Garda was not an IRA informer, inquiry told

A GARDA officer who was said to be in the pay of republican Thomas “Slab” Murphy was in fact responsible for the detection of a number of serious crimes by the Provisional IRA in the Border area, the Smithwick Tribunal has been told.

Det Sgt Owen Corrigan was based in Dundalk, Co Louth, in March 1989 when two RUC officers, Chief Supt Harry Breen and Supt Bob Buchanan, were murdered by the IRA as they returned from a meeting in Dundalk Garda station.

Det Sgt Corrigan was named as an IRA source within Dundalk gardaí by Belfast DUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson in the House of Commons on April 13th, 2000.

RUC officer Alan Mains later gave a statement to a Garda inquiry in which he claimed murdered Chief Supt Breen had also raised concerns that Det Sgt Corrigan was a republican informer.

Mr Mains, now retired, repeated the allegation at the Smithwick Tribunal this week.

The tribunal was established to inquire into suggestions that members of An Garda Síochána or other employees of the State colluded in the killings of the two RUC officers.

Cross-examining yesterday, Jim O’Callaghan SC, for Det Sgt Corrigan, put it to Mr Mains that the allegation was “a monstrous lie”. He said Det Sgt Corrigan had not been mentioned by name in any of Mr Mains’s official statements at the time of the killings.

Mr O'Callaghan said the publication in 1999 of a book, Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh, by journalist Toby Harnden, and a subsequent article in The Irish Timesby journalist Kevin Myers, had referred to an IRA mole among Dundalk gardaí. He said "a momentum had built up" to Mr Donaldson's naming of Det Sgt Corrigan who was "a good guard who had fought the IRA at a difficult and dangerous time".

Mr O’Callaghan said Det Sgt Corrigan was the Garda officer who officially handed over INLA chief Dominic McGlinchey to the RUC, during McGlinchey’s extradition to Northern Ireland in 1984.

Following this, Det Sgt Corrigan, his wife and children had endured death threats and abuse from the IRA.

Mr O’Callaghan said it had been “a vicious campaign” carried out in Drogheda and Dundalk using posters saying the garda was a “Tout” and “Wanted for Treason”. Mr O’Callaghan said that even after Det Sgt Corrigan retired from the force, he was abducted and beaten by the IRA in the mid-1990s.

However, when this was put to Mr Mains, the former RUC officer said his understanding of the abduction was that Mr Corrigan had owed money to the paramilitaries. Mr Mains said he had verbally raised Chief Supt Breen’s concerns over Det Sgt Corrigan with superiors at the time of the killings. Mr Mains said from his experience of the operation of the Provisional IRA in south Armagh, the organisation did not run operations at “short notice” and would have been unlikely to plan the murders based on an attempt to follow the officers’ car.