I thank the sub-committee for this opportunity to speak about the report of the commission of inquiry.
I thank the Chairman for his kind words in respect of Mr. Barry O'Hara, the loss of whom is incalculable from the point of view of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. Mr. O'Hara played a leading role in the security area in recent years. He was, in effect, the head of my Department's security section. His sudden death the other day was a terrible blow to his family and colleagues. I am very grateful to the Chairman for the kind words he has spoken.
A detailed submission has been prepared by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and furnished to the sub-committee. I think I should make a few general points at the outset. I would like to express, yet again, my most sincere and heartfelt sympathy to those - some of whom are here today - who were so terribly affected and bereaved by the bombings.
As a Member of the Dáil between 1992 and 1997, I was part of a cross-party group of Deputies who attempted to take up the cause promoted by the rightly named Justice for the Forgotten. Deputy Gregory, myself and others took the first steps to rekindle interest in this matter in the Oireachtas, following a television programme about the matter. As Attorney General, I played an active role in closely working with the Taoiseach to establish the inquiry, which was chaired by the late Mr. Justice Hamilton and which culminated in the report prepared by Mr. Justice Barron. I pay tribute to the work of Mr. Justice Barron and those who assisted him. Although his report may not have satisfied all concerned, which was inevitable, I believe he worked valiantly with his team in very difficult circumstances to provide whatever answers he could. A degree of courage was demonstrated in that regard.
It is fair to say that missing documentation is the issue involving the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform which has attracted most attention since the publication of the report. The submission furnished by my Department sets out the position in so far as the information available to it is concerned. In dealing with the inquiry, my Department had two obligations. It had to establish the amount of its documentation which was required by the inquiry and it had to make such material available. Our submission shows that this was done. It is fair to say that Mr. Justice Barron does not suggest, in any way, that the Department failed to provide him with the documentation or information in its possession. That more than 70 files of folders were made available to the inquiry is, of itself, proof of a willingness to co-operate.
Every request from the commission of inquiry was responded to by the Department to the best of its ability. I am not in a position to say definitively what documentation may or may not have been in the Department. Leaving aside the accuracy of other people's recollections 30 years on, the sad fact is that the four senior people who would have dealt with security matters in the Department at that time are now all deceased. Therefore, there is no one serving in my Department who would have been involved in these matters at the time.
On the basis of the evidence available in the Department which is outlined in the submission and from my own experience as Minister in the Department - admittedly some 30 years on and with different colleagues in the Department - I caution against any assumption that a considerable amount of relevant documentation has, so to speak, gone missing from the Department. Frankly, what is at issue are assumptions because I am not aware of any evidence that such documentation has, in fact, gone missing, with the exception of the Garda report on the incident, to which I will come back.
Files and other documents dealing with the activities of paramilitary groupings are handled and maintained within a small unit of my Department known as the security and Northern Ireland division which is headed by a principal officer. Access to material within that unit is quite restricted. In the ordinary way, the only people outside the unit who would have access to the material are the Minister, the Secretary General, Mr. Timothy Dalton, and Mr. Ken O'Leary, the assistant secretary in charge of that area of the Department's activities. Nobody else in the Department has access to the material. I am informed that this is situation which has applied for as long as anybody in my Department can remember.
I also want to explain that day-to-day operating practices within the unit and the practices generally followed in handling security matters are not the same as those applying in many other parts of the Civil Service. It is not, for example, the practice to routinely minute exchanges that take place with the Garda authorities on security matters, for the very obvious reason that material which of its nature must be kept secret is rendered less so by the process of minute-taking, recording, typing, data storage and the like. It is not, as far as I am aware, and never has been the practice either for exchanges that take place on these issues within the Department itself - for instance, between the Minister and the Secretary General on a security matter - to be minuted. The only people involved in such matters at times will be the Minister and the Secretary General or the Minister and the assistant secretary. In that situation record creation is neither practical nor would it represent a sound and sensible working arrangement.
This is not something which is unique to Ireland. For instance, at Anglo-Irish conferences it is not at all uncommon in the course of exchanges that take place during what are referred to as restricted security sessions for both sides to agree that discussions on particular matters should specifically not be the subject of any minutes. To put it colloquially, the pens go down and there is a discussion. Therefore, the fact that there may be few papers in my Department on certain issues which at one time or another may have been the subject of extensive political, media and public interest does not mean that somebody has lost a file or that somebody, so to speak, has been squirreling away documentation, nor does it imply that these matters were the subject of little interest in the Department or to my predecessors in office. The mere fact that there is no documentation does not of itself imply that the matter was not a matter of acute interest and detailed discussion. Bearing in mind what I have said, for instance, in respect of many matters of acute interest to me, I know there are no minutes in the Department in this area.
Justice Ministers, in fact, devote quite an amount of time and attention to matters bearing on State security. It will hardly come as a surprise to anybody to hear that this is the case but the time devoted to discussion on the subject is not necessarily matched by a corresponding volume of paperwork. I would just like to distinguish, say, for instance, what I can see from the outside of the Department of Foreign Affairs where it is the essence of diplomacy that they record virtually everything. Everything is recorded in writing - all scraps of intelligence and all scraps of discussion of political interest. The culture in the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform is the exact opposite in relation to security. There is minimal recording of material in that area.
By far the most likely explanation for a paucity of documentation on matters of a security nature is simply that most of the exchanges that took place among the Minister, his senior officials and the Garda authorities were, for the reasons I have already mentioned, verbal rather than written. In fact, given the enormity of the outrages in question in Dublin and Monaghan, it is quite likely that they would have been subject to extensive oral communication rather than written material. That is what would happen now. If something like that were to happen now, there would be lengthy oral meetings and discussions between my officials and the Garda and me. It is quite possible - in fact, it is probable - that no record would exist of those at all.
It is important by way of background to your deliberations that the committee should know how security matters are handled and the reasons for handing them in the way I have described. Those who deal with State security issues at the front line would quite understandably be extremely concerned and, in fact, very cautious about keeping the political system informed in detail of what was happening if they thought security might be breached as a result of less than watertight practices elsewhere in the system. For instance, if I get material on subversion and it is my intention to pass it on to the Taoiseach, which frequently happens, I would never in the ordinary course write him a letter or send him a note on the issue. I would make it my business to meet him in the margin of a meeting or have a special meeting with him to discuss the matter. I would not hand over a document to him unless it was absolutely necessary for some reason.
Some, of course, obviously prefer a different explanation for the lack of records on security matters. It obviously gives rise to a suspicion that there is some concealment or conspiracy involved. However, as I fully acknowledge that such suspicions may be understandable, they do not stand up to scrutiny because the likelihood that persons engaged in such activity would keep records of discussions of that kind is simply remote.
There are two other points that might be worth mentioning. First, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that I, as Minister, or the Department shadow Garda criminal investigations. Certainly, that is so now. Either personally or through the Department, I will sometimes be kept informed in a general way in relation to particular investigations but clearly it is not a matter for me or the Department to second-guess the Garda - the witness to whom you have just spoken - in relation to the discharge of its duties.
Second, I understand Mr. Patrick Cooney indicated that no action on his part or on the part of the Department was requested by the Garda. Had such a request been made - I am not suggesting that I have any reason to think it should have been - it would have been the type of thing that could easily have been expected to generate documentation within the Department. What I am saying is that if somebody is asked to do something, that is the circumstance in which a file is opened. If there is a request for something to be done, if somebody has to note how they are responding to it, if there is a letter which has to be replied to, if there is a set of steps that somebody has asked to be taken, they are noted and the action taken on foot of them might be noted.
I might also mention that it is no longer the practice, nor has it been for many years, for the Department to receive, as a matter of routine, Garda investigation reports. Thinking back to the period with which we are dealing with, 1974, it was routine for police reports on serious matters to go to the Department of Justice. You are also dealing with the period when the Attorney General was the chief prosecution officer for the State. I would never see a murder file or a bombing file unless I requested it. It would not arrive on my desk as a matter of course anymore. That is a change which has taken place since the days of the late Mr. Peter Berry, Mr. Dalton's predecessor, who would have had a much closer knowledge of what and was not happening at senior levels in the Garda Síochána.
Technological developments within the security division will facilitate file maintenance. The security division has two registers - I think you have been made aware of this in the submission - and all files and material are registered.
I should mention briefly that I will be publishing the Garda Síochána Bill in the near future. I am mentioning this now because sometimes there can be confusion about the precise relationship between the Minister and the Garda Síochána which for the first time in the near future will be put on a comprehensive statutory basis.
In relation to general policies which were in existence at the time and, in particular, the amount of cross-Border co-operation, I am aware that the sub-committee has heard from both Mr. Cooney and the Garda Commissioner and I do not think I have anything useful to add at this stage of my contribution. As to changes which have taken place then and lessons to be drawn, some of the issues are dealt with in the submission. It is fair to say we are virtually living in a different world from that which existed in 1974, although obviously for the relatives and the bereaved it is not different but in terms of the Department, it is. Our criminal law has been radically overhauled and there have been huge advances in technology, in particular in relation to forensic science which, as the committee will probably have gathered, was in its infancy - that is probably a euphemism - at that time. Of special interest now are the structures which have developed in the area of British-Irish co-operation.
Before taking questions and dealing with the points committee members want to raise, there is one final point I would like to make, of which I hope none of us will lose sight. This was a monstrous crime but however monstrous the crime and however perverse the perpetrators, these bombings took place against a background of conflict on this island. We have made huge progress in bringing that conflict to an end but we have to ensure we never see such events again. The era of political violence must come to an end and paramilitarism must finish absolutely and unreservedly at this point.
