Republican News · Thursday 9 January 1996

[An Phoblacht]

Urlingford drugs fiasco confirmed in Customs documents

Garda chief at centre of contradictions and unanswered questions

by Rita O'Reilly

Confidential documents examined by An Phoblacht directly contradict official Garda accounts of the Urlingford drugs haul. Customs documents which have been received by a number of journalists in recent weeks show that after over a year of official denials and disinformation, the public continues to be misled over the whole affair.

As recently as last November Garda Commissioner Patrick Bryne dismissed suggestions that the Urlingford operation was a `sting' that went wrong, but the Customs material confirms the operation he himself directed was indeed a Garda attempt at a `controlled' importation of illegal drugs. Garda claimed it was designed to entrap a major Dublin-based drug importer.

Accounts by senior members of the Customs National Drugs Team reveal that Customs had been kept out of the Garda operation from the start, despite its primary role with regard to importation. Customs complain the operation ``could have been jeopardised due to lack of communication'', and point out that in the days before the Urlingford stunt, local Customs officials in Cork intervened with the skipper of the trawler which imported the drugs, unaware that they were investigating what was a Garda-led drug importation.

Other than the skipper and a crew member, the only people on the trawler when it unloaded the drugs from a supply ship on 4 November 1995 were a senior Garda and another officer.
The suggestion that the Garda or other services would import drugs, already supplied by ourselves, is way off the mark...

Garda Commissioner Patrick Byrne, 22 November 1996

 

After unloading, the trawler was berthed directly in front of the Customs office in Castletownbere, Co Cork. Locals had been suspicious for days about its activities. The question arises: if the senior Gardai directly involved in the operation demonstrated such crass undercover work to the people of Castletownbere in November 1995, just how did the rest of their `undercover' operation go?

The Customs complaints go further. They illustrate that while they were requesting meetings and discussion with the Garda on co-operation between the two bodies on drug trafficking, the same Garda officers they were dealing with were withholding information on a key ongoing drugs operation.
 
I would like to have a failure like this every week

Garda Commissioner Patrick Byrne on Urlingford, 22 November 1996.

Both bodies had been mandated by the Government in July 1995 to participate in the Joint Task Force on Drugs. When Gardai requested a meeting with Customs on 20 October 1995, the Customs National Drugs Team head believed it would be about the Joint Task Force and exchange of liaision. Instead, the head of the Garda National Drugs Squad asked him would he have a vessel for hire, as the Garda were looking at the possibility of bringing a large quantity of drugs ashore.

It was sixteen days before Gardai again contacted Customs about the operation when the then Deputy Commissioner Patrick Bryne rang a senior Customs official on 5 November and informed him the operation was now underway. By then, the drugs had already been unloaded at Castletownbere.

A meeting was hastily arranged for the following day. It lasted fifty minutes, during which Gardai admitted an operation was ongoing at Castetownbere, but gave few other details. The lack of full disclosure and co-operation continued, leading to a situation where an RTE correspondent got to the site of the Urlingford cannabis load before Customs officers did.

However, aside from exposing a catalogue of failure to communicate with Customs on the part of the Gardai, the documented evidence of bad planning, bad judgement and failures by the Gardai in the days before the Urlingford stunt raises far more questions about the manner in which the entire Garda operation was conducted.

The central issue is why did the Garda mount such an operation, coming as it did at a time when, as further Customs documents confirm, known heroin dealers were leaving and entering the country with drugs and money for drugs. It would seem that the Garda National Drugs Bureau was engaged in an attempted supercop set-up worthy of FBI fiction when heroin was still being distributed with ease in the eight most deprived areas of Dublin city.

The Garda agenda was apparently very different from that expected of them by people in these areas at the time. In November 1995, communities in Dublin marched on Leinster House for the first time in years on the drugs issue. They demanded better co-operation between state agencies on the issues of drug supply and drug treatment.

Fourteen months later, where is the accountability for the drug importation operation? The question applies equally to the Government. Taoiseach John Bruton and Justice Minister Nora Owen have consistently denied any knowledge of the operation and in March last year, Bruton claimed it was a matter for the then Garda Commissioner, Culligan. It is indeed a matter for the current incumbent of that post, Patrick Byrne, but it is also a matter for John Bruton and Nora Owen. They, after all, were responsible for the promotion of Byrne in July 1996 amidst considerable praise of him as `the PR cop', more adept at the type of public relations the force and the government needed on crime.

If it was not designed to be a PR exercise at its inception, the Garda attempt at a controlled drugs importation was certainly turned into a PR exercise at Urlingford. And while Customs had been told the operation would be credited to the Joint Task Force and no further information given, in fact it was followed by extensive off-the-record briefings to several journalists claiming it was a major drugs bust.

However, despite all the PR, the Gardai and the Garda Commissioner have not yet given a full statement on the operation. On 21 November last, in a written reply in Leinster House, Nora Owen stated that the Commissioner was satisfied nothing relating to the seizure suggested that a Garda investigation was required. The question now is, are the public satisfied too?

 

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