.

When it came to a clash of credibility between Holroyd and Garvey – in respect of the meeting in April 1975 at Garda HQ –  Mr Justice Henry Barron, the retired Supreme Court judge and author of the Barron report, deemed Holroyd the credible figure, not Garvey. Garvey purported not to recall the encounter. The Barron Report, however, determined that the assignation ‘unquestionably did take place‘.

Ainsworth took steps to curtail McCaul’s access to C3 Garda intelligence (again, a story for another day).

Garvey and Wren were probably obtaining their information about Dowra from sources that included Michael McCaul of MI5. McCaul often visited Dublin, where he attended meetings at the British Embassy on Merrion Road before visiting Wren.

McCaul was an expert at smearing politicians. He had been involved in the MI5 campaign against Harold Wilson, the Labour Party Prime Minister of Britain. He was named as a conspirator by Chris Mullin MP, in the House of Commons.

Ainsworth resigned after the new government shut down his molehunt into Garvey and Wren. It is a myth that he retired because of the revelations about the phone taps, although he might have been dismissed by the new FitzGerald administration.

He later regretted resigning when it became apparent that the judicial inquiry FitzGerald and Spring had promised was not going to proceed.

Had he been dismissed, he could have taken a legal action to make the points he would have made at the judicial inquiry. Otherwise, he was bound to silence by the Official Secrets Act.

Ainsworth spent decades trying to get various government ministers to reopen the case but to no avail.

In 1983, Ainsworth was pinning his hopes on exposing Garvey and Wren at the judicial inquiry that Fine Gael was promising would take place but never materialised.

Ainsworth had no doubt that Garvey and Wren were behind the briefings to the media about Dowra.

He also suspected that Andy Ward, the Secretary at the Department of Justice, was deeply involved with Wren. Ainsworth was aware that they had been holding secret meetings with each other during the course of his molehunt.

Joyce and Murtagh, authors of ‘The Boss‘, wrote that:

‘[Jim] Mitchell and Fine Gael were well briefed on the troubles in the Garda Siochana. About three weeks previously, Garret FitzGerald had been informed of [Seán] Doherty’s conduct and other disturbing matters concerning the force. The information came from a garda who had a secret meeting with FitzGerald in the home of Katherine Meenan, FitzGerald’s personal assistant. The informant arrived at the meeting about 15 minutes before FitzGerald to ensure that he would not be seen by FitzGerald’s security guards.’ [247 of The Boss]

Note the reference above to the fact that the garda informant arrived at the meeting about 15 minutes before FitzGerald to ensure that FitzGerald’s security guards would not see him. While Wren might have been known to some of them, Garvey was definitely well-known to all of them.

This would also explain why the meeting did not take place at FitzGerald’s house. FitzGerald was particularly unpopular with the security contingent at his home because he refused to let them use his toilet. While the gardaí were often discreet about what they observed at the homes of the politicians they protected, they gossiped incessantly about FitzGerald because of the way he treated him. It was a virtual certainty that they would have gossiped widely had they seen the former garda commissioner visit FitzGerald’s abode.

The likelihood is that this meeting was with Ned Garvey.

Garret FitzGerald referred to Garda ‘sources’, not a single Garda source. That much was true.

A second garda source for Fine Gael was Larry Wren.

Mitchell was holding secret meetings with Wren in a pub on the north side of Dublin at the time.

‘Jerry Cronin [TD, Fianna Fail] ordered me out again. He put his fist up to my face and said; “If it’s the last fucking thing, I’ll have you transferred.”

‘I knew he was TD for the area. I took the names of some of the people who were there and left to go back to the station. When I passed by on my way home at about 2.30am there were still people in the pub.”

‘From that day Sergeant Geary’s life was ruined, while Jerry Cronin went on to become Minister for Defence.

‘“The following day I made a report to the local Garda Superintendent, Laurence Wren (later Garda Commissioner), with a view to preparing a prosecution for the premises in Mallow. There was an immediate upheaval when it became known that Cronin’s had been raided by the gardaí. Apparently it was unexpected and it was felt that it could lead to trouble for the gardaí concerned. The pub was well known for late-night drinking and there was concern that shift workers from the sugar factory who finished at midnight were drinking there to the early hours.”

Joe Geary wrote to Supt Wren on a number of occasions to remind his superior that there was a six-month statutory period within which to take a prosecution, but received no reply. He also wrote to the then Garda Commissioner who replied that it was a matter for the local superintendent.’

The full Magill article can be read here:

He had a lot to fear about the co-operation he and Garvey had extended to MI6 through Holroyd.

Wren was prepared to smear his colleagues to achieve his aims. Jim Mitchell’s statement – based on what Wren was telling him – was grossly unfair to the late Superintendent Joseph Noonan and the Chief State Solicitor at Dowra District Court, neither of whom had learned that McGovern was being detained by the RUC, and therefore had no grounds to seek an adjournment.

Mitchell’s statement implied that two honourable men had participated in what was, at best, the neglect of their legal duties; at worst, an abuse of the judicial process, which is a crime.  

In turn, the statement fuelled the malicious gossip that was circulating about the Doherty family.

Had Mitchell made inquiries with the local DPP official or Superintendent Noonan, he would have learned the truth. Instead, he appears to have received the version of events being promoted by MI5 and MI6 through Garvey and Wren.

While Wren did not get Mitchell to correct the record, he did accept subsequently that there had been a break in the ‘chain’ as this letter, written a year later establishes. It was written by Wren on 6 October 1983 to John Hermon of the RUC.

16. MITCHELL TARGETS GARDA COMMISSIONER McLAUGHLIN.

Based on these shaky foundations, Mitchell constructed a conspiracy theory about the arrest, which implicated the Doherty family and put Garda Commissioner Patrick McLaughlin into the firing line.

Garvey and Wren must have been delighted.

Mitchell’s statement included the following passage:

‘The inevitable public disquiet at such extra ordinary proceedings are bound to be greatly increased by the facts that the defendant [Tom Nangle] was a member of the Gardai and also a brother-in-law of the Minister for Justice [Seán Doherty].

‘Without the fullest explanation this incident will greatly undermine public confidence in the administration of justice.‘

Doherty had to fend off further accusations. On the same day as Mitchell’s statement, he emerged from a Cabinet meeting in Dublin and told the press that he had received a number of enquiries from reporters suggesting that he had claimed he had not known about the trial in advance. This rumour could only have served to make him, his wife, and brother look like a floundering pack of amateur liars. It is not known who fed this fabrication to the media. Doherty put the record straight:

‘I said nothing of the kind. Because of family connections which have been widely publicised, it is perfectly obvious that I would know that the case was coming up and in fact I did know.

‘I have already denied categorically, and I now repeat, that I had any prior knowledge of, much less any involvement in, the detention of the witness concerned or any of the circumstances surrounding that detention.

‘I wish to add that as Minister for Justice I have no function in relation to the bringing of charges or the conduct of a prosecution in court in any case and that I did not concern myself either directly or indirectly with the matter in which this case was dealt with by the appropriate authorities at any stage.‘

He then pointed out that the Garda Commissioner McLaughlin had been requested to conduct an enquiry into the arrest and ‘the circumstances in which the case proceeded in the absence of a key witness’.

Are we really to believe that Seán Doherty engaged in a series of dangerous and convoluted gyrations with the ISB and RUC when all he had to do to thwart the trial was ensure that McGovern was given a relatively modest sum of money in compensation?

Doherty was not involved in the discussions about the £400 payment, but the point remains. If he had been involved, this is surely the cheap and effective route he would have taken in securing McGovern’s nonattendance.

19. THE BBC IN LONDON FOLLOWS THE STORY.

The Dowra affair was deemed newsworthy in the UK. A detailed report on it featured on the BBC’s flagship current affairs television programme Newsnight.

Newsnight rarely reported on political events in Ireland. Its Irish coverage usually concerned paramilitaries’ activities or high-level Anglo-Irish summits.

Newsnight described the trial as the ‘latest legal scandal’ to have erupted in the Republic. In saying this, Newsnight was referring, inter alia, to the Malcolm McArthur case. McArthur, a double murderer, had been found in the home of Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s attorney-general. Elements of the British media had gone to town on the affair, even to the extent of suggesting that the A-G and McArthur were involved in a homosexual relationship, something that was illegal in the Republic at the time. The story was entirely untrue.

All of this was happening while a British tabloid was running a campaign to deter British people from buying Irish butter because of the stance Haughey’s administration had adopted during the Falklands war.

At this time, MI5 had an office at the BBC where it controlled who worked for the corporation.

In the 1980s, Dame Daphne Park, formerly of MI6, was appointed to the BBC Board.

During the 1980s, MI5 controlled Newsnight through the BBC’s Deputy Director-General, Alan Protheroe.

The BBC was an institution led by very strange people. They knew that Jimmy Savile was interfering with children. Yet, they continued to let Savile host programmes for children.

Alan Protheroe not only tolerated Savile but helped MI5 safeguard the truth about Kincora.

Colin Wallace was one of the most significant Kincora whistleblowers. In 1987, Protheroe moved to shut down a report on Wallace, which was due to be broadcast on Newsnight.

MI5 still controls the BBC. As of April 2026, the corporation persists in its refusal to broadcast the 2021 ‘Lost Boys, Belfast Missing Children’ documentary, which it commissioned about the abduction and disappearance of a group of boys in Belfast by the paedophile gang linked to Kincora. Since March 2026, it has been available on YouTube. Well over 300,000 people have viewed it. The BBC’s reason for not broadcasting it is classically Orwellian: the documentary contradicts the error-strewn content of the 2017 Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry report. If television stations followed that example, no official finding of a tribunal could ever be questioned.

See also Kincora, an Orwellian child abuse nightmare at the BBC.

The Lost Boys documentary can be viewed by clicking this link: https://youtu.be/QAXRIX-Vwss?si=p4bE-UPGUbbRR9Z2

20. HOW THE RUC-GARDA CONSPIRACY THEORY GAINED MOMENTUM.

On 28 October 1982, some six days before Charles Haughey’s precarious Fianna Fáil minority government collapsed, and a general election was called, a report on Dowra alleging an actual conspiracy to interfere with the prosecution appeared in print.

The article was written by Peter Murtagh in The Irish Times based on what he described as ‘reliable sources’.  While no one could doubt the integrity of Peter Murtagh, there are ample grounds to question the bona fides of his sources on this occasion. The article contended that McGovern had been arrested

‘by the RUC in County Fermanagh as a direct result of contact between police intelligence services on both sides of the Border, according to reliable sources.

‘The contact was made between a senior officer of the Garda Siochana Intelligence and Security Branch in Dublin and an officer of similar rank in the RUC’s Special Branch. Senior officers in both services are in regular, sometimes daily contact over security matters of mutual concern.’ [Thursday, 28 October 1982, page 6.]

No one disputes the fact that on 17 September, some nine or ten days before McGovern’s arrest, an inquiry by CS Thomas Kelly of the ISB had been made with the RUC to see if ‘Terry’ McGovern had a police record. Since Doherty was the Minister for Justice, this information should not have been sought. Yet in fairness to Doherty, there was a world of difference between seeking out this type of information, however half-heartedly, and engaging in a criminal conspiracy to kidnap a man and pervert the course of justice with the aid of a foreign police force.

Put simply, Doherty made an inquiry about McGovern, whom he was unable to name correctly but did not ask for his arrest.

As the temperature around the Dowra story rose, the core issue began to revolve around whether a second call had been made – by Ainsworth – on Friday, 24 or Saturday, 25 September, requesting that McGovern be arrested and detained the following Monday to prevent him from testifying at the trial.

This allegation was fed to the media to destroy Joe Ainsworth’s reputation and shut down his mole hunt, the one which was targeting Garvey, Wren and others.

The implication of an Irish Times report on 22 October, 1982, and the book by Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce, published at the end of 1983, ‘The Boss’, was that the second call was made by Ainsworth, although he was not named. Ainsworth would later characterise the implication as a ‘grotesque insult’ to his character.

Despite extensive enquiries conducted over a number of years by gardaí who were hostile to Ainsworth, not a single shred of evidence that Ainsworth had anything to do with the arrest of McGovern emerged. These inquiries were driven largely by the new Fine Gael Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald, who went to unprecedented lengths to find evidence of wrongdoing.

Joe Joyce was less circumspect about Ainsworth in an article he wrote for In Dublin magazine in January 1983. It was entitled, ‘The Scandals So Far:

‘Chief Superintendent [Thomas] Kelly [of the ISB] did contact the RUC and was told McGovern was ‘clean’. He passed on the information to the civil servant, [i.e. James Kirby] Murtagh reported [in The Irish Times]. But on 24 or 25 September, a more senior officer in the Gardai contacted the RUC about the case. Details of the discussions are not known, the Irish Times said, but the RUC issued an order to arrest McGovern. The paper did not spell it out that the only officer more senior to Kelly in the security branch was Ainsworth.‘

The conspiracy theory developed – in good faith – by Joyce and Murtagh (based on what appeared to them to be genuinely ‘reliable sources’) was that the fictitious second phone call (allegedly placed by Ainsworth to the RUC) related to a plot to arrange McGovern’s arrest. On page 249, they described the impact of The Irish Times story thus:

Doherty subscribed to the MI5-6 dirty-trick conspiracy theory. In the months before he became Minister for Justice, he had been advised in writing by a journalist who wrote on security matters and had contacts in the UK that a British plot against Haughey appeared to be in the works. He was warned that steps would be taken to portray Haughey in an unfavourable light. These campaigns, Doherty was warned, fed on intelligence gathered by conspirators, mixed with subtle lies and half-truths. In some cases, dirty tricks could also be used to lend credence to the campaign.

By the end of 1982, Doherty came to believe that this was precisely what was happening, not only to Haughey but also to himself. The example he cited most often after September 1982 was the Dowra scandal.

22. THE DEVIOUS COMMENTS OF A ‘HIGH-LEVEL BRITISH OFFICIAL’ WHO, IN REALITY, WAS AN OFFICER OF MI6.

Doherty died before he learnt that one of the sources promoting the claim that he had ordered the arrest of McGovern was ‘a high-level British official’.

Details about this person’s involvement did not emerge until Saturday, 29 September 2012, when The Irish Times published an article about the events of 1982. One of those interviewed was James Kirby, the former Department of Justice official who was presented as someone now prepared to share ‘his unique insights into the scandals [of 1982] with Geraldine Kennedy and Joe Joyce’.

The report indicated that after the Dowra affair had erupted, ‘a high-level British official’ had convinced him that someone in the gardaí – obviously Ainsworth – had requested McGovern’s arrest.

Kirby, as a security official in the Department, had perfectly legitimate dealings with officials from the Northern Ireland Office in Belfast and the Home Office in London. Many of those who dealt with Dublin were intelligence officers.

Although Kirby did not name the British official, he was clearly ‘high’ enough in the intelligence firmament to convince Kirby that he was in a position to know about alleged corrupt favours between Dublin and Belfast.

In the 2012 Irish Times article, Kirby stated his belief that the Dowra affair:

‘put us at a serious disadvantage in dealing with both the RUC and the British government. Shortly afterwards, when there were perceived problems about co-operation between the Garda and the RUC, a high-level British official said to me that he couldn’t understand what the problem was; after all, hadn’t our people asked that McGovern be arrested and hadn’t the RUC done it for us?’

There are grounds for doubting the integrity of the ‘high-level’ British official. At the time, Garret Fitzgerald, Peter Barry and others were pressurising Margaret Thatcher, Sir Geoffrey Howe and James Prior for an explanation of McGovern’s arrest. British state papers show that the British were aware Fitzgerald suspected Ainsworth had arranged the arrest, but noted that it had actually taken place, ‘based entirely on information obtained by the RUC and was not prompted by Mr Ainsworth or the garda’. This was also the view of the Chief Constable of the RUC, Sir Jack Hermon. So are we supposed to believe that the ‘high-level’ official and his colleagues were aware of the supposed plot yet withheld the truth from the British Prime Minister, her Foreign Secretary, the Northern Ireland Secretary and the Chief Constable of the RUC and all their officials, yet casually disclosed the truth to Kirby? Either way, the ‘high-level official’ was lying to someone. The real question is why? What was he really up to?

Jim Kirby told me that the ‘high-level’ British official was a man who worked as an adviser to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Humphrey Atkins, possibly his private secretary. Kirby could not remember his name but recalled that he was often in contact with him in the course of his normal duties. One day, he discovered that he had been reassigned. On further enquiry, he learned that he had been sent to the Middle East. Kirby was puzzled by this, as he had understood that the man had come from the Home Office. He contacted Stephen Fanning of the ISB, who told him that the individual was an MI6 officer.

23. THE SOURCE AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.

A source within the Department of Justice ostensibly confirmed that Ainsworth had procured McGovern’s arrest. However, the individual in question did not claim to have been present when Ainsworth allegedly made the second call. [For the avoidance of confusion: it is the contention of this webbook that Joe Ainsworth never made any such call; that the allegation that he did was a smear concocted by MI5-6 and their allies in Dublin.]

The Department of Justice source did not step forward when Dowra was investigated later by three senior gardaí, including a Garda Commissioner and a Deputy Garda Commissioner, and said he had heard it with his own ears. Yet, ‘The Boss’ treated this hearsay as sufficiently interesting to describe as follows:

‘parts of the story were checked with a senior civil servant. On hearing references to .. Dowra [the] civil servant stood up from behind his desk, walked quickly to a nearby shelf and switched on a radio.

‘”One can’t be too careful”, he said.‘

The civil servant was overacting. If he was so concerned about being monitored, why did he have reporters in his office in the first place?

There are two candidates for this ham actor.

The first is James Kirby. If Kirby was the Department of Justice official mentioned in ‘The Boss’, he may have been regurgitating gossip relayed to him by his MI5 contact as part of the plot against Ainsworth. On a positive note, this would copper-fasten Kirby’s integrity as a faithful servant of the state. If he were an agent or asset of MI5-6, the latter would not have been obliged to manipulate him with lies.

Kirby also told me that he held weekly meetings with Wren in the car park of a hospital on the northside of Dublin, usually on Sundays. Wren used these meetings to pump Kirby for information about what Seán Doherty and others – including Ainsworth – were doing. Wren also used the meetings to slander an array of people, including Ainsworth.

Ainsworth was aware of these meetings as they took place and informed me about them long before Kirby shared the same information with me during one of our discussions.

The second Department of Justice candidate as the source for ‘The Boss‘ was a more senior figure than Kirby. His potential involvement is far more troubling than Kirby’s as he no legitimate reason to be in routine contact with MI5 or MI6 security officials.

This figure, who has passed away, was part of the Thomas Coyne-Peter Berry clique.

Thomas Coyne was the Secretary of the DoJ, 1949-61. Coyne an MI6 agent. He was directly involved in the handling of Patrick Crinnion, the MI6 agent inside C3, Garda Intelligence.

Coyne’s successor, Peter Berry, was his protégé. One of the most senior officials at the DoJ believed that Berry was involved in the Crinnion spy affair as well.

This aspect of the Crinnion affair is covered in considerable detail in a story on this website, accessible via the following link: Nest of Spies.

If this senior DoJ official was passing carefully construed MI5-6 smears to reporters, it raises the distinct possibility that he was yet another MI6 spy at the DoJ, something that was under consideration by Joe Ainsworth.

There were other incidents involving this particular individual which indicate an unhealthy relationship with MI5 and MI6.

24. SEÁN DOHERTY’S WARINESS AND DISTRUST OF THE BRITISH SECRET SERVICE.

By September 1982, Seán Doherty had become convinced that British Intelligence was plotting against Haughey, a story beyond the scope of this webbook. For present purposes, it will suffice to note that Doherty was an ex-Special Branch detective and knew full well of the relationship between the RUC Special Branch and MI5. It beggars belief that he would have asked them to arrest McGovern.

Furthermore, Doherty was deeply wary of British Intelligence, having seen firsthand what they were capable of during his time in the Special Branch, when he served during the notorious Littlejohn scandal. The Littlejohn brothers, Kenneth and Keith, worked for MI6. They petrol-bombed garda stations in the Republic while masquerading as Republicans to sway government and public opinion against the IRA.

In 1972, the Littlejohns were arrested after the then-largest bank heist in Irish history. They revealed their connection to MI6. Both men were convicted and sent to prison. They escaped from Mountjoy in 1974. Kenneth got away while Keith, who broke his ankle jumping from the prison wall, was recaptured.

Kenneth fled to the Continent but was eventually returned to the Republic. They were released in 1981 by Garret FitzGerald on what he described as ‘humanitarian’ grounds. It was one of the first steps FitzGerald took after becoming taoiseach. (He lost power in January 1982.)

FitzGerald’s invariable approach was to ingratiate himself with the British Establishment, as indicated by his involvement in the British-Irish Association, the Institute for the Study of Conflict, the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Institute of International Relations. For further details, please click here: Sir Garret

John Wyman, the MI6 officer who had served as one of the brothers’ handlers, was also captured during an attempted rendezvous with Detective Garda Patrick Crinnion of C3 in December 1972. Both of them were convicted and sent to prison as well.

FitzGerald covered up his knowledge of Patrick Crinnion’s machinations during the Arms Crisis. (See Sir Garret link above for details.)

Many Special Branch officers were also suspicious that British agents had helped Loyalists bomb Dublin in 1972 and 1974.

If all this wasn’t enough to keep MI6 at arms length, in 1982 relations between the Irish Government and the UK were in disarray after Haughey’s stance on the Falklands, making it even less likely that Doherty would have countenanced the possibility that the RUC Special Branch and its MI5 masters would have assisted him in such an outrageously illegal manoeuvre; moreover, something that would have made him vulnerable to blackmail.

25.   FITZGERALD’s CIRCLE OF FRIENDS IN THE UK.

Garret FitzGerald was elected Taoiseach twice, first in June 1981 and again in November 1982. On one of these occasions – probably the latter – he made a dash for the UK within a day or two of the result of the election that indicated that his party, Fine Gael, would form the next government with the Labour Party.

He did not describe his mysterious trip in either of his autobiographies. Whether it was 1981 or 1982, his garda driver swept him to Dublin Airport, where he tried to catch a flight to England but to no avail. After this, he instructed his driver to take him to the North Wall ferry port, where he was joined by a civilian with a private vehicle. The pair boarded a car ferry bound for the UK, leaving Fitzgerald’s bewildered garda escort behind them.

The escort notified Garda HQ, who duly alerted MI5 in London that the Taoiseach-elect was on his way over to the UK, only to find out they already knew.

Later, FitzGerald would say that he had visited a relative, but that was hardly the full story. It is more likely he wanted to make direct contact with members of a circle of influential people he had been cultivating in Britain to help him advance Anglo-Irish relations, and, if the trip was in 1982, he would have had a second item on his agenda, a desire to secure what he believed was evidence to prove his conspiracy theory about Dowra.

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) was one of the main sources of personnel for the NIO, sent ambassadors to Dublin, and was generally central to Anglo-Irish affairs. If FitzGerald was going to succeed in making progress in Anglo-Irish affairs, he was going to have to win over the support of the mandarins at the FCO, especially in the wake of the rupture between Haughey and Thatcher over the Falklands War in 1982. Yet FitzGerald was not universally admired at the FCO. He had been the victim of a cruel parody by FCO officials at an amateur Whitehall Christmas pantomime where his perceived grovelling to the NI Secretary of State, 1976 – 1979, Roy Mason, had provided them with much amusement. (Phoenix 18 Jan 1985).

However, no one could accuse FitzGerald of not trying hard to cultivate warmer relations with the UK. He had been a keen participant in the British-Irish Association (BIA) from its inception in the early 1970s. MI6 placed Dame Daphne Park, the former Head of the Western Hemisphere division of MI6, into it after she became the Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, in 1979. Perhaps it was she who had heard about FitzGerald’s imminent arrival on the BIA grapevine after the Irish general election and informed MI5.

Another possibility is the Duke of Norfolk, an influential Conservative peer in the House of Lords. During the November 1982 general election campaign, the Duke’s relationship with Fitzgerald had generated newspaper headlines after he had been exposed as a former British spymaster by Charles Haughey. The Duke had served as the Head of the Defence Intelligence Service, DIS, in the 1960s. Yet in 1982, he tried to mislead the Irish media by denying he had ever been a member of MI6 (also known as the Secret Intelligence Service, SIS). Yet no one had accused him of being in MI6. He was banking on the fact that the media would not realise the difference between MI6 (which is attached to the Foreign Office) and the DIS (Ministry of Defence). At the time, he told reporters:

‘I have never been in the Secret Intelligence Service. Haughey has just made it up. It’s all absolute nonsense.’

One of the Duke’s friends was Sir Brooks Richards, the man who had taken over from Maurice Oldfield as Intelligence Coordinator in Ireland in 1980. The Duke and Richards socialised with each other at White’s Club in London.

On his post-election trip to the UK, FitzGerald may have hoped to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to the network he was developing across the Irish Sea. If the trip took place in 1982, the kerfuffle about the Duke might have persuaded him to keep his head under the parapet. Dame Daphne Park certainly had the potential to cause him trouble. Her association with MI6 was hardly a well-kept secret, even in 1982. She was named in the book, ‘British Intelligence & Covert Action‘ written in 1982 and published by Brandon Press in 1983. She also appeared in The Phoenix in 1983.  When she died in 2010, the Times of London described her as:

‘..  one of MI6’s most treasured intelligence officers whose secret career spanned Russia, Africa, Vietnam and Mongolia .. Daphne Park spent 30 years in MI6. Sir Colin McColl, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1989 to 1994, told The Times: “She was marvellous, she was always confident of her abilities without showing off and treated everyone as her equal. I felt sorry for the other women in the service because they tried to be like Daphne but it was impossible to be like Daphne”.

It says a lot about MI6’s mindset that Park was considered a ‘most treasured’ officer. She remained an unapologetic colonialist. When she was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph in April 2003, she stated that

‘The [British] Government is too worried about speaking out [against Mugabe] because they think they will be accused of being colonialist. Well, I don’t think that’s such a terrible crime.’

What type of information might Park have been looking for at the BIA? Perhaps a clue is to be found in an interview she gave to the BBC’s Panorama about MI6 in 1993, when she explained:

‘Once you get really good inside intelligence about any group, you are able to learn where the levers of power are, and what one man fears of another… You set people discreetly against one another… They destroy each other, we [in MI6] don’t destroy them.’

Park was not the only spy FitzGerald encountered at the BIA. He befriended Christopher Ewart-Biggs at it shortly before he was appointed British Ambassador to Ireland in 1976, but was assassinated shortly after his arrival in Dublin. He had served as the link man between MI6 and the FCO at one stage in his career.

Yet another man with intelligence links was David Astot, owner of The Sunday Observer newspaper and a founder member of the BIA.

26. RUC DETECTIVE INSPECTOR IAN CARTER.

After the defeat of Fianna Fáil in the November 1982 general election and the return to power of Fine Gael and Labour, unnamed sources continued to feed slimy smears to the media.

Ainsworth was still in charge of the ISB. These smears focused primarily on Ainsworth. They continued to promote the fiction that he had colluded with the RUC Special Branch to procure the arrest of James McGovern.

RUC Detective Inspector Ian Carter was a ‘local’ RUC Special Branch Inspector who was alleged to have objected to the arrest of James McGovern.

According to Jack Hermon:

‘Over the weekend of 25 and 26 September, [1982] when the local Special Branch Inspector in Enniskillen was informed that a certain ‘James McGovern’ was due to be arrested, he initially believed that it referred to a man whom he knew to be eighty years of age. Immediately, he queried this instruction with his superiors, only to be advised that the direction to arrest related to the two young McGovern brothers. This proper and legitimate check by the Inspector was seized upon later by a newspaper reporter, who depicted it dramatically as an objection to the arrest of James Francis McGovern. This was typical of ill-founded and often opportunistic reporting on the whole of the Dowra Affair.‘

It was unfair of Hermon to characterise the reports by the journalists who covered the Dowra Affair as ‘opportunistic’, especially if he had Peter Murtagh and Joe Joyce in mind. Their integrity is beyond question. Nonetheless, even the best of journalists can be misled by sources who are cunning, plausible and resourceful. This is one of the ‘occupational hazards’ reporters encounter.

Murtagh was misled about Ian Carter by his sources.

On Monday, 13 December, 1982, Murtagh wrote an article about Carter, entitled ‘Gardai and RUC In Contact Before Arrest’. The inaccurate version fed to Murtagh was that:

‘An Enniskillen-based officer in the RUC’s Special Branch protested about the order to arrest Mr McGovern and travelled to Belfast to make his objections known to his superiors at RUC headquarters.

‘RUC officers in Enniskillen were made aware of the order to arrest either on Friday evening or Saturday morning. Some time on the Saturday, Detective Inspector Ian Carter, a member of the RUC Special Branch based at Enniskillen went to Belfast where he protested to his superiors about Mr McGovern’s imminent arrest. His objection was overruled however.‘

Murtagh developed the conspiracy theory being fed to him a little the following day:

‘Sources revealed yesterday that Inspector Carter left the Belfast meeting with the impression that his representations had been successful. He was surprised, according to the sources, to find later that the order to arrest Mr McGovern had been confirmed by Assistant Chief Constable Trevor Forbes. At the time, Mr Forbes was the Assistant Chief Constable for the RUC’s south district, but he since moved to the Belfast section of the Special Branch.‘

27. TIME TRAVELLING RUC OFFICERS.

There is another difficulty with this story. According to Murtagh’s garda sources, the alleged call from Ainsworth to the RUC requesting McGovern’s arrest might have taken place on Saturday, 25 September. Murtagh’s exact words were that

‘The second contact with the RUC over Mr McGovern was made by a more senior officer [than Chief Superintendent Thomas Kelly] either on Friday, September 24, or on the following Saturday morning. It is not known precisely what was discussed on this occasion but a subsequent order was issued by the RUC that Mr McGovern was to be arrested.’ (Irish Times 14 December 1982.)

If Ainsworth had made the alleged call requesting McGovern’s arrest on the Saturday morning, how could Carter and his colleagues have known about it the previous Friday?

Hence, the RUC sources who were promoting the conspiracy theory about Seán Doherty were not quite in sync with those pushing it in Dublin.

They should have pinned Carter’s imaginary exploits exclusively to Saturday morning to afford more credibility to their falsehoods.

Nonetheless, the chaos caused by the blizzard of smears and other events had set in motion a series of circumstances that would lead McLaughlin and Ainsworth to quit the gardaí in February 1983.

While it was a case of ‘mission accomplished’, Wren was not quite out of the woods yet.

28. SHUTTING DOWN THE MOLEHUNT FOR THE ‘BRITISH CELL’ INSIDE GARDA INTELLIGENCE.

No one ever believed that the arrest of James McGovern was aboveboard.

McGovern would sue the Northern Ireland state and receive compensation.

The question to resolve is whether his unlawful arrest was {i} requested by Joe Ainsworth as a favour to Seán Doherty, or {ii} arranged by MI5-6 to smear Ainsworth by making it look like he had requested the RUC to make the arrest.

Fine Gael and Labour won the November 1982 Irish general election. They promised a judicial inquiry that would probe a series of garda-related issues, including Dowra.

Since Ainsworth had not requested McGovern’s arrest, there was no evidence to support the notion that he had. The paper-thin tissue of lies supporting the smear was likely to dissolve under scrutiny from experienced trial lawyers. Exposing the smear campaign would raise questions about those who made false claims, including Ned Garvey.

Meanwhile, Ainsworth was closing in on a piece of evidence confirming breaches of security within the ISB’s transcription unit. Suddenly, the new government ordered McLaughlin to direct Ainsworth to terminate his investigation, i.e., his molehunt for MI6 agents in the force.

Who told the new government about this inquiry? Presumably, Wren or Garvey, or Andy Ward, the Secretary at the Department of Justice?

No one in government asked Ainsworth about the nature of his inquiry.

They probably did not know it was a molehunt for British spies.

Ainsworth had one meeting with Peter Sutherland, the new attorney-general, who was remote. Sutherland did not make eye contact with Ainsworth, who felt he was borderline hostile. This was out of character for Sutherland, who was an exceptionally charming individual. (He was most helpful to me during my research for my first book on the 1970 Arms Crisis – he had once represented Captain James Kelly and remained committed to clearing his name.) Someone had clearly poisoned Sutherland against Ainsworth.

Ainsworth decided to resign in protest at what he saw as government interference in garda affairs.

He planned to use the forthcoming inquiry ‘to expose the British cell inside the force’, as he described it to me.

McLaughlin also resigned.

Ainsworth told me that he intended to talk openly about his probe into MI5 and MI6 penetration of the gardaí, and would name Wren and Garvey.

Garvey and Wren had now accomplished their primary goal, the removal of McLaughlin and Ainsworth.

Better again for Wren, FitzGerald, and Dick Spring, the Tánaiste and leader of the Labour Party, appointed him as the new garda commissioner.

The judicial inquiry, however, posed a lethal threat to Wren’s continuation in office.

Ainsworth later hinted about these affairs when he gave an interview to The Irish Times about what he described as a ‘mole’ in the force. As he confirmed to me on many occasions, this was a reference to Wren.

It would take Wren nearly three years to wrestle the judicial inquiry genie back in the bottle. His tactics were as ingenious as they were manipulatively Machiavellian.

Wren was, it would transpire, far smarter than all the politicians and media in his orbit.

He retained Andy Ward’s loyalty and support at the Department of Justice throughout.

Meanwhile, other dark clouds were hovering on the horizon, which threatened Wren.

29. THE PROVISIONAL IRA PROBE INTO MI6 OPERATIONS IN DUBLIN.

The Provisional IRA was also watching MI6 activities in Dublin. They mapped out their network and planned to close it down in a repeat of what Michael Collins did to the Cairo gang in 1920, a story for another day.

As part of their investigation, the IRA made recordings of conversations between an MI6 officer from Scotland and certain Irish citizens which had relevance to the plotting against Ainsworth.

Kieran Conway, the former Director of Provisional IRA Intelligence, disclosed some of this information to a journalist based in Dublin in the early 1980s.

Conway wrote a book entitled ‘Southside Provisional’ about his time in the IRA. It covered the 1970s. He intended to write another book. I interviewed him a number of times and gathered up the stories he had given to the Dublin-based journalist in the 1980s, to assist his second book. Unfortunately, Conway passed away in 2025 before making any progress with it. He did, however, discuss much of what he intended to put in it with me.

Someone in the Provisional IRA knows the whereabouts of the 1982 transcripts of the Scottish MI6 officer.

Further details about this are still too sensitive to disclose at this time.

In the 1970s, McCormick was employed as the Foreign Department Manager of The Sunday Times. McCormick once said that ‘half of those who worked for the paper’s’ foreign desk were spies. Some of the services McCormick performed for MI6 are described in the book, ‘Murder in Cairo’ (2025).

Deacon published ‘C’, a biography of Oldfield, in 1984. Much of it was based on information provided by Oldfield himself and other MI6 insiders. One of them was Anthony Cavendish, a rotund former MI6 officer who had served with Oldfield and remained one of his best friends. Cavendish later published his own autobiography, ‘Inside Intelligence‘, in the face of efforts by the British Government to suppress it.

One of Deacon’s tantalising revelations was that during 1979/80:

‘MI6’s main success was in establishing agents inside the Garda, the Irish army and government departments. One of the most vital informants was a senior garda officer [who] provided information on the activities of the former Irish premier, Mr Haughey, and other prominent political figures.‘

Since Deacon wrote the book, unassailable evidence of British espionage directed against Haughey has emerged from Britain’s National Archives. It is to be found in a letter dated 24 April, 1980, from the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins, to Margaret Thatcher, which makes reference to two intelligence reports on Haughey:

‘For his part, Mr Haughey, having made promises that he will pursue the question of Northern Ireland with other European political leaders, needs a meeting with you: he has been criticised at home for going to Paris before London. What use he will wish to make of a meeting, in terms of substance as distinct from presentation, is not clear (but you will, I expect, have noted two recent intelligence reports that throw some light on his approach).‘

Deacon also revealed that in the 1970s Oldfield had enjoyed ‘some quiet successes’ on both sides of the Border where the gardaí and the RUC were now enjoying a ‘closer understanding’.

He also attributed

‘the comprehensiveness of certain of the Service’s intelligence reports’ to a network of ‘agents and informants’ inside the Garda, Irish Army and civil service.[ Deacon 173]

The civil service department most likely penetrated by MI6 was the Department of Justice.

31. THE BOOK IN CHARLES HAUGHEY’S PRIVATE LIBRARY.

Charles Haughey kept a copy of Kennedy Lindsay’s book, ‘The British Intelligence Services In Action’ (1981) in his private library. Lindsay, a Unionist politician, alleged that MI6:

‘has numerous agents and informants [in the Republic of Ireland], including many at high levels in the civil service, police, and armed services. The territory had been part of the United Kingdom until 1921, and even today, some citizens do not fully recognize the legitimacy of Irish governments. Feuds stemming from the civil war that followed independence still linger. Political bias in appointments is common, fostering jealousy that undermines loyalty to the regime or even to the state itself. [MI6’s] challenge has never been finding agents, but limiting them to those with the best contacts and greatest potential.‘

Overall, Lindsay’s book suggests he had several reliable sources. Haughey certainly took the book seriously.

32. HAUGHEY’S INNER CIRCLE AND CONCERNS ABOUT MI6.

Martin Mansergh, another of Haughey’s inner circle, told me that Haughey was so wary of the British that he always ensured that any flights he booked never went through Britain unless it was his destination.

Haughey’s home had been bugged by the gardai in the early 1970s. Joe Ainsworth once went out to inspect the security at Abbeville. When he mentioned the possibility that the premises could be bugged, Haughey shot him a death stare. The suggestion that Haughey and Ainsworth were close or friends is yet another myth. Their dealings were always professional and arranged through official channels. Ainsworth had been appointed to the ISB by McLaughlin during Jack Lynch’s time as Taoiseach.

Revelations about the bugging of Haughey’s house appeared on the front page of The Sunday Tribune in 1984 in an article by Vincent Browne. Still, from Haughey’s reaction to Ainsworth’s remarks, he clearly suspected the intrusion earlier. The transcripts from the bug would have reached Patrick Crinnion, MI6’s spy at C3.

In 1982, Sean Haughey, who later became a TD and Minister for State with responsibility for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, among other ministries during the period 2006-2011, spoke in public about British interference with his father’s administration. He once told me that his comments reflected the mindset of Haughey’s inner circle.

33. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DID NOT ALWAYS ‘NEED TO KNOW‘ ABOUT MI6 REGIME CHANGE OPERATIONS.

For decades, the perceived wisdom has been that Dowra was a Seán Doherty-initiated dirty trick to help his brother-in-law. However, the pattern of deceit discernible in the machinations of the Garda-DoJ cabal, which was feeding disinformation to the media, raises the polar opposite possibility: that the arrest was an MI5-6 dirty trick designed to smear Patrick McLaughlin and Joe Ainsworth. The pair had embarked on a mission to root out British spies inside the garda. 

If Dowra was indeed an MI5-6 dirty trick designed to undermine Ainsworth et al and was orchestrated with the aid of British agents in the gardaí and Department of Justice in Dublin, it hardly proceeded without the involvement of Michael McCaul of MI5, a man not only well-versed in the art of the political smear (as demonstrated by his involvement in the plots against Harold Wilson and Ted Heath et al) but also MI5’s link man to the ISB in Dublin. The right-wing Ultras in MI5 (of which McCaul was a leader) had a nine-month opportunity to plan a dirty trick around the Nangle case. The assault had taken place in December 1981, and the trial was on 27 September 1982. Wren had his spies inside the ISB reporting what was happening. The call from Jim Kirby to Chief Superintendent Kelly could easily have been noted by others at the small ISP complex at Phoenix Park.

In 2021, I discovered an astonishing fact. I asked a former foreign secretary about plots in the 1970s against Charles Haughey. I wanted to know if Maurice Oldfield of MI6, with whom he had many discussions, had ever mentioned the anti-Haughey plotting to him. The former Foreign Secretary told me in an email that he would not necessarily have been told about such a plot, as it might have been conducted on a need-to-know basis. I was astonished by this. I was being told that Britain’s intelligence service could plot against government ministers and the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic without the British government’s knowledge or approval.

The facts in the Dowra case indicate that the plotting against Ainsworth may have been conducted without the knowledge of Margaret Thatcher and her foreign, Northern Ireland, and home secretaries.

What records have emerged in the UK about Dowra indicate that Thatcher was ‘bemused’ at Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with it. She would hardly have felt like that if she had been aware that it had been a dirty trick all along, perpetrated by MI5.

Dowra Phase II (thwarting the proposed tribunal) began as soon as McLaughlin and Ainsworth departed. Sir John Harmon and his new RUC Special Branch chief, Trevor Forbes, were among its victims.

Why would the likes of MI5, McCaul, Wren and Garvey spread smears about the RUC?

McCaul and his associates were aware that Garret FitzGerald’s new administration needed to convince London that Dublin would continue to co-operate meaningfully with the RUC, inter alia, to secure the signing of what would eventually become the Hillsborough Agreement of November 1985. Hence, they appear to have gambled that FitzGerald would abandon the judicial inquiry if it threatened to derail Garda-RUC relations. This involved convincing FitzGerald that senior RUC officers had much to hide over Dowra.

Put simply, the message going forward was that a judicial inquiry risked implicating the RUC hierarchy in the illegal arrest of James McGovern and jeopardised the chance of securing a deal with Margaret Thatcher’s government.

The overarching fear for the MI5-6 cabal must have been that a judicial inquiry had the potential to reveal the truth: that Ainsworth had not sought the arrest of McGovern, rather that the RUC had been manipulated by MI5-6 to lift McGovern and make it appear Aindworth had requested the arrest.

If this was the plan behind the ‘leaks’ about Hermon and Forbes, it worked perfectly.

35. A YARN ABOUT A CALL FROM DUBLIN AIRPORT.

Jim Kirby of the Department of Justice hailed from Enniscorthy, where he had developed an animus towards Fianna Fáil as a young man. He told me this developed as he observed how the party operated in his home town. If Doherty had directed him to request the arrest of McGovern, he would have shouted this from the rooftop.

Any attempt by MI5-6 to scapegoat Kirby as the individual who requested McGovern’s detention was likely to backfire.

There was little point in trying to find a patsy inside the ISB HQ at the Phoenix Park because it was a small unit where people knew what was going on around them.

The ploy adopted by the cabal was to cut out imaginary middlemen and pretend that the call requesting McGovern’s arrest was made by Ainsworth at Dublin airport on 24 or 25 September 1982.

In September 1982, the gardaí had rooms at the Airport, inside the heart of the building, at the far end of the first floor. Members of the public were sometimes escorted there for an interview. There was no privacy, nor were the phones inside it which were scrambled. At the time, the ISB always communicated with the RUC on scrambled lines to outfox possible IRA eavesdroppers. Was Ainsworth meant to have made the call openly on a non-scrambled line in a room where the gardaí, airport officials, and possibly even members of the public could have entered suddenly and without warning, and left a record of the call in the process? On what planet does anyone think that Joe Ainsworth would have risked letting the IRA listen in as he colluded with the RUC in a criminal conspiracy?

36. MISREPRESENTING THE 9.15 A.M. CALL, WHICH ALLEGEDLY REFERRED TO A ‘SPECIAL REQUEST’.

The conspirators decided to concoct a reply to the fictitious call from Dublin airport.

That required a whipping boy from the RUC side of the fence. Trevor Forbes, the new head of the RUC’s Special Branch, had the misfortune to be chosen. Forbes had no background in the special Branch and was not a member of the old boys’ network that did the bidding of MI5.

On 12 April, 1983, Peter Murtagh reported a call made by the RUC to the ISB on the morning of McGovern’s arrest. Although not named, the implication was that Trevor Forbes had left a disguised message for Joe Ainsworth, informing him that his ‘special request’ (to have McGovern lifted) had been carried out.

‘The RUC officer [Forbes] who was contacted about Mr McGovern’s arrest telephoned Garda headquarters in Dublin shortly after 9 am and left a message for the man who had made the request [Ainsworth]. The message, which was written down by an assistant of the Garda officer, stated that the special request [to arrest McGovern] was being carried out. The RUC officer [Forbes] also left his name.‘

On page 246 of ‘The Boss’, Murtagh and Joyce revisited this alleged event when they wrote that:

‘a senior officer in the RUC telephoned a counterpart in ISB at Garda headquarters. The special request from the South, which they had spoken of a few days previously, was being looked after, he said.‘

Note that Forbes is alleged to have said that the ‘special request .. was being looked after’ as if it was something that was still in train, not an event from the past. However, the logbook of his call shows that he spoke about an event that had already been completed. What he actually said was that the ‘job was successful’.

These accounts distorted and misrepresented a call that the ISB had actually received from the RUC Special Branch Belfast HQ at 9.15 a.m., on the morning of the trial.

It was normal for the RUC and the ISB to exchange calls daily, sometimes hourly. The message left for Ainsworth at 9.15 a.m., had nothing to do with Dowra.

At 9.15 a.m., Trevor Forbes had not yet heard of James McGovern, let alone that he had been arrested and prevented from crossing the Border. He first learned about McGovern an hour later when the Det Chief Inspector at Armagh contacted him.

As before, Murtagh was reporting in good faith what he was told by sources he considered credible but they were misleading him.

I spoke to Joe Ainsworth many times over many years at his home on Weston Road in Churchtown about this and other matters. Ainsworth was aghast that anyone could believe such a meeting had taken place. He had a vivid recollection of the meeting, and it had nothing to do with Dowra. On the contrary, it concerned an INLA bomb atrocity.

In the chapter in his memoirs on Dowra, Jack Hermon recited the passage from page 307 of ‘The Boss’, quoted above, and responded as follows:

‘In fact, it was not ‘unusual’ for such meetings to take place on Saturdays. Since the Garda Commissioner and I both had numerous commitments during December, a weekday meeting proved impossible. As weekend working was part of my normal pattern, I had suggested that we meet on that Saturday morning, to which [Garda Commissioner]’s Pat McLaughlin willingly agreed, as he knew of my deep concern over the escalating terrorist activity in the North. I had just returned from five weeks leave of absence in America, and there was an urgent need for an operational review of the position with the Gardai; to have delayed it into the New Year was unacceptable to me. I clearly recollect the purpose of that meeting on 18 December 1982, and remember well the occasion.

‘I had returned from holiday early on 6 December, only hours before seventeen people were killed in an INLA no-warning bomb in the Droppin’ Well Inn, a dance-hall in Ballykelly, County Londonderry. The shock of such a multiple murder reverberated throughout Northern Ireland and world-wide.  Those who died were a local boy of seventeen, five young women, and eleven off-duty soldiers. Many others, civilians and soldiers, suffered grievous and lasting injuries. Such terrorist atrocities were causing great community anxiety and tension. Northern politicians were in their customary strident, often irresponsible and excitable mood, and I had James Prior, a relatively new and still somewhat perturbable Secretary of State.

‘Consequently, I had initiated the Saturday meeting with Pat McLaughlin to discuss co-ordinated preventive security measures across the border, and specifically the need for overt and covert patrolling in the North and South to inhibit the movement of terrorists, their explosives and weapons. The meeting was intense and continued over lunch. To my mind, therefore, the comment in The Boss was sheer nonsense..’ [307] 

Hermon’s account makes perfect sense because the Droppin’ Well outrage was perpetrated by an INLA unit led by Dominic McGlinchey, which was based in the Republic. In fact, it would have been astonishing if a meeting had not taken place to deal with it. It is impossible to believe that there was ‘just one item’ on the agenda and the Droppin’ Well was not discussed at all.

Records may still exist from this meeting outlining the main points the group discussed. They would prove that certain deceitful gardaí and or RUC officers misled the media over Dowra.

38. NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION EMERGES.

Noel Dorr, Ireland’s Ambassador to London from 1983 to 1987, met John Hermon of the RUC in the mid-1980s. They discussed the Dowra affair, during which Hermon was adamant that no one in Dublin had asked the RUC to arrest James McGovern. The RUC man then complained that there were many things he knew about the garda investigation into the affair that would be ‘astonishing if they came out’. These involved numerous irregularities by the authorities ‘on the southern side’, which he could have pursued but did not.

What was it Hermon found so ‘astonishing’ about the Garda investigations into Dowra, of which there were two?

The first one was carried out by Chief Superintendent Stephen Fanning of the ISB within days of McGovern’s arrest.

The second one was conducted by Wren and his new deputy commissioner, John Paul McMahon, with assistance from Stephen Fanning.

Fanning was not the most reliable officer in the force. At some point in 1982, he told James Kirby of the Department of Justice that Kirby’s phone had been tapped when it wasn’t. As a result, the first inquiry into Dowra was conducted by someone who fabricated damaging, malicious claims about Joe Ainsworth and circulated them behind his back. One would assume that if there had been even a shred of evidence that Ainsworth had conspired with the RUC to arrest McGovern, Fanning would have found it.

Ainsworth was still in charge of the ISB when Fanning began his investigation at the end of September 1982, and would remain in place until he signalled his intention to resign on 20 January 1983.

In the event, Fanning was unable to find a morsel of proof. Yet none of this deterred him from trying – and succeeding – in convincing the new Fine Gael-Labour Government that there had been a conspiracy. His reward was to succeed Ainsworth as ISB Chief in February 1983.

Ironically, Fanning had been brought into the ISB by Ainsworth. Their relationship had been professional and harmonious until Fanning implored Ainsworth to intervene with Seán Doherty to lobby for his promotion to assistant commissioner. Ainsworth had refused point-blank, explaining that promotions were for the Commissioner and the appropriate boards. This may have unsettled Fanning, who was older than Ainsworth and now faced the prospect of being overtaken in the promotion stakes by others before he would have to retire.

The British Embassy became aware of Fanning’s animosity towards Ainsworth. In a letter 15 August 1983, Ambassador Alan C. Goodison wrote to C. M. James at the Foreign Office, referring to how

‘Fanning disliked his predecessor, Joe Ainsworth; indeed, the two were not on speaking terms in the final months of Ainsworth’s period of office.’

As his inquiries progressed, Fanning became aware that the RUC had {i} informed the gardaí in Cavan that James McGovern had been arrested and was being detained by the RUC, and {ii} that McGovern would not be attending court, but {iii} that the local officer had merely relayed to Superintendent Noonan that McGovern would not appear as a witness. Hence, Fanning would have realised that the RUC arrest team had provided the necessary information to enable the gardaí to seek an adjournment of the trial. That meant that the RUC officers who had arrested McGovern were hardly a part of a plot to sabotage the trial.

He must surely also have discovered Joe Ainsworth’s personal efforts to relay details of the arrest to his garda colleagues in Dowra, who were prosecuting the trial, via the RUC.

Yet, all the indications are that Fanning purported to conclude that there had likely been a conspiracy involving Ainsworth to pervert the trial. Unfortunately, his report has not been published.

‘left a message for the man who had made the request. The message, which was written down by an assistant of the Garda officer, stated that the special request was being carried out. The RUC officer also left his name.‘

A message was left at 9.15 a.m., but it did not concern Dowra. Inspector Dan Boyle recorded it at 9.15 a.m. He assumed it related to an operation against the IRA.

There were other problems with the line Fanning was pursuing. They involved the alleged involvement of Trevor Forbes.

Forbes had been appointed as Head of the RUC Special Branch by Jack Hermon with effect from 1 September 1982. Ainsworth had not met him in person by the time of McGovern’s arrest. Within a week or so of the appointment of Forbes, Ainsworth had gone abroad on holiday.

Are we to believe Ainsworth would ask a relative stranger in the RUC to commit a crime that anyone of reasonable intelligence could see would explode all over the media if it were executed?

Are we to believe that one of the pair’s earliest dealings was a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, a crime that could easily destroy their careers and potentially land both of them in prison?

On 3 November 1983, Hermon sent a letter to Wren, which included Forbes’ recollection of the calls made on the morning of McGovern’s arrest. See the extract reproduced below this paragraph:

Unless someone can show that Forbes was lying, this account demolishes the Dowra conspiracy theory.

What did Fanning make of it when it was brought to his attention?

Overall, he stuck to position that Forbes was guilty of arranging the improper arrest of McGovern as a favour to Ainsworth.

The possibility that Fanning was involved with the cabal plotting against Ainsworth cannot be ruled out. In other words, he knew full well there was no garda wrongdoing to uncover about Dowra except that Seán Doherty, McLaughlin and Ainsworth were the victims of a smear campaign perpetrated by malicious individuals.

Fanning never found any evidence to support the conspiracy theory linking Ainsworth to the arrest. Indeed, in February 1983, Larry Wren, to whom Fanning was reporting, told Sir John Hermon of the RUC that there wasn’t ‘an iota of evidence’ of a conspiracy.

While the report Fanning wrote has not been released, it is reasonable to surmise that it points a finger at Ainsworth. After the new Minister for Justice, Michael Noonan, read it, he tried to use it, or a draft of it, to browbeat Ainsworth at a January 1983 meeting. Noonan as good as accused Ainsworth of having arranged the arrest at this encounter.

Ainsworth never read the report, although Noonan offered him the chance, because of his contempt for its author.

Fanning was no stranger to fabricating stories designed to smear Ainsworth. It was he who told James Kirby that his phone was being tapped in 1982, when it was not, thereby poisoning James Kirby against Doherty, McLaughlin and Ainsworth.

If there had been a shred of truth to the allegation about Kirby’s phone being tapped, a paper trail including phone transcripts would have been created, along with the evidence of an array of ISB officers in the transcription unit, all of whom could have confirmed that it had taken place. Suffice it to say, no evidence of any of this ever materialised, not even after Ainsworth and McLaughlin left the force and a regime hostile to them took over. In fact, it was Fanning who replaced Ainsworth as ISB Chief in February 1983, while Larry Wren succeeded McLaughlin as Commissioner. Fanning also realised his ambition to become an assistant commissioner.

41. GARDA SUPERINTENDENT NOONAN’S STATEMENT IS WITHHELD FROM THE RUC INQUIRY BY WREN.

The RUC failed to uncover any evidence of a conspiracy, either. Their inquiries commenced shortly after 29 September, 1982, when Father Denis Faul, from Dungannon, Co Tyrone, filed a complaint with the Police Complaints Board (PCB) for Northern Ireland. He asked the PCB to establish if there had been ‘collusion between the RUC and people in the Republic to pervert the course of justice’, over the arrest. In his complaint, Fr. Faul also drew attention to the fact that Garda Nangle was the brother-in-law of Seán Doherty. According to Hermon:

‘This information was unknown to me at that time, and I believe it was also totally unknown then at RUC Headquarters. Judging by his letter of complaint, Father Faul had no knowledge of the efforts made by RUC officers at different levels to notify the Garda promptly of McGovern’s detention, and thereby notify Dowra District Court. Had there been less haste and more careful examination of the sequence of events, I believe much unnecessary aggravation might have been avoided.‘

At that stage, Hermon asked Trevor Forbes for a report. According to Hermon, Forbes

‘immediately checked the background to McGovern’s arrest and satisfied me that he could find absolutely no evidence in the case of any collusion between the Gardai and the RUC at any level. On his return from compassionate leave after his mother’s death, the Regional Detective Superintendent, who had originally been in charge of the arrest operation, confirmed Trevor Forbes’s findings and also rejected completely any question of there having been collusion.‘

The RUC report on Dowra was completed in April 1984 and given to the PCB. According to Hermon’s memoirs, the Board read it and sent him a request for further information

‘on a series of detailed and pertinent questions, including a specific request for the statement of [Garda Superintendent Joseph Noonan.]’ (p. 147).

This was not surprising because although Noonan’s statement had been made a few days after the arrest, it had not been furnished to the RUC, although ‘all the other statements of Garda officers’ had been made available by Wren.

This statement undermined the smear that there was Garda-RUC collusion in the arrest of James McGovern. It showed that the RUC arrest team had sent news of the arrest to Dowra, thereby creating grounds for a request for an adjournment. There would have been no point in lifting McGovern merely to bring about an adjournment.

Why did Garda Commissioner Wren, Deputy Commissioner John Paul McMahon and Assistant Commissioner Fanning withhold this statement from the RUC until some stage after April 1984?

Hermon felt Joseph Noonan’s statement was the ‘crucial’ one because

‘it made clear that Garda ‘X’ had not given [Joseph Noonan] the full message — omitting to say that the RUC had arrested McGovern — and also that [Noonan], together with the State Solicitor, had decided not to tell the Presiding Judge that McGovern would not be attending Dowra District Court that day. In light of all the evidence, the Police Complaints Board agreed that no disciplinary charges should be preferred against any RUC officer.‘

42. POLITICAL PRESSURE FROM THE COALITION GOVERNMENT.

The new Government’s blood was up over Dowra. Unfortunately for them, Fanning’s report had not delivered any meat. Another inquiry was demanded.

Larry Wren, now garda commissioner, led it. He asked his new deputy commissioner, John Paul McMahon, to assist him. Fanning remained involved.

According to his colleagues, Hanna organised the attack in cooperation with British special forces officers. The Garda inquiry under Garvey, Wren, McMahon and others was a dismal failure. The central file on the Monaghan attack should have remained in Monaghan, yet McMahon removed it to Dublin for no logical reason and in violation of protocol.

The removal of files connected to British agents was something McMahon had in common with Wren. After Ainsworth took over C3, he asked for the file on Patrick Crinnion, who had worked at C3, 1960-72, before he was arrested for attempting to pass C3 files to John Wyman of MI6. Ainsworth discovered that there was no file. This would be the equivalent of MI6 not having a file on Kim Philby, the MI6 officer who defected to Moscow after having betrayed British secrets to the KGB.

Wren travelled with Fanning to Belfast on 8 February, 1983, when they discussed Dowra with Hermon. The RUC man was surprised that Wren was directly involved in the inquiry because he was obliged to remain aloof ‘from any detailed disciplinary [RUC] investigations’ in case he might have to preside over disciplinary hearings later ‘and adjudicate on the guilt, innocence or punishment of police officers’. (Page 143)

Hermon also felt Wren was under political pressure. In his memoirs, he stressed how Wren was ‘accountable to the Minister for Justice’ and felt that without a ‘police authority as a buffer between the Gardai and the Minister, political influence could obviously be brought to bear’.

An alternative analysis is that having shafted McLaughlin and Ainsworth, Wren now wanted to forget about Dowra. Yet inconveniently, the new Fine Gael-Labour government wanted him to deliver dirt on Seán Doherty and Fianna Fáil.

Hermon quickly grasped that Wren had no real intention of troubling him over Dowra. On the contrary, Wren was scathing about the media’s coverage of it. According to Hermon,

‘[Wren] advised me that there was a belief at lower levels within the Gardai and the RUC that an Assistant Chief Constable [Forbes] had a knowledge of McGovern’s arrest, and indeed had directed it. This, he agreed, could well have been created by irresponsible and unwarranted media statements. He concluded, however, that they had “not one iota of evidence to sustain the belief”. This point lodged in my mind because of the considerable pressure which I felt he ultimately attempted to exert on me. I advised Larry that, as Chief Constable, I could initiate action for investigating any chief officer only if I received a formal complaint based on some evidence or reasonable suspicion.’ (144)

After the February meeting, Wren and McMahon proceeded – or at least gave the Coalition the appearance they were proceeding – with their probe into Dowra. What they were really doing was buying time. The longer they could string FitzGerald along with the possibility of acquiring evidence from the North, the longer he could postpone establishing the judicial inquiry. They also explore a series of dead ends to drag out the process.

43. TURNING A BLIND EYE: WREN AND FANNING IGNORE THE DROPPIN’ WELL AND 9.15 a.m. PHONE CALL SMEARS.

There were two lines of enquiry they should have pursued. On 15 April, 1983, The Irish Times had reported that John Hermon and Trevor Forbes had travelled to Dublin, where they met McLaughlin and Ainsworth. The agenda of the meeting had allegedly been

‘quite extraordinary. There was just one item: any issues which might arise with the advent of the new government in the Republic.’

The implication of this was that they were meeting to discuss Dowra.

Wren was obsessive about press coverage of Garda affairs and personally micromanaged press releases from his office daily. He once even ordered an internal inquiry after a leak to The Phoenix magazine. It is inconceivable that he did not read this Irish Times report. If either he or McMahon had bothered to talk to Hermon, Forbes, McLaughlin or Ainsworth, they would have discovered that the December meeting had dealt exclusively with the Droppin’ Well massacre perpetrated by the INLA.

The minutes of the meeting would have confirmed this, too.

Hence, they would have established that someone was misleading The Irish Times. Yet Wren and McMahon did not explore the possibility that a smear campaign was underway, no more than Fanning had.

Why not?

In addition, they appear to have failed to investigate the source of the misleading claim that Trevor Forbes of the RUC had left a message with Ainsworth stating that the favour he had sought was being looked after. In the first instance, the allegation was false and malicious. Second, it was a breach of the Official Secrets Act to reveal ISB information.

44. THE SLOW DEATH OF THE PROPOSED JUDICIAL INQUIRY INTO DOWRA.

After winning the November 1982 general election, the two coalition parties, Fine Gael and Labour, hammered out a Joint Programme for Government that promised a sworn judicial inquiry into a series of garda controversies dating back to 1979.

Shortly after his election as Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald informed the Dáil that it would be one of the first matters to be placed before the new Dáil.

From a British Intelligence perspective, the proposed judicial inquiry posed a deadly threat because it had the potential to unmask its prized network in the Republic. There was no hint of this during 1983.

In April 1984, however, Joe Ainsworth would give Conor Brady of The Irish Times a glimpse at what he was going to say at the tribunal by referring to a ‘mole’ in the Garda who was a ‘threat’ to national security. He was referring to Wren, who was now Garda Commissioner. Whether a judicial enquiry would have accepted or rejected such a statement, what was an absolute certainty was that Joe Ainsworth, a retired Deputy Garda Commissioner, was going to use a public platform to accuse a serving Garda Commissioner of being a ‘mole’

Ned Garvey, Larry Wren, Patrick McCoy, Vincent Heavin, Colm Browne, and others in their once all-powerful circle feared what Ainsworth was going to say, and some of them took steps in 1983 and 1984 to ensure there would be no tribunal. Some of their darkest secrets, however, nearly became public knowledge at the start of the endeavour in January 1983.

45. DOHERTY’S PROPOSED PRESS CONFERENCE, JANUARY 1983.

On 20 January, the new Minister for Justice, Michael Noonan, revealed the existence of phone taps placed on the lines of journalists Bruce Arnold and Geraldine Kennedy. These revelations provoked Seán Doherty to organise a press conference at a hotel in Dublin for Saturday, 22 January, to hit back at Fine Gael.

RTE News ran a report heralding the showdown. At it, Doherty proposed releasing details about the tapping of the phones of the Workers Party, a number of journalists, and the British Embassy, by the gardaí and G2 while Garret FitzGerald was Minister for Foreign Affairs. One of the journalists he intended to name was Vincent Browne. However, since Doherty was now an Opposition backbencher without the authority to make such disclosures, he backed off at the last minute, having received a stern warning from the Department of Justice that he would be in breach of the Official Secrets Act if he proceeded.

At this time, Andrew Ward was in charge of the Department of Justice. Ward was the man who had insisted on the continuation of the tap on Vincent Browne’s phones against the advice of Joe Ainsworth.

Now thwarthed, Sean Doherty determined to wait for the judicial inquiry and use it as his platform to publicise these matters.

As 1983 progressed, it also became clear that other secrets which C3 had concealed for over a decade were likely to spill out at the proposed tribunal. Although the intended terms of reference were meant to confine it to 1979 – 1983, no one doubted for a moment that earlier controversies would seep out. For instance, Garvey had placed the Director of Public Prosecutions, Eamon Barnes, under surveillance in 1976 because Barnes had refused to prosecute a number of gardaí who had criticised him in an editorial in Garda Review magazine. At a judicial inquiry, the allegation of RUC-Garda collusion over Dowra would almost certainly have been dismissed for lack of evidence, whereas the interference with the DPP would have become a confirmed fact. Indeed, a report on the surveillance of Barnes had already appeared in Magill magazine in 1980, written by Joe Joyce.

The dilemma facing the cabal which wanted to sink the tribunal before it could be launched, was that the new ISB Chief, Stephen Fanning, had inflamed the new Government’s suspicions about Dowra. This had happened before Ainsworth and McLaughlin’s departure.

After they left, Fanning could hardly perform a U-turn on the issue without looking shifty and inept.

Hence, the Coalition government directed Larry Wren to conduct a further inquiry into Dowra. It commenced on 14 January 1983.

What FitzGerald wanted Wren to produce was evidence that could be presented at the sworn judicial inquiry, or perhaps even at a criminal trial.

46. THE TRIBUNAL IS KICKED TO TOUCH, JANUARY 1983.

The tribunal would never sit. Terms of reference would never be drawn up. No judge would be nominated to chair it.

A crucial factor in its stillbirth was the excessive length of the probe into the affair conducted by Wren and Deputy Commissioner John Paul McMahon. It expanded the investigation from McGovern’s arrest to a string of other matters.

The planned tribunal was put on hold while the Wren-McMahon probe proceeded.

At this point in time, McLaughlin and Ainsworth were on their way out of the force.

On 20 January 1983, McLaughlin wrote to the new government indicating his intention to retire. So too did Ainsworth.

Wren was appointed ‘acting’ Garda commissioner, a post which became permanent on 8 February.

Wren’s so-called inquiry would drag on for years and yield no evidence of any plot perpetrated by Doherty, Ainsworth and Forbes.

One of the first things he would do was visit John Hermon and tell him there was not one ‘iota of evidence’ of conspiracy.

Had the tribunal been established, the garda probe would have shut down automatically. The Coalition did not want that to happen before the gardaí found evidence of collusion and wrongdoing. In the absence of proof, the tribunal would have been counter-productive from FitzGerald’s point of view, as it would inevitably have vindicated McLaughlin, Ainsworth and Doherty.

Unaware of the forces lining up against the tribunal in the shadows, the Coalition’s game plan, as of late January 1983, was revealed to the public by an ‘official source’ to Dennis Coughlan of The Irish Times. He reported on 25 January, 1983 that

‘THE GOVERNMENT may defer the establishment of a sworn pub­lic inquiry into political interference with the gardaí when the Dail meets tomorrow, according to an official source.

‘The decision would be based on the fact that investigations are already under way within the Garda Siochana under the acting Commissioner, Mr Laurence Wren, and the establishment of a sworn inquiry at this time might inhibit that work.

‘Before Christmas the Taoi­seach, Dr Fitzgerald indicated that the of the inquiry would be one of the first pieces of business to be placed before the Dail, but there was some uncertainty as to what its terms of reference would be, and whether it would be of a judicial nature with the involvement of the full range of legal experts.’

Coughlan also described how opposition to the tribunal was beginning to form:

‘Reservations had been expressed over the establishment of a formal judicial inquiry, both because of the cost and the length of time such an enquiry might take in reviewing the operations of ministers for Justice going back to 1979.’

Coughlan’s ‘official source’ also indicated that the Government expected the Wren-McMahon probe (assisted by Fanning) to be completed quickly, the polar opposite of what would actually happen.

‘The joint Fine Gael/Labour programme for government contained an undertaking to establish an inquiry, but an official source suggested yesterday that the investigations at present in train were likely to be completed before the terms of references were forwarded to the Dail for the establishment of an enquiry.

Meanwhile, not a finger was lifted to find out who had been leaking smear stories to the press.

Time and money were wasted. Nothing was achieved. Aside from the IRA and INLA, no one could have welcomed this stagnation more than the members of the British Intelligence network in Dublin.

47. FITZGERALD LOBBIES THATCHER OVER DOWRA, JUNE 1983.

Garret Fitzgerald hoped to get Margaret Thatcher’s government to concede Dublin a say in Northern Ireland’s affairs. He set about arranging a formal summit with her after his election, but soon discovered she was not interested in any new or substantive dealings with him. He even found it difficult to gain access to her.  At first, she limited their encounters to the margins of EU summits.

Fitzgerald was due to meet Thatcher in Stuttgart on 19 June 1983 and must have asked Wren for an update before his departure. This prompted Wren to contact Hermon on Thursday, 16 June, at 8.25 p.m., when Hermon was at his office hosting a dinner at RUC HQ for a group of visiting Australian police officers. ‘The message from the Commissioner was noted and brought to me. It was terse. He needed results,’ Hermon wrote later in his memoirs.

Wren could hardly have expected ‘results’, but at least he could now report to FitzGerald that he was doing his best but receiving little or no co-operation from Hermon.

In the event, Thatcher saw FitzGerald for 30 minutes at Stuttgart. When they met, he devoted a portion of this precious time to briefing her about McGovern’s arrest.

The Government’s Secretary, Dermot Nally, who accompanied FitzGerald to Stuttgart, noted that he

‘took some time in explaining the background to the Dowra affair and made certain suggestions as to how it might be handled’.

48. THATCHER’S ADMIRATION FOR AINSWORTH’S COURAGE.

FitzGerald tried to convince Thatcher that there was a case to be made that Joe Ainsworth had orchestrated McGovern’s arrest on behalf of Seán Doherty.

Thatcher didn’t subscribe to FitzGerald’s conspiracy theory and was ‘bemused’ at his preoccupation with it, according to records which have emerged from the UK’s National Archives.

It is a virtual certainty that she remembered Ainsworth fondly from her trip to Dublin Castle in December 1980. Her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, had introduced Ainsworth to her as the man with the formidable task of looking after her security while she was in Dublin. Ainsworth had devised a plan to fly her over Dublin in a helicopter rather than risk using cars, which were likely to encounter vulnerable choke points in the city. After introductions, he accompanied her on the flights in and out of the courtyard at the Castle to display his confidence in his security plan, thereby putting his life as much on the line as hers. Thatcher had singled him out for a chat during the inward flight and later spoke about how impressed she had been with the security arrangements she had enjoyed in Dublin. She was probably dismayed at Fitzgerald’s hounding of Ainsworth.

When FitzGerald met Thatcher again at Chequers in November 1983, he raised the issue again. This time she responded with platitudes, telling him, ‘it was important that some satisfactory conclusion be reached’. (All in a Life, page 477)

Peter Barry, the new Foreign Affairs Minister, also lobbied his British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe, over the issue, but to no avail.

49. A CONFUSED GARRET FITZGERALD WAS TOLD BY BRITAIN’S AMBASSADOR THAT WREN IS HOLDING UP THE INQUIRY INTO DOWRA IN THE NORTH, JULY 1983.

FitzGerald was not getting a clear picture from Wren about what the RUC were doing about Dowra. There were erroneous reports in the press that Hermon had told Wren he would bring in an external chief constable to investigate the issue. Wren or one of his associates may have been the source of this disinformation. Wren may have relayed it to FitzGerald, too.

Hermon, however, had not promised that a visiting officer would investigate the case.

When FitzGerald met with Ambassador Alan Goodison on 21 July 1983, he raised the issue.

FitzGerald would have been even more confused had he learned that Wren had told Hermon the previous February that there was ‘not one iota of evidence’ of wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, FitzGerald continued to pursue the issue and appears to have retained his faith in Wren.

50. THE DECEPTIVE AND ALARMIST SOURCE WHO ‘HOPED THAT RELATIONS WOULD NOT NOW DETERIORATE TO THE EXTENT THAT EXISTING SECURITY COOPERATION BROKE DOWN ALTOGETHER.’ NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER 1983.

The Coalition Government in Dublin could not afford to alienate the RUC, nor the mandarins at the NIO or the Home Office, if it wanted to secure an Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher.

Enhanced security was the only substantial card Fitzgerald had to play in his negotiations with her.

The letter was also circulated to Hal Doyne-Ditmas of MI5.

Angel wrote to Bourn again on 25 October, stressing the same point.

Again, the letter was circulated to Doyne-Ditmas.

On 17 November, 1983, John Lyon of the Northern Ireland Office wrote to a colleague called Coles in London noting that

‘we detect a sense of frustration in Dublin that having so far been unable to ‘nail’ their [Fianna Fáil] predecessors over the [Dowra] affair .. We, –  or more specifically the Chief Constable [Sir John Hermon] –  have not been able to do the job for them.’ [PREM 19/1408/1]

FitzGerald knew there was only so far he could go in accusing the RUC, NIO and Home Office of criminality if he wished to convince Thatcher that it would be possible to build a working relationship with them.

Fitzgerald’s undoubted core interest was to gather information to maintain the Haughey Factor, the process of frightening the electorate at the prospect of Charles Haughey’s return as Taoiseach and all that that might entail.

Fitzgerald’s doggedness drew another shot across his bow from the secretive RUC cabal. It landed on Wednesday, 30 November, 1983, when The Irish Times published an article titled ‘Garda-RUC Relations Cool Over Dowra’, alleging that the conflict between Wren and Hermon over Dowra had become ‘a matter of trust’ and that there was ‘little point’ in the two men discussing security cooperation ‘while a suspicion remains that certain currently serving officers in the RUC were involved in what is seen as a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in the Republic’.

An RUC officer was reported as having

‘said yesterday he hoped that relations would not now deteriorate to the extent that existing security cooperation broke down altogether. .. The RUC source feared however, that if relations between the top men in both forces continued at its present level, it would inevitably start to have an adverse affect on relations at a lower level.’

51. FITZGERALD CLAIMS FORBES WAS THREATENING TO BRING THE HOUSE DOWN, DECEMBER 1983.

The potential to damage RUC-Garda relations was clearly on Fitzgerald’s mind when he spoke to Sir Philip Woodfield, the 60-year-old pipe-smoking Permanent Secretary at the NIO, in December 1983. He had witnessed much of the intrigue that had swirled around Ireland since the early 1970s. If the Dowra arrest had been a dirty trick, Woodfield would have known – or at least would have had a shrewd idea – of what had happened.

FitzGerald assured Woodfield that he did not want to jeopardise Hermon’s position, as he was an extremely effective police chief.

In other words, Fitzgerald was saying that even if Hermon or his subordinates had engaged in the perversion of justice, it was not a point of principle for him, and he would be happy to tolerate Hermon as RUC chief constable; all he wanted was the dirt on Fianna Fáil.

‘The position’, he said, ‘is that [Commissioner Larry Wren] has lost confidence in the [RUC] chief constable’, because Hermon had supposedly told Wren he would ask the Police Authority of Northern Ireland to appoint an independent chief constable to carry out an inquiry into Dowra. FitzGerald said that Wren had chosen to view this as Hermon’s concession of wrongdoing. Now, FitzGerald contended, Hermon seemed to be going back on what he had said. Suffice it to say, Hermon had not conceded wrongdoing; in fact, quite the opposite was true. In reality, Wren had told Hermon that there was not ‘one iota’ of evidence of wrongdoing.

FitzGerald then proceeded to made the astonishing claim that Trevor Forbes, Head of the RUC’s Special Branch, had considered resigning over Dowra, but had changed his mind and threatened that, if he went, he would bring others with him. This was slanderous of Forbes, who had never made any such threat.

Who was telling FitzGerald these lies?

If Woodfield spoke to Hermon after the exchange with FitzGerald, it may have reinforced Hermon’s concerns that someone in the gardaí was leading FitzGerald on a merry dance. This casts light on what Hermon said when he informed Ireland’s Ambassador to London, Noel Dorr, that there were many things he knew about the Garda investigation which would be ‘astonishing if they came out’, and that it involved a large number of irregularities on the part of the authorities ‘on the southern side’ which he could have pursued but did not.

Irrespective of what game Hermon may have suspected was afoot, he persisted in his efforts to calm troubled waters. In his memoirs, he remarked that

‘Wearied by the manipulations over the Dowra Affair by the Republic’s authorities, I issued a public statement on 6 December [1983]. In it, I declared that I had ‘no desire other than to continue the same cordial co-operative relationship with the present Commissioner’ as I had enjoyed with Pat McLaughlin. I also noted that Larry Wren had stated in writing that he had ‘no complaint against the RUC’.

Time would prove that Murtagh’s RUC source was crying wolf: the existing security co-operation between the forces did not break down. Superintendent-level meetings continued largely unaffected, and Garda chief superintendents enjoyed direct telephone access to their counterparts on the other side of the Border. In fact, Garda-RUC ties improved. In January 1984, James Prior and Michael Noonan met in Dublin. As a result, liaison officers were appointed from each force to foster improved relations, and a commitment was made to hold formal RUC-Garda meetings between senior officers. Before the signing of the Hillsborough Agreement, two meetings between Border chief superintendents took place, one in September and another in October 1985. They were chaired by Assistant Garda Commissioner Stephen Fanning of the ISB and the senior RUC Assistant Chief Constable responsible for security, John Whiteside.

Yet at the top of the force, Wren, the method actor supreme, continued to cold-shoulder Hermon. The RUC man later recalled that:

‘Even the resolution of our [Dowra] inquiries did not change Larry Wren’s position. The criminal investigation file into Father Faul’s complaint was forwarded by Michael McAtamney in mid-December 1983 to the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland. In early March 1984, the DPP directed no prosecution, because there was no evidence to justify one.’

The Coalition did not abandon the judicial inquiry until some stage in 1984. The climbdown was so subtle, hardly anyone noticed it. In the meantime, no evidence had emerged to implicate Doherty et al in wrongdoing over Dowra, with the inevitable consequence that the tribunal could only vindicate them if it was set up.

A number of factors contributed to this climb-down. Insofar as FitzGerald’s dealings with the UK were concerned, securing a deal over the North was his overarching objective. Eventually, it must have dawned on him that he was banging his head against a brick wall over Dowra. He seems to have backed away from the controversy by agreeing to disagree and leaving it at that.

UK state papers show that Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior and the Republic’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Peter Barry, agreed that there was nothing further they could pursue at a ministerial level regarding the case of James McGovern. That presumably reflected the attitude Fitzgerald adopted.

52. WIRETAPPING KEY FIGURES AND THE IMPACT OF THE DUNNE KIDNAPPING ON THE JUDICIAL INQUIRY.

FitzGerald may also have been influenced to drop the judicial inquiry for other reasons. The gardai had tapped the phones of journalists Vincent Browne, Tim Pat Coogan, and others on Fine Gael’s watch. Browne was editor of Magill; Coogan was editor of The Irish Press. Many other journalists were tapped.

Bruce Arnold had been a contributor to Magill, hence his calls to the magazine must have been picked up.

Barristers (including one who later became a High Court judge) had also been intercepted.

Throughout his political career, FitzGerald was able to maintain the credible stance that he was utterly opposed to the violence of the IRA. However, in what must rank as one of the best-kept secrets of the Troubles, FitzGerald’s opposition to the IRA was not always as ironclad as it seemed.

FitzGerald was fully aware of what Fine Gael expected of a Taoiseach in the throes of a paramilitary kidnapping. Liam Cosgrave had set the template in October 1975 after the Dutch industrialist Tiede Herrema had been abducted by Republicans. Cosgrave informed his Cabinet that no ransom would be paid; prisoners would not be released, and no concessions would be made to the kidnappers.

Cosgrave’s colleagues promptly lined up behind him.

FitzGerald was in Chicago at the time of the abduction. After he was alerted to it, he contacted his Dutch counterpart, Max Van der Stoel, who was unavailable because he was abroad.

Instead, FitzGerald spoke to his Minister of State, Laurens Brinkhorst.

‘I assured him that we would do all in our power to track down the kidnappers and to release Herrema. Neither then nor later did the Dutch propose to us that we should negotiate with the kidnappers or accede to their demands.’ [All in a Life.]

Herrema was traced to a house in Monasterevin, which was surrounded by the Irish army and gardaí. His release was secured after a gruelling marathon siege.

FitzGerald would not react with such fortitude when he became Taoiseach in 1981.

On Friday morning, 16 October 1981, Ben Dunne Jr. was driving his 500 SEL Mercedes towards Portadown. He was a member of the Dunne family, which owned Dunne Stores, a retail giant. Before Ben Dunne Jnr. crossed the Border, a green car pulled over blocking his route. Four masked men carrying guns tore him out of it, threw him into the rear of their vehicle, hooded him and drove away while two of them sat on top of him.

When the kidnappers, members of the IRA, reached their lair, they extracted the phone numbers of his father and wife from him. They then contacted Ben Dunne Snr.

By all accounts, Ben Dunne Snr. was a forceful and persuasive man; certainly not one to take no for an answer. His son was in the hands of terrorists who were threatening to kill him. At some stage later that day, he contacted FitzGerald.  Dunne Snr. told FitzGerald that he intended to pay the ransom, but wasn’t going to alert the gardaí. Even though every minute lost could prove a disaster, FitzGerald did not pass this information to the ISB.

Dunne instructed his branch managers and other staff members around the country to bring cash to his home.

There were other indications that a kidnapping had taken place, and some details were in the hands of the ISB.

By Saturday morning, a detective sergeant monitoring the Dunne home surmised correctly that the family was secretly preparing to pay the ransom for the kidnapping and contacted his superiors at Garda HQ.

We may never know precisely what Dunne Snr. said to FitzGerald, but it was enough to secure his acquiescence and, in effect, turn a blind eye to the payment of the ransom.

Ben Dunne was acting as a loving father. His object was to secure the release of his son to his family.

Ainsworth contacted Jim Mitchell, FitzGerald’s Minister for Justice, on the Saturday morning over a scrambled phone line. He gave him a report and stated that he believed the Dunnes had a plan to pay a ransom, which he intended to thwart immediately.

To his surprise, Ainsworth discovered Mitchell already knew about the kidnapping. He was aware because FitzGerald had told him about it.

Ainsworth asked Mitchell if he knew what arrangements were being put in place to make the payment. Mitchell was flustered and refused to answer the question. Ainsworth persisted.

Ainsworth next found himself in the bizarre and unprecedented position of having to secure Mitchell’s approval to halt the payment. Ainsworth was strong, direct and forceful: no ransom was to be paid, he insisted. Ainsworth argued that if it was paid, Ben Jnr. would be killed to conceal the identity of the kidnap gang anyway.

Mitchell refused to commit himself to this course of action.

Eventually, Mitchell agreed he would talk to FitzGerald.

When he reverted to Ainsworth later, he informed him that both he and FitzGerald were now in agreement: the ransom was not be paid.

Once the kidnapping became public knowledge, FitzGerald played the part of the uncompromising man of steel, insisting that no ransom would be paid, nor any concession made.

Several attempts were made to pay the ransom, both north and south of the Border, but the gardaí and RUC intervened to suppress them. On the southern side, the gardai also sealed off the area where they believed Dunne was being held. With nowhere safe for the exchange in Ireland, the money appears to have been handed over in Europe.

Ben Dunne Jnr. was released after six days in captivity at the gates of St Michael’s Church in Cullyhanna, South Armagh. The ransom believed to have been paid was between £350,000 and £500,000, in used banknotes.

£350,000 in sterling is now worth €1,665,000.

£500,000 in sterling is now worth €2,377,000.

In his first autobiography, FitzGerald wrote about the Herrema and Don Tidey kidnappings, but made no mention of the events described here. Instead, he portrayed himself very much in the resolute image of Liam Cosgrave when he wrote about how he had brought in legislation after the Don Tidey kidnapping.

‘We had hoped that the foiling of [the Don Tidey kidnap in 1983] and other kidnap attempts by the IRA and various breakaway groups would have ensured that this possible source of funds would be barred to them. Unhappily we discovered 14 months later that £2 million sterling had been paid to a Swiss bank, from which the great bulk of it was transferred via New York to the branch of an Irish bank in Navan. When we heard this on Wednesday, 13 February 1985 we set to work at once to draft legislation that would enable us to seize this money in a manner that could not be challenged in the courts…‘

Ben Dunne Snr warned some of his associates that he believed the IRA was planning more abductions. He was right: the payment of the ransom inspired a string of further kidnappings. One of these was Don Tidey’s.

The Tidey kidnapping occurred while the establishment of the judicial inquiry into Dowra and related matters was still in contemplation, at least as far as the Fine Gael and Labour parliamentary parties and the public were concerned.

Don Tidey on 24 November 1983. It ended in the tragic death of a soldier and a garda in Derrada Woods, Co. Leitrim.

Even animals were in danger: the famous racing horse Shergar was taken on 8 February 1983 and never returned.

In 1986, Jennifer Guinness was abducted. When she was traced to a house in Ballsbridge in Dublin, her kidnapper smashed a window and threatened to kill her. She had to endure the trauma of being in a room with a man who held a grenade in one hand and a revolver in the other before she was eventually released. 

In 1987, John O’Grady was kidnapped and mutilated by the O’Hare.

Senior Garda figures and officials at the Department of Justice knew about FitzGerald’s behaviour during the Dunne kidnapping, as did others. However, not a word of the scandal reached the pages of a newspaper, or if it did, it was spiked.

If Haughey had agreed to {i} turn a blind eye to the payment of a sum in the region of €2,377,000 (in today’s money) to the IRA, {ii} withheld his knowledge of a kidnapping from the Gardai, {iii} prevented his Minister for Justice from performing his duty and {iv} set a precedent which encouraged kidnapping by Republicans, the Irish, British and international press would have had a field day.

53. HERMON BECOMES BEWILDERED.

A closer examination of the inconsistent manner in which Wren treated Hermon between February 1983 and November 1985, yields more clues about the secrets of the Dowra affatir.

As 1983 had unfolded, Hermon would become bewildered by Wren’s gyrations over Dowra, but he made it his priority to placate Wren in order to preserve the good relations he had previously enjoyed with the gardaí. He also had to deal with backstabbing inside the RUC.

John Hermon and Joe Ainsworth had a few things in common, including being independent thinkers. British Intelligence wanted police officers on both sides of the border in Ireland whom they could control.

It is against this background that dark forces within the RUC were forming in the shadows. They would create all sorts of trouble for Hermon over the coming months.

On the surface, these events are baffling. Still, if read in the light of an attempt to convince the Dublin government that probing too far into Dowra would create a chasm between the RUC and the gardaí – and that the judicial enquiry should not be established – the apparent contradictions make sense.

A cabal of RUC officers joined Wren in creating the impression that Hermon was not co-operating with the gardaí over Dowra, and worse still, was covering up Forbes’ wrongdoing. Who they were and why they acted as they did remains a mystery to this day. Although they were in the RUC, they knew what Wren would do in the future, ie., that Wren would soon give Hermon the cold shoulder.

During February, March, and mid-April 1983, the relationship between Hermon and Wren worked smoothly. Then, on Friday, 15 April 1983, Peter Murtagh published a front-page article in The Irish Times which cited ‘sources on both sides of the Border’, entitled ‘Dowra affair sours Garda-RUC relations’.

‘The two men have not met since but it is expected that, at any further meeting, Mr. Wren will again raise questions about the affair.’

Clearly, Murtagh’s sources had a manipulative agenda of their own.  

The most disconcerting feature of the article was that these RUC and garda sources were able to predict that the relationship between Wren and Hermon was destined for troubled waters:

‘Several RUC sources expressed the fear that, if the affair were not cleared up-quickly, the existing mistrust would breed an unco-operative attitude which may permeate the lower ranks of both forces.’

Wren was so obsessive about leaks from Garda headquarters that he once launched an enquiry to find out who was talking to The Phoenix magazine. As far as can be told, Wren did not initiate an enquiry into the source of these leaks. This raises the possibility that he sanctioned them.

By April 1983, Wren had painted himself into a corner by pretending Hermon was being uncooperative over Dowra, so he actually had to give Hermon the cold shoulder.

Unaware of the adversity lurking around the corner, Hermon prepared for what he expected to be a typical meeting in Dublin on 19 April 1983 and drew up an appropriate agenda. He clearly did not read the Irish Times story, or, if he had, paid no heed to it. His wife, Jean, accompanied him for some shopping. In his biography, he describes how he had always

‘found the atmosphere with the Gardaí invariably relaxed and warm, with plenty of Irish wit in evidence. At bottom, there was a good understanding between us, as had been evidenced at the 60^th anniversary celebrations of the creation of the RUC and the Garda Siochana.’

To his surprise, there was to be nothing relaxed or warm about his encounter with Wren, which

‘took on a completely different tone. The 14 items on my prepared agenda were all, except one, relevant to our joint thrust against terrorist criminality. However, in the privacy of his office, the Commissioner immediately raised the Dowra issue with a vehemence which surprised me. It was not even on my agenda, because I had not judged it an appropriate subject, since our internal investigations were still ongoing. (145)

‘To the exclusion of all else, and to my scarcely concealed annoyance, he briefed me in some details on the problems which had arisen over alleged Fianna Fáil interference with the Gardaí in 1982, during Seán Doherty’s tenure of office as Minister for Justice.

‘It was without doubt the intensity of Commissioner Wren’s manner which struck me. .. I concluded that the Commissioner was been subjected to some considerable political pressure over the Affair. I carefully confided my remarks to the identified and recorded efforts of RUC officers of various ranks to ensure that the Gardaí and Dowra District Court were fully informed of McGovern’s arrest and detention.’ (145)

Wren replied the following May, but his letter contained comments which Hermon felt ‘made implications, if not allegations, about a chief officer of the RUC’. This was a reference to Forbes. Hermon became so concerned that he visited the Chairman of the Police Authority’s Complaints and Discipline Committee and showed him Wren’s letter. The Chairman advised him to ‘tread warily by putting in writing any subsequent discussion of the Dowra Affair with the Commissioner. Reluctantly, I accepted his advice as sound’.

Hermon now left nothing to chance. He briefed Sir Myles Humphreys, the Chairman of the Police Authority, on Wren’s letter. He followed this by sending Humphreys a ‘comprehensive’ report of his own, outlining what the RUC had learnt about the arrest. When this was done, he telephoned Wren to give him an update, then confirmed the conversation in writing.

55. WREN BACKTRACKS, JULY 1983.

Four days later, Hermon received a letter from the Police Authority of Northern Ireland asking him to request that Wren send any evidence he had that supported his complaint, so the matter could, if necessary, be investigated.

Since Wren had no evidence, he had no choice but to tread carefully, especially as he was being asked to commit his comments to writing. Hence, when he next wrote to Hermon on 25 July 1983, he took a different approach. He provided what Hermon later described as ‘a firm statement that the [Garda] Commissioner had not made any allegation against any member of the RUC, and recognised that the manner in which this matter was dealt with was a matter absolutely for me and my Police Authority’. This dizzying flimflam now meant that no allegation was being made against Forbes – at least for the present.

Hermon forwarded Wren’s July letter to the Police Authority, which sought a formal report on the grounds for McGovern’s arrest and the investigation file into Fr. Faul’s complaint. Hermon complied with their request.

56. WREN GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE AGAIN, OCTOBER 1983.

In October 1983, Hermon received yet another cagey letter from Wren in which he emphasised that the gardaí had not made any ‘complaint’ against the RUC, but instead wanted some assistance in answering a long list of very detailed questions about McGovern’s arrest. In response, Hermon ordered the preparation of a ‘comprehensive response to his request’. It was furnished to Dublin on 2 November, 1983.

A bewildered Hermon felt he could do no more:

‘Father Denis Faul’s complaint had automatically launched a full investigation, during which every officer involved with the detention and interrogation of the McGovern brothers was interviewed after caution. Not a shred of evidence of RUC collusion with the Gardaí ever emerged. I was satisfied that no more thorough investigation was possible, and I was certainly not going to depart in any way from its findings in order to satisfy the expediencies of the moment or unjustified pressures from the South.’

A cynic might suggest that if there had been Garda-RUC collusion, the RUC officers involved were unlikely to admit any wrongdoing to Hermon or Forbes. Yet it is equally likely they were telling the truth as they saw it. McGovern was arrested on the basis of misleading intelligence supplied by ‘Agent Dubious’, an alleged IRA informer. If MI5 had orchestrated the arrest with a hidden agenda, they would have operated on a strict need-to-know basis. The team of 24 RUC officers who carried out the arrest would hardly have been privy to the inner workings of such a scheme. The IRA informer’s lies about the McGovern brothers were intended to provide the RUC with an excuse to arrest James McGovern. In other words, the IRA informer lied so the wool could be pulled over the eyes of those in the RUC who were not part of the tight-knit circle of conspirators behind an MI5 plot to arrest McGovern.

57. HERMON’S OUTBURST, OCTOBER 1985.

Hermon did vent some frustration at the behaviour of the authorities in the South, but it was sparked by his anxiety about the success a resurgent IRA and INLA was enjoying against security targets in the North. His criticisms were primarily directed against the Coalition Government and the extradition process; not Wren personally, but the ongoing Dowra affair must have affected his mood somewhat.

The outburst took place in October 1985 during a speech he delivered to the Conference of the International Association of Chiefs of police in Houston, Texas. He was unaware he was being recorded by two journalists. He complained that the Irish Government had no interest in penetrating the IRA or their ‘Trotsky-Leninist’ colleagues, the INLA. He protested that the RUC had made 94 extradition requests to the Republic, of which only four were honoured. He claimed that the drug problem in Dublin had prompted the gardaí to ‘pull their resources from penetrating and monitoring terrorist groups’ and that the lack of priority given by the Coalition to countering terrorism had meant that ‘terrorists live in houses yards from the Border, where they organise, train, plan and stage attacks on Northern Ireland’.

By the time of this outburst, the public had lost interest in Dowra, and the once trumpeted judicial inquiry had become a hazy memory. The Coalition’s focus had shifted to the negotiations with Thatcher that would bear fruit as the Hillsborough Agreement the following month. The media, however, was still interested in the bizarre breakdown in relations between Wren and Hermon. In ‘Holding the Line’, Hermon wrote that

‘As part of the [Hillsborough Agreement], it was expected that the Commissioner of the Gardaí [Larry Wren] and the RUC Chief Constable would attend meetings of the Anglo-Irish conference. The first meeting was arranged for 11 December 1985. There was much public conjecture as to whether the Garda Commissioner and I would meet – or, rather, whether Larry Wren would meet me. The nonsense of the Dowra affair was turned over again and again, with media predictions that the two of us would retire in the immediate future, at the behest of our respective Governments.

‘Such was the speculation that, on 29 November, I judged it necessary to issue a comprehensive stateaament to the Force, and also to the public.’ (181).

Yet no one resigned.

58.  A HIGHER POWER.

The RUC cabal that was sniping at Hermon and Forbes in the media could have been emboldened to attack them because its members were being directed by a more powerful force: MI5. Hermon was not close to MI5. The Ultras in MI5 would have preferred their own man as chief constable. In his memoirs, Hermon gave MI5 no credit for any of the successes achieved against the IRA or INLA. On the other hand, he was particularly generous in his praise of McLaughlin and Ainsworth. Worse still, in February 1982, he had called for an investigation into the egregious Kincora scandal. This had put him and MI5 at daggers drawn.

MI5 did not employ choirboys. The dissemination of smears in the media would not have troubled their consciences. The Stalker Affair offers further insight into the moral disposition of those who worked for MI5 at this time. The Kincora scandal shows that they were prepared to allow pederasts to rape children and juveniles so they could blackmail Loyalist politicians and paramilitaries and use gunmen to murder people. Other affairs, such as those involving Ginger Baker, the MRF, Robin Jackson, and Stakeknife, demonstrate the extent of their willingness to tolerate and direct torture and murder. Indeed, the man who had led MI5 up to 1981, Sir Howard Smith, had once recommended the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

MI5 undoubtedly managed the anti-Stalker campaign, which infected every part of the UK media. That operation would have been beyond the reach and competence of the RUC acting on its own. If MI5 was capable of attacking a deputy chief constable from Manchester, it is not absurd to suggest they could have been behind the attacks on Hermon, McLaughlin and Ainsworth.

Trevor Forbes was probably a collateral victim of the smears hurled at Hermon. He had taken over the RUC Special Branch on 1 September, 1982, despite having no background in the Special Branch, and hence had had little or no dealings with MI5’s ruling elite in Belfast prior to this. From their paranoid viewpoint, he was probably seen as Hermon’s man, sent in from the outside to keep an eye on them for Hermon and therefore a cuckoo in their nest. 

59. THE IRA IS GIFTED A PROPAGANDA VICTORY.

The dubious claims made about Dowra by the unnamed RUC and garda sources undermined public confidence in both police forces, something that handed the paramilitaries a propaganda victory.

In an effort to undo the damage the RUC was suffering in the mind of the public, Margaret Thatcher assured the House of Commons on 6 July 1985, that co-operation between the RUC and the gardaí was still close despite Wren’s cold-shouldering of Hermon. She stated that the

‘consultations between the Gardaí and the RUC do not necessarily have to be conducted at top level. The consultations are conducted very well and the co-operation is close for which we are very grateful.’

While Fitzgerald and Thatcher were negotiating what would become the Hillsborough Agreement, the RUC cabal persisted in its campaign against Hermon by amplifying the bizarre rift between him and Wren. On 13 November, 1985 The Irish Times reported that:

‘The difficulties between the two officers date to when Mr Wren was in charge of the Garda intelligence (C3) branch [in the 1970s]’s and Sir John held an equivalent position in the North.

‘At that time, Sir John was extremely critical of Mr Wren, in discussions with Government officials, and this has not been forgotten.’

However, this was the polar opposite of what Hermon would recall in his memoirs. His version was that after his promotion to the post of Deputy Chief Constable of the RUC in 1976, he had assumed ‘direct liaison’ with the Gardaí. His opposite number was Larry Wren:

‘Our meetings were on a monthly basis, with the venue alternating between Garda headquarters at Phoenix Park in Dublin and RUC headquarters in Belfast. Larry and I chaired the meetings jointly, with the border divisional commanders from the North and South in attendance. An unspoken, but shared, objective was the maintenance of good working relations between us. Substantial progress was made on many matters of mutual benefit, including more secure and improved cross-border telephone and radio communications.’ (101)

This was not the only compliment Hermon paid to Wren arising out of their joint efforts in the 1970s. At page 143, he wrote:

‘Larry Wren was appointed by the Coalition Government as Commissioner. McLaughlin’s departure and Wren’s appointment with the subject of considerable comment in the Republic, but its problems were not ours, nor should we have been involved in them. While disappointed that Pat McLaughlin was leaving, and that we would lose Joe Ainsworth’s enthusiastic and successful efforts to curb terrorist crime, I had no qualms about Larry’s appointment, having worked well with him in the 1970s.’

60. ‘WREN’S ANIMOSITY DISAPPEARED LIKE SNOW OFF A DITCH IN SPRINGTIME’.

The stage was now set for yet another pirouette by Wren. On 2 December, 1985, Hermon visited Dublin

‘where Larry Wren did meet me. We shook hands, and I found him at least as outgoing as when I had first got to know him nine years earlier; the Dowra affair appeared to have been forgotten.’

From this point on, Wren wore a friendly mask. As Hermon recalls in his memoirs:

‘It was only when the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed in November 1985, required maximum co-operation between the RUC and the Garda Siochana that Larry Wren’s animosity disappeared like snow off a ditch in springtime; his attitude towards me was as if the Dowra Affair had never been! If Dowra teaches us anything, it is that the expediencies of politics and politicians must be kept out of policing in order that the police service retains its integrity.’

Another meeting followed within weeks. Discussions about a new coordinated Border strategy followed, as outlined in the joint communiqué issued by the Irish and British after the signing of the Hillsborough Agreement. Hermon and Wren now attended international rugby matches together and were spotted at one of Barry McGuigan’s boxing fights.

Hermon would write of this period of isolation from Wren that

‘the absence of meetings between the two of us had no discernible impact on the level of effectiveness of RUC/Garda co-operation against terrorism at Divisional and District level. If anything, what was missed was the dynamism of Joe Ainsworth’s thrust against terrorism and other serious crime in the Republic. Throughout this unpleasant and unnecessary affair, I was immensely reassured that the sound working relationship, affinity indeed, between the main body of the Gardaí and the RUC had remained steadfast. The [Garda] Bard’s poem of October 1982 [at the RUC’s 60^th anniversary celebrations which had extolled RUC-Garda relations] proved to be no mere flight of fancy.’

61. THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CIVIL ACTION BROUGHT BY JAMES McGOVERN.

Insofar as Dowra was concerned, Hermon had wanted to fight the civil action James McGovern had brought against the RUC for false imprisonment and wrongful arrest.

He was aghast to discover that the action had been settled out of court while he was abroad in January 1989.

McGovern received over Stg£3,000 in an out-of-court settlement. ‘The award of damages against the RUC proves that I was lifted in the wrong,’ he declared after his vindication. His brother Philip was also awarded Stg£3,000 for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.

The publicity after the settlement laid the blame for McGovern’s arrest at the feet of the RUC, not MI5.

There was no mention of the MI5 informer who had triggered the arrest in the first place. The agent’s existence did not emerge until Hermon published his memoirs in 1997. Although he did not mention the word ‘MI5’ in his book when describing the agent, a reasonably informed reader would have known that MI5 controlled the RUC’s E section informer network, especially after the revelations about MI5’s control of E section had tumbled out during the Stalker Affair.

If there had not been an out-of-court settlement in 1989, the part played by MI5’s informer would have emerged at the civil trial, and MI5 would have become embroiled in the affair. Charles Haughey was Taoiseach in 1989, and this could have proved problematic for Anglo-Irish affairs. Hermon did not reveal the agent’s role until the publication of his memoirs in 1997. If he had chosen not to write about the informer, the role of MI5 might have remained hidden indefinitely.

62.    THE OFFICIAL WHO VIEWED HIMSELF AS AN HONOURABLE WHISTLEBLOWER.

James Kirby of the Department of Justice was not a party to the machinations of the secretive garda cabal that was knowingly spewing out black propaganda to the media. Unlike them, he genuinely believed Seán Doherty had organised a dirty trick over Dowra. He was led to believe the very worst about Seán Doherty by CS Stephen Fanning, who had lied to him, alleging that his – Kirby’s – phone had been tapped by Ainsworth when it had not.

Kirby was the official who had passed on Doherty’s enquiry about James McGovern to CS Thomas Kelly. In 2012, he told The Irish Times how he had developed suspicions about Dowra almost immediately after the arrest. The paper reported that:

‘Knowing nothing about this case, Kirby was accompanying Ainsworth to Copenhagen for an EU security meeting shortly afterwards. “[Ainsworth] picked me up that morning (September 29, 1982), on his way to the airport, and as soon as we got there he got his driver to get all the newspapers. I thought this was a bit unusual. One would do me. Plastered all over the papers was this Dowra thing. I started reading it, and at some stage or another the penny dropped.’

Kirby felt it was noteworthy that Ainsworth was preoccupied with the affair. Yet was there really anything surprising about this? After all, the reports implied someone in the force had perverted the course of justice, a serious criminal offence.

More pointedly, Tom McCaughren of RTE had contacted CS Thomas Kelly, asking him if anyone in the ISB had ordered the arrest.

Kirby, of course, was unaware of the call from RTE and might not have made the remark about Ainsworth’s interest in the newspaper reports if had been fully appraised of that fact.

Kirby also recalled that

‘I did not disclose to Ainsworth at any stage that Doherty had made an enquiry about McGovern. Ainsworth was frightfully agitated. All the way to Copenhagen he was discussing this court case in Dowra. I was kind of mesmerised at him and wondered why he was so agitated.’

As late as 2012, Kirby was labouring under another misapprehension, namely that Ainsworth had tried to contact Doherty, when in fact he had not.

‘We got to Copenhagen and Ainsworth indicated that he had to ring the Commissioner urgently. I met him about an hour later. I gather he first tried to get in touch with the Minister but didn’t succeed. But he got in touch with the Commissioner [Patrick McLaughlin], and he told me that he told him to get Chief Superintendent Stephen Fanning to investigate the case. “Steve is sound, he said, but I (Ainsworth) told Commissioner that he was not to ask any questions until I got back”.’

Based on his erroneous assumptions, Kirby believed he had managed to ‘put’ the ‘outline’ of a conspiracy theory together. According to The Irish Times

‘It didn’t take Kirby long to put together the broad outline of what had happened. The Garda had asked the RUC to detain McGovern for the day to prevent him appearing in court, which it had done, against the objections of some members of the force involved in the arrest. The objections were overruled by a senior officer at RUC headquarters. “The same officer rang Garda headquarters at 8.30 the morning that McGovern was arrested and left a message to tell Ainsworth that the operation was successful,” Kirby says. “I can’t say for sure that it was McGovern’s arrest that he was referring to, but that was the message, and it seems like an extraordinary coincidence.”’

But where was the evidence for any of this? Kirby had not been at Garda HQ on the morning of the arrest. If he had heard the alleged call himself, he would surely have said so. Perhaps one of the dishonest garda sources feeding lies to journalists was also circulating them to Kirby.

Kirby was also wrong to believe that ‘officers’ in the RUC had objected to the arrest. On the contrary, a single officer, Detective Inspector Ian Carter, had made an enquiry after being told to arrest James McGovern because he knew an elderly man in his 80s with the same name. When Carter established that he was to arrest another man entirely, he was happy to comply with his orders. Kirby was presumably relying on The Irish Times article about this incident on 13 December 1982 and never saw Hermon’s book, which had clarified the issue in 1997.

Hence, Kirby’s observations cannot be taken as much more than speculation and hearsay.

63. AINSWORTH UNLEASHES A BROADSIDE AT KIRBY.

By 2012, Ainsworth had finally had enough. I had yet to speak to Jim Kirby (who I came to like enormously), but I had been speaking to Joe Ainsworth for a number of years. I advised him to respond to The Irish Times article for posterity.

Over the decades, Ainsworth had prepared a briefing on the events of 1982, which he had furnished to a series of ministers for justice, none of whom had inquired into the matter. Incredible as it may seem, he had not realised that people believed he had made the alleged second call to the RUC. He did not see Joyce’s In Dublin article, which had named him, until 2012 when I brought it to his attention. He now came out fighting his corner. The Irish Times afforded him an extensive right of reply to their 2012 article which had featured the interview with James Kirby. I helped Ainsworth with the reply. Ainsworth wrote:

‘The clear implication in your article about the so-called the Dowra affair is that the Garda officer arranged for the arrest of an innocent man to prevent him crossing the Border into the South to give evidence against the brother-in-law of the Minister for Justice.

‘Mr Kirby is the proponent of this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, the finger of accusation is pointed at me. Mr Kirby provides no facts, only supposition; “at some stage or another… the penny dropped”, he says. In the real world, I actually attempted to get the case adjourned when I found out at the last minute that the RUC had arrested the witness, so the prosecution could proceed later.

‘From some of the accounts I have read, it appears that some in the RUC were uncomfortable about the arrest. Indeed, the arrested man was compensated later. There are alternative views about the arrest including one that it was part of a British intelligence operation. In any event, I was never involved in perverting, or attempting to pervert the course of justice and to imply that I was, however veiled, is a grotesque insult my character.

‘No doubt other people have come to the same strange conclusion as Mr Kirby about Dowra. Yet I cannot really blame them for I know they were the victims of dark forces operating from the shadows who were pumping out carefully tailored propaganda. The smears they disseminated about me were obviously a great success.

‘I’ve a very good idea exactly who was leaking disinformation from inside the Garda to the media. Of interest, all of them had worked closely, perhaps too closely, with foreign services prior to this. The deceivers were prone to telling people that the phones were tapped, when they weren’t.’

This was a reference to Stephen Fanning.

‘Mr Kirby’s phone was never tapped. Those was no conceivable reason why it should be. Yet your article now reveals that “Kirby says he received a phone call from a (now deceased) chief superintendent in the Garda security section one Friday afternoon, who told him not to use his home phone that weekend. ‘If you need to make any calls. Go and use a public phone box’, he said’. This officer was a malicious fraudster who was determined to create paranoia and dissent and was working to an agenda. Mr Kirby should identify him by name.

‘Mr Kirby makes an issue of our visit to Copenhagen at the height of the Dowra affair. The truth is that on arrival in Copenhagen, I phoned the Commissioner and recommended that he set up an enquiry into the allegations that it appeared in the press about the controversial arrest, and the Commissioner readily agreed.

‘He asked if I had anyone in mind to take charge of the enquiry. I recommended Detective Chief Supt Stephen Fanning, and the enquiry was set up. From thereon I had no input into it. Of interest, I never saw the Dowra file, I never read the Dowra file or any documents in the file.

‘Unfortunately, the machinations involved in the Dowra affair appeared to have damaged relations between the RUC and the Garda for a number of years from 1983.’

When Ainsworth’s letter was published, Kirby accepted the challenge to identify the chief superintendent who had told him that his phone was tapped. The Irish Times reported that:

‘James Kirby has confirmed that the chief superintendent concerned was Stephen Fanning.’

64. CONOR BRADY’S INTERPRETATION OF AINSWORTH’S LETTER.

Insofar as The Irish Times was concerned, Ainsworth appears to have wasted his time in writing to it. Conor Brady, the former editor of the paper and author of a book on the gardaí entitled ‘Guardians of The Peace‘, claimed that:

‘As late as 2012 he [i.e. Ainsworth] wrote to the Irish Times, citing national security as the justification for the Dowra affair …’ (Page 166 of ‘Guardians of the Peace’)

It is, however, impossible to interpret anything in Ainsworth’s 2012 letter as a ‘justification’ for anything in that affair, let alone national security. On the contrary, Ainsworth pointed out the steps he had taken to alert the gardaí at Dowra District Court to the arrest of McGovern so that an adjournment of the case could be sought.

Brady had also been scathing in The Irish Times about the notion that the Dowra affair was connected to MI5 in any way. On 13 October 2012, he penned an article in paper contending that

‘Former deputy Commissioner Ainsworth has long protested his innocence of any wrongdoing. .. For example, he implies the so-called “Dowra affair” may have been the product of a British intelligence operation. This goes beyond the most vivid flights of the imagination .. This had about as much to do with British intelligence as with the Legion of Mary.’

Brady was also a victim of much of the nonsense fed to journalists about Ainsworth. This would explain why claims in his book that Ainsworth had carried two guns with him during an official trip with Charles Haughey to the United States in 1982, one of which, a Beretta was strapped to an ankle holster. Ainsworth never wore an ankle holster and did not take a Beretta to the US. Who fed this account to Brady?

He also claims that Ainsworth had direct access to Haughey. Again, this is inaccurate. Ainsworth had a few meetings with Haughey, but always through formal channels and at the Government’s request. Ainsworth did not have any official or unofficial access from his end and never initiated any meeting with Haughey. Who told Brady this, and why?

Brady was also wrong to suggest that Ainsworth insisted on an armed escort for himself. On the contrary, Garda Commissioner McLaughlin directed that he be afforded one, based on what was deemed credible intelligence from the RUC and other intelligence services that a maverick Republican subversive was intent on assassinating him and the Chief Justice. Both were provided with additional security at this time.

Brady had also claimed in his book that Ainsworth ‘had little crime experience and none in security‘. (149) This was absurdly inaccurate.

65.  ‘GROTESQUE, SHOCKING AND AN INSULT TO MY CHARACTER’.

James Kirby has made other claims about Ainsworth, which have been dismissed by no less a figure than Martin Mansergh. According to ‘The Boss’, a source had alleged that Ainsworth had been complicit in an attempt by Haughey to undermine the operation of the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act in July 1982.

The provisions of the Act permitted a person accused of a crime on one side of the Border to be tried on the other. The imagined Ainsworth-Haughey conspiracy was meant to have been announced at a meeting of senior government and security figures. ‘The Boss’ claimed that:

‘Haughey called Ainsworth to his office a few days before the meeting and discussed at length what Ainsworth would say. Those who attended the meeting would not easily forget it. Someone who was there later described it as a ‘Royal Command Performance‘.’ (207)

The book claimed that Ainsworth duly told the high-powered meeting that the act would be ignored. In reality, Haughey never held a meeting of this nature with Ainsworth. Yet, bearing Haughey’s reputation in some quarters as a hard-line republican, this story fed the belief he was soft on the IRA.

Martin Mansergh was one of those in attendance at the meeting and was Haughey’s Northern Ireland adviser. He told me that he never attended any gathering at which a policy U-turn on the Act was discussed. He would have been central to any such change in policy, as he was Haughey’s adviser on these matters.

Murtagh’s source on this issue is unknown.

Kirby repeated the allegation about the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act in The Irish Times in September 2012. His comments elicited a response from Ainsworth thus:

‘Mr Kirby described a meeting in the Taoiseach’s office in July 1982 at which he claims I “indicated that the law of the land was not going to be operated in relation to terrorists. Mr Haughey ordered that no notes were to be taken”. The notion that I would assist subversives by inaction is grotesque, shocking and an insult to my character. There were others at the meeting. Clearly, they were not interviewed prior to publication [by The Irish Times]. The recollections of those present who are still alive should now be sought and reported by your paper. Some of them are named in The Boss.

‘The meeting was called by Mr Haughey to obtain an overview of subversive activities. At the outset, he praised the Gardaí for their dealings with subversion and stated that his government continued to give the Force its full support.

‘I then spoke about subversion in Irish and international terms, addressing the procurement of arms, ammunition and explosives. I also focused on the funding of subversion, the use of European banks and the laundering of funds and other deposits. It is self-evident that these were highly confidential matters, and hence it would been wholly inappropriate for anybody to have left the meeting with notes which could have fallen into the wrong hands.

‘The meeting was attended by a number of diplomats from Foreign Affairs. One of my aims was to highlight the fact that the State was under stress because of subversive activities emanating from abroad. I requested of them that if useful intelligence became available abroad, it should be forwarded here as quickly as possible. This request was made against a background where Ireland does not have an overseas intelligence service.

‘Thus, the meeting was designed to further curtail subversion, not assist it through inaction.

‘At no time did I say that the law would not be enforced against subversives and nobody at the meeting offered such words, including the Taoiseach. Neither was this implied in any way. The Commissioner of the Garda Siochana, along with senior diplomats, the attorney general and the Minister for Justice were also present. Does Mr Kirby mean to convey that they are sat there mute as I made such an astounding and treacherous statement?

‘Mr Kirby states that I spoke about not operating the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act. This is also inaccurate. When it was first passed into law, it was discovered that there were difficulties with it, especially in relation to the attendance of witnesses from other jurisdictions. For a long time nothing came up which made it necessary to use the Act.

‘Eventually, a case did emerge. A person was arrested here, who, at that time was wanted in the UK and in Northern Ireland. Despite the difficulties with the legislation, it was decided by the Haughey administration to use the Act. No suggestion was ever made to me or anybody I am aware of, by Mr Haughey, or any of his aides or associates, about the non-operation of the Act at any time thereafter. I would have been aghast if they had.’

66. FOUR SCENARIOS.

SCENARIO 1: THE SEÁN DOHERTY DIRTY TRICK CONSPIRACY THEORY.

This theory posits that Seán Doherty wanted to deal a hammer blow to the prosecution of his brother-in-law. He directed Joe Ainsworth to make a sinister request to the RUC for McGovern’s arrest. Ainsworth complied on either Friday, 24 September, or Saturday, 25 September. The arrest was opposed by an RUC officer, Ian Carter, who became concerned about its legality and travelled to Belfast to lobby against it. He left Belfast believing his intervention had been successful, yet it went ahead anyway. After the arrest, a message was sent to the ISB in Dublin by telephone. Ainsworth did not take the call, but one of his aides wrote it down and passed it to him. It informed him that the arrest of McGovern, which he had sought, had taken place. Later, after the change of government and the exposure of the Dowra plot in the media, John Hermon and Trevor Forbes travelled to Dublin, where, on Saturday 18 December, they had an ‘unusual’ meeting with McLaughlin and Ainsworth to discuss their potential exposure over McGovern’s arrest now that the new Coalition government had begun to probe the affair.

There are numerous difficulties with this theory’s viability. First, the dates don’t add up. If there was a conspiracy, it means the information supplied by ‘Agent Dubious’ was the trigger that set it in motion. Yet, the so-called ‘specific intelligence’ of ‘Agent Dubious’, which started the operation, was supplied by MI5 on or shortly after 20 September 1982, i.e. before the alleged request for the arrest was meant to have been made by Ainsworth. That event was meant to have occurred on 24 or 25 September 1982.

Second, Ian Carter was reported to have received his orders possibly as early as Friday, 24 September. If that date is correct, Ian Carter knew about the arrest before Ainsworth requested it.

Third, Ian Carter never objected to the arrest, nor did he lobby his superiors against it. He initially thought the man called James McGovern, whom the RUC had been told to arrest, was in his 80s. Once this was clarified, he had no objection to the arrest and complied with his orders.

Fourth, after McGovern was arrested, the RUC foot soldiers involved in the arrest alerted the gardaí in the Republic in plenty of time to inform the Judge at Dowra and seek an adjournment; hardly the act of people who wanted to thwart the trial.

Fifth, Ainsworth tried to alert his garda colleagues in Dowra District Court about the arrest. He would hardly have done this if the purpose of the alleged conspiracy had been to secure a dismissal of the charges against Seán Doherty’s brother-in-law, and he was complicit in these efforts.

Sixth, if one of Ainsworth’s aides had taken a written message on the morning of McGovern’s trial, he or she could have been asked to provide details about it by Fanning, Wren and McMahon, who all investigated the arrest. There was a tiny pool of potential message takers. If an aide had taken one, but was reluctant to talk about it while McLaughlin and Ainsworth were in office, he or she could have done so without any fear of repercussions after they retired on 1 February 1983 and were replaced by a regime which was hostile to them.  Neither Fanning, McMahon, nor Wren ever uncovered the existence of such a message, nor any aide who allegedly took it down.

Seventh, John Hermon has provided an entirely plausible account of what was discussed at the meeting he and Trevor Forbes attended in Dublin on Saturday, 18 December, 1983. Far from entering a huddled conclave about their vulnerability over Dowra, it dealt with the INLA massacre at the Droppin’ Well during which 17 people had been slaughtered. It is impossible to believe an atrocity of this magnitude could have been ignored completely at that meeting.

Eight, none of the unnamed Garda sources who promoted this conspiracy theory ever claimed to have been present when a request to arrest McGovern was made by Ainsworth, nor indeed anyone else. They seem to be relying upon nothing more than hearsay and conjecture, if not downright lies. James Kirby does not rank among these deceivers. He developed an honest belief in this conspiracy, but was not present during any event that demonstrates that one took place. If he were the corroborative source referred to in ‘The Boss’, his contribution was nothing more than glorified gossip. As he said himself in 2012, his analysis of what he perceived was going on led to ‘the penny’ dropping.

Ninth, there is no explanation as to how Murtagh’s garda sources purport to know about the alleged second call, whether it was placed at Dublin Airport or elsewhere? Was Ainsworth meant to have made it openly in front of some of his subordinates, and thereby expose himself to disgrace and possible criminal prosecution? If no one overheard him, was he meant to have been so reckless that he disclosed his alleged efforts to pervert the course of justice with a foreign police force to his colleagues?

Tenth, despite extensive enquiries, no one stepped forward during the Fanning or Wren/McMahon investigations to say they had heard such a call, nor did Ainsworth make any statement that he had made such a call, not even after the change of government. Neither Fanning, Wren, nor McMahon ever found any evidence of such a call. If they had made inquiries at Dublin Airport, they would have learnt Ainsworth had not been present on the relevant dates. Since Ainsworth was always accompanied by a garda inspector, his whereabouts could have been easily established.

Eleventh, the conspiracy theory implies that Maura and Kevin Doherty were involved in the alleged conspiracy, which is not only egregiously unfair but also grossly defamatory to both.

Twelfth, Ainsworth had begun an investigation in 1980 into British intelligence activity in the Republic, particularly the possibility that Patrick Crinnion of C3 might have had accomplices at Garda HQ and Dublin Castle. The notion that Ainsworth would have indebted himself to the RUC Special Branch, which worked hand-in-glove with MI5, not to mention expose himself to MI5 blackmail, is difficult to countenance.   

Thirteenth, when ‘The Boss‘ was published later in 1983, it contained some clues about the Garda responsible for the accusations made about Dowra. He had a flair for the dramatic that made his stories compelling. From page 271 onwards, the authors describe how:

‘Murtagh returned to Dublin and made an appointment to see one of his regular Garda sources. The meeting took place in the man’s office. He was relaxed and chatted over a cup of coffee. At the mention of [various rumours concerning Seán Doherty] his demeanour changed instantly. He became nervous, said it was impossible to speak in his office, and moved to another nearby room. There, he said it was not safe to talk at all in the building, they would have to meet elsewhere. A colleague had a flat, he gave the address; he would be there at 4:30 pm. People were being followed, so watch your route and look to see that nobody is behind you all the way, he advised. Do not use the telephone. The contact had already developed his own code for telephone conversations: Haughey was referred to as number one, Doherty was number two, Ainsworth three, [Garda Commissioner] McLaughlin four, [Garda Tom] Tully five and so on down the list of twelve – Murtagh.

‘A few more hours later, the contact was much more at ease sitting in an armchair in his colleague’s flat. The colleague kept an eye out the window to make sure the house was not being watched by plainclothes gardaí. .. The gardaí, he said, were slowly being taken over and turned into an instrument of Haughey and Doherty…The gardaí had been directly involved in the Dowra affair.’

Fourteenth, writing in the Irish Times on Tuesday, 14 December 1982, Peter Murtagh admitted that the sources he had spoken to up to that point did not know what had been discussed during the alleged second phone call. On that occasion, he reported on page 7 of the newspaper that

‘The second contact with the RUC over Mr McGovern was made by a more senior officer [than Chief Superintendent Thomas Kelly] either on Friday, September 24, or on the following Saturday morning. It is not known precisely what was discussed on this occasion but a subsequent order was issued by the RUC that Mr McGovern was to be arrested.’

Yet the Garda sources somehow managed to overcome the gaps in their knowledge and, over the following months, confirmed the conspiracy with the help of unnamed RUC officers, though we have no idea how they managed this feat. All the evidence points to the fact that they were liars.

Seán Doherty would maintain to his death that he wasn’t his brother-in-law’s ‘keeper’ and had not sought McGovern’s arrest, but few believed him, and virtually no one in the media did. Yet no evidence has ever emerged that he colluded in a kidnap plot with the RUC. Nor has any evidence emerged that Ainsworth made such a request or directed one. The same clean bill of health can be afforded to McLaughlin, Ainsworth and all others at Garda HQ at the relevant time.

Three people knew about Doherty’s inquiry about ‘Terry’ McGovern: his PA, Kirby and CS Kelly.  Surely, if Doherty was considering having him arrested by the RUC so corruptly a week later, he would have been more circumspect.

Seventeenth, the timeline of the alleged plot does not make sense either. If a request was made, it would have been processed through official channels. Bearing in mind that it was meant to be made on a Friday or Saturday, for implementation the following Monday, high-level meetings would have had to take place over the weekend in Belfast and London. Trevor Forbes and the MI5 contingent at his Belfast HQ would have had to have reacted promptly and decisively. The mandarins at MI5’s HQ in London would have had to contribute their tuppence ha’penny too, not to mention James Prior, Sir Philip Woodfield, and their colleagues at the NIO, as well as other UK government departments, including the Prime Minister’s Office, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office.  The notion that all of this could have been executed over a weekend in time to have RUC boots on the ground at 6 o’clock the following Monday morning is laughable. What is even more preposterous is that an array of perhaps fifty or sixty officials in Belfast and London were prepared to risk disgrace, dismissal and possibly even criminal charges to help Seán Doherty in the immediate wake of the Falklands War. The perception in London was that the Dublin Government had stabbed the UK in the back over that dispute. Are we supposed to believe that all these officials went along with Doherty’s kidnap request without blanching, and for four decades, no one, including all the telephone operators and secretaries on the sidelines, spoke out about it? (with the sole exception of Kirby’s ‘high’ official who made his comments in private and undoubtedly did so as part of the plot to smear Ainsworth.)

Eighteenth, this version of events is also incompatible with the fact that Seán Doherty believed British Intelligence was plotting against Haughey. In those circumstances, it is even more unlikely he would have subjected himself to potential blackmail by engaging in a criminal conspiracy with them.

Equally, Joe Ainsworth was conducting an investigation into British Intelligence’s activities in the Republic and would not have compromised himself so foolishly.

No one interviewed by this author who knew Ainsworth or McLaughlin believes for one moment that either of them could have been capable of organising the illegal detention of an innocent man. As Ainsworth himself protested in 2012, the suggestion was a ‘grotesque insult’ to his character. Equally, Seán Doherty’s family are disgusted at the suggestion that the man they knew so well could have organised a kidnapping.

Finally, it is also difficult to imagine how Seán Doherty could have foreseen escaping unscathed after pulling off a stroke of this magnitude. As a former Garda and a qualified barrister, it would have struck him immediately that the Nangle trial was going to be heard in public in front of journalists and that McGovern’s arrest would unleash a huge political storm.

SCENARIO 2: A COINCIDENCE IS EXPLOITED.

In this scenario, the arrest of McGovern was carried out in good faith and for good reasons, as far as the RUC was concerned, but garda elements hostile to Seán Doherty, McLaughlin, and/or Ainsworth exploited it to create a scandal where none existed. The conspirators were acting out of malevolence towards their garda superiors.

One significant problem with this scenario is the intervention of the ‘high-level’ British official who told Kirby that there had been a request to arrest McGovern.

Nor does this theory explain the speed at which the rumours were circulated. Recall that the following morning, RTE contacted Chief Supt Thomas Kelly at the ISB to ask whether someone from the unit had requested that the RUC make the arrest.

Also, Jim Mitchell based his initial onslaught against Doherty on the mistaken assumption that the prosecution team in Dowra was aware that McGovern had been arrested. This was not accurate, but something that the RUC and MI5 believed.

Nor does this version of events account for the activities of the RUC cabal that stabbed Hermon in the back and whose leaks to the media dovetailed so neatly with the thrust of the conspiracy theories being peddled by the Garda cabal in Dublin.

SCENARIO 3: THE MI5-6 DIRTY TRICK CONSPIRACY THEORY.

In this scenario, MI5 learned of the connection between Seán Doherty, his brother-in-law, and the assault at the Bush Bar at some point between December 1981 and the Nangle trial in September 1982. They could have learned about the connection from their sources in Northern Ireland or from their agents inside the gardaí in Dublin. MI5 then directed one of its informers inside the IRA to fabricate a report that McGovern was a subversive, thereby crafting an excuse for his arrest. After this, they pulled the strings behind the scenes to ensure he was lifted on the morning of the trial. However, since the RUC foot soldiers carrying out the arrest were not privy to the plot, MI5 was unable to prevent them from alerting Dublin to the arrest. Another element of the plot was to create a trail of false and misleading evidence to tie Dublin to the arrest. Hence, RUC Special Branch officers working with the MI5 plotters in Belfast put a call through to the ISB, alerting them that an arrest had been made. Later, their garda agents fabricated a claim that a message had been left with the ISB stating that the arrest Seán Doherty had requested had taken place. After the arrest, their agents inside the Gardaí and RUC fed disinformation to journalists in the South about non-existent phone calls, written messages, objections by Ian Carter, and the meeting in Dublin between Hermon, Forbes, McLaughlin and Ainsworth on Saturday 18 December. To all this, we can now add the purported confirmation by the ‘high-level’ British official that the smear had been relayed to James Kirby. That British official was a demonstrable liar.

The difficulty with this scenario is that it means that MI5, or at least a rogue element within it, was prepared to sully the reputation of the RUC in the process, something that could only have provided a propaganda boost for the IRA and other Republican subversives.

‘It was also a source of personal satisfaction that the Commissioner of the Garda Siochana [Patrick McLaughlin] kept in regular contact with me. Following the appointment of Assistant Commissioner Joe Ainsworth [as intelligence Chief in December 1979] there was a noticeable increase in the attrition rate against terrorists in the Republic of Ireland. Within the resources available to the Gardaí, which had been considerably enhanced by Commissioner Patrick McLaughlin in 1980/81, co-operation between the two forces was extremely good.’

As the man who held the equivalent post to McLaughlin in the RUC, Hermon would have been aghast at an attempt to smear McLaughlin or Ainsworth. If he were ever to find out, his silence could not be guaranteed, especially as the garda officers feeding rumours to the press were also tarnishing his reputation. His anger at the passage on page 307 of ‘The Boss’ (which describes a meeting in Dublin on 18 December 1982) provides a palpable example of how he felt about the ‘nonsense’ written about Dowra. Indeed, his anger was such that he devoted a full chapter to the arrest in his memoirs. If Hermon had discovered it had been an MI5 dirty trick designed to smear Ainsworth and Doherty, he might have exposed MI5. He had certainly afforded them no favours by setting up an independent inquiry into the Kincora sex abuse scandal. Hence, a dirty trick involving Dowra would have been a very high-risk gamble, even for the experienced character assassins and media manipulators of MI5.

Another difficulty is that James Kirby might have revealed the role of the ‘high-level British official’ at a sworn judicial inquiry in Dublin. That would have triggered requests for his attendance before the inquiry. Although the enquiry promised by Garret Fitzgerald was never established, MI5 could not have banked on it in late 1982 or 1983.

SCENARIO 4: A NOD IS NOT AS GOOD AS A WINK  

On 15 September, the RUC Special Branch organised McGovern’s arrest after receiving a call from Chief Superintendent Thomas Kelly of the ISB. The arrest was not prompted by any request from Kelly or anyone in Dublin, but by a misinterpretation of Kelly’s enquiry as a subtle hint to arrest McGovern. In these circumstances, there was a conspiracy, but it was one-sided on the part of the RUC, intended to curry favour with Seán Doherty and the ISB. Neither Doherty nor the ISB was aware that the arrest would take place. 

The problems with this scenario are similar to those already outlined. It fails to explain the call to RTE, the false information fed to Jim Mitchell, the massive smear campaign that was organised by cabals within the police force on both sides of the Border against Doherty, nor the statement by the ‘high official’ to James Kirby, nor why an RUC cabal was engaged in stabbing Hermon in the back.

67. UNEXPLORED LEADS & UNANSWERED QUESTIONS?

Jim Kirby described to me the ‘high-level’ British official who told him that McGovern had been arrested. He turned out to be an MI6 officer.

Thus, it can be said with certainty that only one individual on the UK side is known to have promoted the claim that there was a conspiracy involving Seán Doherty, who was a member of MI6. Yet, everyone in the security and intelligence community was telling Prior, Howe and Thatcher otherwise. Clearly, this man was a liar. The only questions was a long, herby or British Cabinet, or both?

Further information about the Dowra Affair might be gleaned from the Department of Justice’s release of Stephen Fanning’s report, if it has not already been removed or destroyed.

As things stand, a myriad of questions remain unanswered about Dowra (and the Kerry car crash, which has not been addressed in this webbook, but also included the spreading of stories about Ainsworth and Doherty in the cover-up of the car crash in Kerry):

• Was the Garda who spread the rumours about the Kerry car crash also involved in the dissemination of the Dowra smears? Beyond question, he was a liar. Who was he?
• Who was ‘Agent Dubious’, the MI5/RUC agent who provided the report on the McGovern brothers in September 1982? Is the agent still alive? Is a file on him still in existence?
• Who were his or her handlers? Are they still alive?
• It is now known that an array of British agents, such as Freddie Scappaticci, were working for British intelligence (FRU and MI5 in the case of Scappaticci). Was Scappaticci ‘Agent Dubious’?
• What was the basis for the misleading assertion by ‘agent Dubious’ that the McGoverns were connected to subversion? Did the MI5 agent knowingly concoct lies about them? If so, who put him up to it and why?
• In the normal course of events, MI5 agents are carefully protected from exposure by their handlers, even when this may cost the lives of innocent people. If this agent had learned something truly suspicious about the McGoverns from someone in the IRA, his life would have been endangered by their speedy arrest. So why did the RUC arrest the McGovern brothers within days when there was no suggestion that either of them was presenting any sort of an immediate threat to anybody and thereby risk the exposure, torture and execution of the MI5 agent?
• If ‘Agent Dubious’ was being used as an excuse to arrest James McGovern, and in fact knew nothing detrimental about him, and was lying about them all along, there would never have been any risk to his life. Is this what really happened?
• Why did sources inside the Garda feed Peter Murtagh inaccurate information about non-existent phone calls and a message allegedly delivered to Joe Ainsworth on the morning of the arrest? Who were they?
• Why did sources inside the RUC feed Peter Murtagh inaccurate information about Ian Carter? Who were they?
• Why did ‘sources’ inside the Garda and or the RUC feed Peter Murtagh inaccurate information about the meeting to discuss the Droppin’ Well massacre on Saturday 18 December, 1982, in Dublin?
• Who circulated the inaccurate claim that the Gardaí at Dowra District Court been informed that McGovern was being detained by the RUC? This allegation was given a wide circulation by Jim Mitchell in his press statement on Wednesday 29 September, 1982. This account was consistent with what MI5 and the RUC believed had occurred. The correct position was that the Gardaí at Dowra merely knew that McGovern would not be in attendance, not that he was been held by the RUC.
• Who circulated the inaccurate claim that the Gardaí at Dowra District Court been informed that McGovern was being detained by the RUC? This allegation was given a wide circulation by Jim Mitchell in his press statement on Wednesday 29 September, 1982. This account was consistent with what MI5 and the RUC believed had occurred. The correct position was that the Gardaí at Dowra merely knew that McGovern would not be in attendance, not that he was been held by the RUC.
• Who started the false rumour that Seán Doherty had claimed that he had not known that his brother-in-law was on trial?
• Who contacted RTE in the immediate aftermath of the trial, alleging that someone in the ISB requested the arrest of James McGovern?
• Did Stephen Fanning’s report contain insinuations that the McGovern arrest was a Seán Doherty-organised dirty trick despite the absence of any evidence to support that position? Did it correct the mistake Jim Mitchell had made in his press statement on 29 September 1982?
• Did Wren advise Garret Fitzgerald that a smear campaign in the media was underway after he read the 15 April 1983 Irish Times report about the trip to Dublin by Hermon and Forbes on 18 December 1982? Assuming he did not, can we also take it that he did not take any steps to root out the culprits in his own force who were behind the smear campaign? If so, why not?
• Who told Garret FitzGerald that Trevor Forbes had threatened to resign from the RUC over McGovern’s arrest, a claim that was false?
• Why did Wren cold-shoulder Hermon between 1983 and 1985 over Dowra? Why did he do a volte-face in December 1985 and attend football and boxing matches with him?
• Ian Hurst of the FRU section of British military intelligence; David Shayler of MI5; Annie Machon of MI5; and Richard Deacon, the friend and biographer of Sir Maurice Oldfield of MI6, have all revealed that there were British agents in the gardaí at this time. Sir Anthony Duff also referred to an ISB clique operating behind the back of the Dublin Government (or most of its members) in early 1985. Duff was the Cabinet Security Coordinator when he described the clique in a report for Margaret Thatcher. He became the Head of MI5 later in 1985. Was this clique behind the smears about Dowra? Did MI5 coordinate their efforts with the RUC cabal, which was also smearing McLaughlin, Ainsworth and Hermon? If they were not involved, what was the motive of the group that was? Could an alternative group of gardaí have concocted lies that, by sheer coincidence, were similar to those being disseminated by the RUC cabal?
• Why did CS Stephen Fanning lie to James Kirby about the latter’s phone being tapped in 1982?

In the final analysis, the beneficiaries of the Dowra Affair were the IRA, INLA and other subversive organisations, as the apparent scandal portrayed the RUC and gardaí as having colluded in kidnap and the perversion of justice. Hence, whoever was really behind McGovern’s arrest handed them a propaganda boon. They may also have delayed the fragile negotiations that would eventually lead to the Hillsborough Agreement by distracting Garret FitzGerald, who spent some of his scarce time with Thatcher trying to engage her in the affair. Thatcher was ‘bemused’ by him and believed he was trying to embroil her in internal Irish political feuding, something that was hardly conducive to improving Anglo-Irish relations. John Hermon developed a very poor view of Fitzgerald’s attempts to exploit the gardaí for his own political ends. His views were probably shared by many at the RUC, NIO, Foreign Office, and Home Office, again something that was not helpful to Anglo-Irish relations or Ireland’s reputation in Belfast and London.

These books can be purchased here: 

https://www.mercierpress.ie/?s=Puppet

https://www.mercierpress.ie/?s=Kitson

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/an-enemy-of-the-crown

https://www.mercierpress.ie/irish-books/deception-and-lies