Focus: Rotten to the core

Despite White’s posting to Donegal, he was given a role unusual in the force of investigating serious crime under supervision from Phoenix Park, regularly working at will outside his formal base in the Donegal division.

When it emerged one of his informants was supplying the Real IRA with stolen cars for use in bomb attacks and White’s work had stopped at least two such attacks, his standing among his colleagues was guaranteed. He was given a “roving brief” investigating whatever crime in the county he wanted, apparently without supervision.

Last week the cost of giving him that freedom was revealed.

The most damning findings of garda insubordination, corruption and abuse of power yet were made by Justice Frederick Morris, who singled out White for particular criticism.

Michael McDowell, the justice minister, announced new disciplinary and promotions procedures, promising an era of no-nonsense force management and hinting that White would be sacked in disgrace.

But the people in Donegal that White tried to stitch up — the McBrearty, McConnell and Peoples families — claimed junior gardai were being scapegoated to protect senior management. Inquiries that would uncover the full extent of the garda scandal are not being done, they said.

Despite Morris’s five in-depth reports, disturbing questions remain. How many rotten apples are there in the gardai, or is the whole barrel tainted? And is the Morris tribunal asking the right questions to expose it?

IT WAS 1:40am last Friday when Mark McConnell finished reading the Morris report into the “silver bullet” affair and began drafting an e-mail to the tribunal. Morris had investigated claims McConnell had threatened to kill Bernard Conlon, a garda informant who helped White frame the McBrearty family, with a silver bullet.

McConnell, who had been falsely accused of killing Richie Barron, was arrested again. It was largely his and his family’s campaign highlighting their persecution by gardai that led to the report he was now reading. “What a load of crap,” he wrote to the tribunal solicitor. “And a waste of paper.”

While the report found that White and another officer in Sligo was at fault and cast suspicion on the involvement of White’s superintendent, it didn’t go nearly far enough for McConnell.

Earlier this year, White confessed he had horrifically abused McConnell’s wife, Roisin, in a garda cell, calling her a lying bitch, threatening to take away her children and causing her to have a mental breakdown.

“My wife spent nine weeks in hospital after White interrogated her,” said McConnell last week. “I think he’s an animal and anything he gets he deserves. But anybody who thinks it was only White and Superintendent Kevin Lennon is wrong. It goes the whole way to the top. They knew what was going on and they’re trying to hang a few local guards.”

Frank McBrearty Jr, who was wrongly accused by gardai, including detectives from elite Dublin units, for the murder of Barron, says the same. White stood by as he was kicked, beaten and dragged unconscious through Letterkenny garda station, but McBrearty feels the blame for what went on goes higher.

In keeping with the rest of the contradictions behind the Morris tribunal, it was White who did more than any other garda to discredit the case against McBrearty Jr and McConnell, discovering that a key prosecution witness in the murder case was lying and was miles away from Raphoe on the night of Barron’s death.

White did this on his own time, according to McBrearty’s legal team, after he became suspicious of his colleagues’ motives. He later became the first garda to go on record saying McBrearty Jr’s confession was false.

So is White just a tough cop using dodgy methods who is hiding a heart of gold? He says he merely took a “hard line” in interrogations aimed at “breaking” a suspect or witness. A former colleague from his 10 years in Dublin says White is a “grafter” with good intentions.

“There might be some things he believed were correct and necessary at the time for whatever he was doing, and that could have led to him overreaching,” he said.

A lawyer familiar with White’s career said he was “from the heavy gang school of policing”, but bent the rules only when he was sure of a suspect’s guilt. In the case of the McBreartys, that belief was planted by his superiors.

Nevertheless, Morris’s three reports last week characterised White as more a criminal than a cop. They say he planted evidence, including a gun in a traveller camp, and helped with a campaign of harassment against the extended McBrearty family, including organising a witness to testify that the McBrearty pub was selling alcohol after hours.

Morris found that when White was charged with planting the gun, three of his colleagues formed a conspiracy to “corruptly invent a story” vindicating him and incriminating two others. Morris also found White had planted fake explosives on a telephone mast so he could search and arrest local protesters.

White responded last week by attacking Carty and Conroy, his former mentors in Dublin, who also oversaw internal inquiries in Donegal that led to his arrest and vilification. Carty, who led the team, was by then an assistant commissioner.

Conroy was appointed the head of the force, even though he consistently supported the original botched Barron murder inquiry years after the McBreartys’ vindication.

Despite his dislike of White, McConnell agrees with the detective sergeant’s analysis of Carty, Conroy and the tribunal. “Morris didn’t allow the Carty investigation [an internal garda inquiry] to be brought into the tribunal. He uses it as a guideline, yet if you mention the Carty team, Morris stops you and says it isn’t in his remit.

“But it was members of the Carty inquiry who arrested Peoples for the silver bullet and had a search warrant for his house. None of this was looked into.”

McConnell and Michael Peoples, the victims in the “silver bullet” report published last week, were not asked to testify until hearings were finished and they say some of their e-mails outlining concern at the tribunal’s failure to ask certain questions were ignored.

The Carty report, which blamed several local gardai, has not been published despite requests from victims. The families still question some actions during internal inquiries by garda management, including Conroy recommending the prosecution of Billy Flynn, a private investigator hired by the McBreartys who found telephone records that exonerated innocent people, and an order by Pat Byrne, the former garda commissioner, to obtain the phone records of TDs who had received anonymous complaints about senior gardai including Carty. But in 2000, two years after the McBreartys were vindicated, and again last year in a submission to the tribunal, Conroy praised the botched Barron murder investigation, even though it found the McBreartys were the only suspects for a nonexistent murder.

The Morris tribunal was given freedom to reach conclusions “on the balance of probability”, but given terms of reference that many victims reject as inadequate. The suspicion is that there are more guilty gardai, some higher up, who will never be fingered.

Morris admits the corruption he found is not limited to Donegal: “The tribunal has examined senior officers from garda headquarters, from almost all of the specialist technical sections, from crime and security branch and from the specialist detective units in Dublin. Of the gardai serving in Donegal, it cannot be said they are unrepresentative or an aberration from the generality.”

An earlier Morris report found the investigation into Barron’s death was “prejudiced, tendentious and utterly negligent”. Among those who shared the blame were Detective Superintendent Joseph Shelley and Detective Inspector John McGinley, while garda John O’Dowd was found to have been involved in a cover-up of vital evidence.

LAST WEEK, McDowell said reforms he has enacted, including new regulations for promotions and discipline, a garda ombudsman commission and inspectorate, will solve the problem.

Professor Declan Walsh of University College Limerick disagrees and says the reforms are ill-considered and dangerous. “The Garda Siochana Act 2005 has fallen very far short of what was required,” he said. “If anything it’s counterproductive, because it concentrates too much political power over the gardai in the hands of central government.”

McDowell has been sweeping in his criticism of previous disciplinary failures, while outlining an optimistic vision of the force’s future. But many of his proposed reforms have yet to be negotiated with the garda representative bodies, who will try to water down the more restrictive provisions.

Morris now moves on to his final three modules, including two of the most contentious yet: an inquiry into the detentions and false confession that emerged in the Barron murder inquiry and allegations of corruption against Carty and another senior officer sent anonymously to two politicians. But at least three of the victims say they no longer wish to co-operate as a result of the tribunal’s approach.

McConnell is adamant he will join the McBreartys in a boycott. “It’s disgraceful the way it’s run. They seem to be in a rush now to finish up,” he said. “Heads should have rolled at the top. At the end of the day whatever happens in Donegal, the buck stops in Phoenix Park.

“They had a great opportunity to find out what happened and they’ve wasted it. All the people who were arrested have unanswered questions. These big headlines are all right — the general public think it’s great and that Morris is doing a great job. But when you’re involved in it you know what’s missing.”

The darkest chapter of the garda force’s history may well be closing, but its full detail may never be read.