The Irish Sunday Mirror, 13 June 2004:

 

Ken Murray Our Man in the House column

 

Why the high failure rate?

 

Word reaches me that the Department of Justice and the Garda Siochana will be accused of incompetence yet again when Justice Henry Barron presents his second report on suspicious paramilitary murders in the Republic to the Government within the next week or so.

Justice Barron has already written the highly acclaimed report into the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings which saw 33 people killed.

He then criticised the Gardai for allowing crucial files to go missing. 

The second report which is expected before the Cabinet on Tuesday - bar unforeseen developments - will question why the Gardai failed to achieve prosecutions in a number of high profile paramilitary murders in the Republic in the early 1970s.

They include the bombings of Liberty Hall and Sackville Place in Dublin on December 1 1972, the latter of which killed bus drivers George Bradshaw and Thomas Duffy. There was also the Sackville Place explosion in Dublin on January 20, 1973, which killed Scottish bus driver Thomas Douglas.

The Report will also look at the deaths of teenagers Geraldine O'Reilly and Patrick Stanley from Clara, Co. Offaly, who died following a UVF car bomb in Belturbet, Co. Cavan on December 28th 1972.

Judge Barron is also looking at the murders of Oliver Boice and Breege Porter who were stabbed by a UVF unit from Fermanagh in the early hours of January 1, 1973, at Burnfoot in Co. Donegal.

The Gardai failed to prosecute ANYBODY for these murders yet, as a contrasting example, when the IRA murdered protestant Fine Gael Senator Billy Fox in March 1974, a number of suspects were convicted within months