"Dublin Reader" (Ask a Guard, 11 February) makes a good point in highlighting the failure of the 15,000 strong RUC and 800 Special Branch  operatives to find the UDA gunmen operating in north Belfast and elsewhere, but he is way off the mark in suggesting that "the Garda wouldn't get away with that".

 In fact, the Gardai have been getting away with that since the early 1970s. Loyalists have bombed southern towns intermittently and with impunity, causing dozens of deaths and many appalling injuries to men, women and children, and not one Loyalist bomber or gunman has ever been arrested by the Gardai.

 Murderous outrages in Dublin, Monaghan, Dundalk and Castleblayney have never been solved in a lamentable failure of the Gardai to defend the citizens and uphold the law in the State. Sadly, such failures are not confined to the "Heavy Gang" period under the anti-republican agenda of the coalition government of the 1970s. Disgracefully, this ineptitude continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s with the murder of Eddie Fullerton and the bombing of the Widow Scallans Bar in the very heart of the capitol city.

 And then there is the case of my own uncle Seamus Ludlow, murdered just outside Dundalk  in May 1976 by a group of UDR and Red Hand Commando thugs whose identities were known to both the RUC and the Gardai very soon after. Both forces had a file on the killers since 1979, but neither force made the slightest move to arrest them until February 1998 and all that time the Gardai in Dundalk were telling my family that Seamus Ludlow had been murdered by the IRA and that members of the family were involved. It wasn't enough that they failed to find his killers, but they went to great lengths to protect them from justice and they did this by smearing the good name of an innocent victim and his family.

 Sorry "Dublin Reader", the Gardai have been getting away with it and that failure to uphold justice continues to cause great heartbreak for the grieving relatives of the many victims of British agents south of the border.

 

Michael Donegan

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