A Fianna Fáil parliamentarian has called on the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, to raise issues connected with the trial of the three Irishmen held in Colombia directly with the authorities in Bogota.
Senator Mary White, who is attending the trial as an observer, said Mr Cowen should enter into dialogue with his Colombian counterpart or the Colombian President, adding "I don't want him to ring him up, I want him to sit down face-to-face." He should do so, even if it meant travelling to Bogota in person: "Let him, what's the big deal about that?" She said the Minister should raise the issue of comments made by a former Colombian president, Mr Andres Pastrana, and the head of the country's armed forces, Gen Fernando Tapias, who linked the men to the IRA.
Mr James Monaghan (56), Mr Martin McCauley (40) and Mr Niall Connolly (36) have been held in Colombian prisons since their arrest in August 2001. They are charged with training the FARC rebel army in IRA bomb-making techniques and with using false passports.
The terrorist training charge carries a potential sentence of up to 24 years. The men were moved from La Modelo prison in Bogota to the Combita penitentiary, 90 miles from the capital, last December at a time when the judge was on holidays. However it was reported yesterday that the judge, Mr Jairo Acosta, had ruled that they should be moved back to a prison in Bogota and that the three men had been told to prepare themselves for transfer.
Ms White stressed that she had travelled to Colombia in good faith, at her own expense and was meeting all her own costs "to ensure my independence". The reason for her being there was to ensure that the accused men were held in safe prison conditions and received a fair trial.
While praising the work of Irish diplomats, she said the issues had to be raised at a political level. Commenting on the prison conditions, she said: "The men are lucky to be alive today." She added: "The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, has to take immediate action." Ex-president Pastrana and Gen Tapias should not have made such comments and had done so "to please the American government".
She wanted Mr Cowen to give leadership and "to take on the Foreign Minister and let them know that our Government are totally displeased at Pastrana's and Gen Tapias's prejudicial comments; in any system in the world you are innocent until proven guilty ". She had raised the comments with the judge yesterday and he told her they should not have been made but would not interfere with his conduct of the trial.
She had been told that Mr Cowen met the Colombian Foreign Minister during a visit to the UN but this was not enough: "He has to have dialogue himself, one-to-one, not on the periphery of some meeting in the UN." She added: "There are three men's lives at stake." The senator was speaking after a meeting between Judge Acosta and the group observing the trial. She had asked the judge to ensure there would be an interpreter in the court when the trial resumed today as the absence of translation facilities on Wednesday had put international observers like herself at a serious disadvantage.
Ms Caitriona Ruane of the Bring Them Home Campaign said they had "called on the Irish Government to call for the Colombian authorities to halt this trial, to intervene and say, 'This is a fiasco, stop it and stop it and stop it now.' ".
Asked why the three accused men had so far refused to turn up in court, she said: "They do not believe they can get a fair trial. If they came into court they would be turned into showpieces."