A Sunday World focus on the murder of Christy Phelan in County Kildare, asking was it garda incompetence that allowed loyalists to kill with impunity or was it garda collusion with the RUC?

Or did some high-ranking garda officers stifle proper investigations into atrocities like the Dublin/Monaghan bombings or the UVF murder of Seamus Ludlow near Dundalk?

Not only relatives of the victims of these cross-border loyalist killings have doubts about the way the cases were investigated.

For there is growing suspicion that certain garda officers were working hand-in-glove with the RUC to cover-up the fact that loyalists on murder missions in the Republic were Special Branch or British military agents.

The names of those involved in almost every loyalist atrocity in the Republic are known to police but no one has ever been charged.

One case which has largely been ignored in the northern media concerns Kildare farm worker and father of five Christy Phelan who, while out for a Sunday walk in June 1975, stumbled on a UVF gang planting a bomb on the railway line near Sallins.

The loyalists planned to blow up a train carrying Official IRA supporters to the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration.

They battered Christy half-unconscious and then stabbed him through the heart.

The razor-sharp military bayonet used to kill Christy was found in a hedge a mile from the murder scene.

And it bore the fingerprint of a UVF man who blew himself up in the Miami bomb massacre only weeks after he killed Christy Phelan.

but 30 years later the full truth has never been revealed.

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