Responsibility for Garda should be taken from Justice

The conduct of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform on the Dean Lyons case beggars belief, given all that is now known about practices and culture within An Garda Síochána. For years now, the Department has been dodging and weaving central questions over the Dean Lyons case, thereby compounding the malaise within the Garda.

The central issues are straightforward:

• How was it that a confused, incoherent, drug-dosed man made a detailed, chronologically coherent, precise statement admitting to two murders he never committed, reciting information about the weapon used, the gruesome circumstances of the killing and the layout of the house where the killing took place, that would have been known only to the investigating gardaí and the actual murderer?

• How was it that Dean Lyons remained in prison for eight months after it had become obvious to the Garda authorities that there was at least good reason to doubt the reliability of his alleged "confession" (this was after another man, Mark Nash, had confessed to the murders)?

• How is that no disciplinary action has been taken against the gardaí involved?

One presumes the report now completed by senior counsel Shane Murphy addresses these matters but it is likely that further obfuscation will be manufactured to confuse the issue and again let the Garda off the hook.

There is also the other case that Hilary Curley reported in Village last week.

On 22 November 1990 armed men broke into the home of Peter North and his parents in Newtownbutler, Co Fermanagh. North was abducted and then required to drive a van with explosives to a British Army checkpoint at Rosslea on the Monaghan/Fermanagh border, the intention being to detonate the explosives, killing Peter North and British soldiers. As it happened, the explosives failed to detonate and nobody was killed or injured.

Subsequently Peter North was asked by gardaí to help identify those involved in this heinous enterprise. He, Peter North, from the seclusion of a van parked in Monaghan town, said he believed a man walking down a footpath outside was one of the abductors. This was a Sinn Féin councillor, Owen Smyth.

Smyth was arrested and, according to the interrogating gardaí, admitted to the abduction and attempted murders and, they claimed, did so in graphic language. Smyth was charged with abduction and, given the evidence there was against him (that is, the identification and the explicit "confessions"), one would have thought conviction and a long jail sentence would have followed. However, mysteriously, charges against Smyth were dropped, which suggests that someone, probably in the DPP's office, thought the "confessions" and identification were unreliable – in other words that the gardaí fabricated them or at least there was a worry that so it might appear.

Smyth had assembled statements from 26 witnesses who testified he was in his pub on the night of 22 November 1990, the night of the abduction (they claimed they were sure of the date for this was the evening Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign as British Prime Minister, an occasion of some celebration for the regulars at Councillor Smyth's public house!). It might be claimed the DPP dropped charges because he believed that the weight of evidence – that is, the identification and confessions on one side, against the alibi testimonies on the other – would result in an acquittal, but how likely is that since doubt could have been cast on the alibi evidence – unless, of course, there was reason to suspect the "confessions" had been fabricated?

Incidentally, Owen Smyth has at all times said he never made the admissions the gardaí said he did. He made a complaint to the Garda Complaints Board but it got nowhere.

Again, no internal Garda inquiry, aside from whatever enquiries may have been undertaken on behalf of the Complaints Board, no disciplinary action, no concern even.

The Garda Síochána is in a fine mess. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, for many years, has proved itself unable to deal with this mess. A resolution has got to include the removal of responsibility for the Garda from the Department to an independent authority but, of course, that is/would be only the beginning.

vincent browne