No Justice, Just Us
This year it became impossible to ignore the extent of Garda corruption.

This cancer was revealed most shockingly at the Morris Tribunal. We’ve been used to having our blood boiled and our breath taken away by revelations of the RUC’s less-than-indefatigable approach to tackling loyalist terrorism: the Morris Tribunal shows that we’ve no cause for complacency about their Southern counterparts.
The background is that two innocent men, Frank McBrearty Jr and Mark McConnell, were arrested in 1996 for the murder of Richie Barron, who had in fact been killed by a speeding driver. The Garda ‘on duty’ at the time, Padraig Mulligan, was in fact sinking pints in a Lifford pub: no pathologist was called to the scene. In order to deflect attention and ‘get a result’, Gardai pounced on a suggestion from criminal and informer Willie Doherty that Barron had been murdered by Frank McBrearty, against whom Doherty held a long-standing grudge. What followed was a living nightmare for McBrearty, who has confirmed, “I was abused, called a ‘murderer’, dragged down corridors, poked in my ribs, and had my head banged off a chair. All for something I hadn’t done.”
McConnell testifies similarly: “I was called a big fat murdering bastard. They threatened that I was going to be assaulted or killed by the Barron family, and there would be no Garda protection. My wife ended up being admitted to a psychiatric ward.” Both parties were presented with ‘confession’ statements allegedly signed by the other.
The framing conspiracy reached all the way up to Donegal’s top-ranking Gardai: the Morris Tribunal subsequently found many officers, including two Chief Superintendents, guilty of gross negligence and gross incompetence. At every stage of the investigation, Gardai closed ranks to protect themselves.
The Morris Tribunal’s definitive verdict speaks for itself: “The Tribunal has been staggered by the amount of indiscipline and insubordination it has found in the Garda force. There is a small, but disproportionately influential, core of mischief-making members who will not obey orders, who will not follow procedures, who will not tell the truth and who have no respect for their officers.”
The truth – as many, particularly young working-class Dubliners, can readily confirm – is that Garda abuse of power is a regular reality of life, systematic and institutionalised. I’ve been physically threatened by Gardai, as have many of my peers. As a teenager, I was once beaten about the head repeatedly with a hammer by an irate householder who took exception to me ‘hanging around his garage’. Afterwards, I was told in forceful terms by Gardai to forget about any idea of taking the matter further, my middle-aged, home-owning assailant being a friend of theirs. I’ve suffered three epileptic fits since, and suspect that the incidents are related. And like most people, I shrug it off and get on with life, knowing full well that to complain or pursue the matter would expose me to a far more difficult life.
Compared to the nightmare which engulfed Frank McBrearty Jr., such complaints are small beer. But they serve to illuminate the caution and suspicion with which the force, rightly, is viewed by huge swathes of the public they purport to serve.
From Russia With...Love
Hmmm. Russia is on the way to democracy, isn’t it? The fall of the Soviet Union released a great flow of freedom and enterprise, didn’t it? That’s the American dream, my friends. It freed the oligarchs and gangsters, the terrorists and thieves.

We’ve had a few indicators this year that modern Russia isn’t all that different from the Russia of Tolstoy. There was the gas shutdown that screwed the Ukraine and Georgia and sent a warning to Europe. And there was the murder in Moscow of campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
She wasn’t the first murdered journalist. The news agencies listed 25, all killed over the last decade or so. Politkovskaya was shot but Yuri Shchekochikin was poisoned, probably with dioxin. His face came out in blisters like Viktor Yuschenko, who survived to become President of Ukraine.
More recently we had the death of Alexander Litvinenko, killed by a lethal dose of alpha radiation from Polonium-210. Basically, it was a kind of dirty bomb. British police have yet to fully establish where he had been, and with whom he had been in contact. But he himself had no doubts. In a deathbed statement he accused Russian president Putin.
It’s like revisiting some 19th century novel or a spy story of the Cold War. Incredible!b
Gangster's Paradise
The increasing numbers of gangland killings in Ireland in 2006 provided serious cause for concern about where we're going – and how we’re getting there.
In March, Coolock mother of one Donna Cleary was killed when shots were fired indiscriminately into a house where she was attending a 40th birthday party. The chief suspect, Dwayne Foster, subsequently died mysteriously in Garda custody.
The north-eastern corner of Dublin, encompassing Kilbarrack, Donaghmede and Coolock, was particularly afflicted by a spate of murders: Ger Goulding, lured to a meeting in Donaghmede and gunned down on a green field over a minor drug debt; Keith Fitzsimons, shot dead in a Millbrook driveway, apparently by mistake; Patrick Harte, a father of four, slain in Edenmore after leaving his ten- and eight-year-old children to school; James Purdue, pumped full of bullets in Donaghmede in what was described as a ‘well-planned attack’...these were gangland killings, but not in the traditional sense. No-one believes that the perpetrators were ‘Mr.Big’-style crime lords of the sort that ran the rule in early-’90s Dublin. In fact, most of these killings appeared to be connected to relatively trivial disputes about small-time drug debts or other minor arguments. People had access to guns. They used them.
The most high-profile case of the year was, in fact, a murder that dated from 2005: the horrific dismemberment in a Summerhill flat of Farah Swaleh Noor, whose headless torso, covered in 22 stab wounds, was found floating in the Royal Canal. The killers were Linda and Charlotte Mulhall, two sisters with a long-standing record of heroin addiction and prostitution. It has also been widely speculated that their mother Kathleen, Noor’s partner, described as ‘a very malign influence on her family’, was involved. As the trial progressed, a picture began to emerge of a severely dysfunctional family ‘poisoned by drink, drugs and violence’.
According to a criminal-law barrister who followed the trial: “It is a shocking story, but what is also shocking is that this kind of lifestyle is relatively common in parts of Dublin. Getting up in the morning and drinking all day, this very hardened life. It’s not that unusual. You see many teenagers who hardly ever go to school. They’re used to dealing with gardai; they’re children, but they have children. They have these blank eyes that you see around the courts all the time. This spiral of destruction should be detected by the authorities, but because it’s everybody’s responsibility, no-one takes responsibility.”