OMBUDSMAN LINKS BORDER FARM WITH DUBLIN AND MONAGHAN BOMBS

EXCLUSIVE by PATSY McARDLE

AN Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement is to be urged, as soon as it re-convenes, to immediately review the recent report by the North’s Ombudsman which has linked a cross-border farm in Armagh with the Loughinisland pub massacre in 1994 and the earlier Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

Local MEP Matt Carthy also revealed yesterday that Sinn Féin will raise the issue in the Dáil “at the first available opportunity, and put it on the agenda of the Oireachtas Joint Committee.”

Local Fianna Fáil TD Brendan Smith, who was nominated by his party leader Micheal Martin on Tuesday as Chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs, Trade and Defence, also called yesterday on Northern Secretary Theresa Villiers to retract an earlier statement she made, last February, exonerating the RUC from any involvement and he demanded an apology as well as further action.

The Carrickmacross-based SF MEP Mr Carthy said yesterday that the recent publication of the report by the North’s Police Ombudsman on the pub massacre, which revealed that a farm in Co. Armagh had links with that attack – in which six civilians were killed and several others injured -and also with the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, some twenty years earlier, as well as other sectarian attacks, certainly raised some very serious questions for the Government.

Mr Carthy said: “The latest report by the Ombudsman in the North makes a direct link between the farm at Glenanne in Co Armagh, which was central to the 1974 bombings of Dublin and Monaghan, and the subsequent massacre in the pub at Loughinisland, in which innocent customers were raked with gunfire, some twenty years later.

“We already know from the Barron Commission investigation into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and the attack on Kay’s Tavern in Dundalk, that the British authorities knew the loyalist weapons were held on the farm of a former RUC reservist, James Mitchell, at Glenanne.
“This farm, which was publicly named in the Commission Report, was the operational base, not only of the Dublin/Monaghan bombers, but for those behind scores of other murders.”

Mr Carthy said it was now believed those who used the Glenanne base were involved in the murder of at least 120 people – a shocking statistic
The SF MEP went on: ”This clearly points to the fact that the British authorities ….