The wrong arm of the law

In March, the Supreme Court more than doubled, to 4.6 million euro, the damages awarded to Donegal publican Frank Shortt for what Justice Adrian Hardiman described as “the worst known oppression of a citizen by the state.” Garda treatment of Mr. Shortt, said Hardiman, had been “so outrageous as almost to defy description.”

Shortt had been jailed for three years in 1995 after being convicted of allowing the sale of drugs in his nightclub, the Point Inn at Quigley’s Point on the Inishowen peninsula, about 10 miles from Derry. He served 27 months in Mountjoy.
The Supreme Court described the conditions he’d endured: “The floor was of lino badly burnt and unclean. His bed had a thin horsehair mattress. There was a stench. The cell was infested with mice and cockroaches. There were no washing or toilet facilities. The toilet was a small aluminium soup pot. He was confined to the cell for 17 hours each day. He had to slop out each day in the toilet area, the floor of which was generally covered with urine, excreta and vomit. He was allowed out of the cell to collect his meals, which he then took back to the cell to consume.”
Shortt was a former accountant and a 61-year-old father of five. He had never previously been in trouble of any kind with the law. Prison was to shatter him. He lost more than 30 pounds. His family was vilified in public and ostracised in Inisowen. He was refused release to visit his seriously ill wife in hospital.
The conviction had arisen from two Garda raids on the Point Inn. The first, shortly after midnight on August 3rd 1992, involved more than 60 officers in riot gear who smashed their way in through the emergency exits, using sledgehammers. Amid screams of panic and pandemonium, customers were seized at random and roughly searched. Some were beaten with batons or wrestled to the ground. A number, including young women, had their trousers pulled down. Seven people were arrested: all were released within hours, without charge.
The second raid, in February 1993, followed the same pattern. This time, more than 100 officers were involved: this is believed to have been the largest-ever single muster of gardaí in Donegal. Seven ecstasy tablets were found. Frank Shortt was arrested and charged.
The affair has widely been put down to the disgraceful behaviour of two corrupt officers.
It is now clear that nothing was discovered during either raid to justify charging Shortt. The two gardaí, Superintendent Kevin Lennon and Detective Garda Noel McMahon, had colluded to manufacture false evidence to frame him. Lennon has since been dismissed from the force. McMahon has resigned.
But it wasn’t two gardaí, or even the Gardaí as a whole, who had contrived the events.
Over the summer of 1992, the Point Inn had been the subject of persistent public allegations of drug dealing. Donegal and Derry newspapers had headlined claims by Sinn Fein that a licensed premises in Inisowen was a major distribution point for drugs, as well as threats from the IRA that they’d take action if this continued. It was wide public knowledge in Derry and Donegal that the Point Inn was the target of the allegations.
Around the same time, the PIRA in Belfast, under the cover-name Direct Action Against Drugs, was engaged in a campaign of killing individuals accused of dealing in drugs, mainly marijuana and ecstasy.
A week before the first raid, the Derry brigade of the PIRA claimed that a threat two months earlier to “execute” drug dealers had resulted in a 70 per cent drop in the drug supply in Derry and Donegal, but warned that it “reserved the right to take whatever action deemed necessary” against those who persisted. The statement claimed that the IRA had put 180 “suppliers” in the area out of business. As for any still in business: “Neither age nor gender, nor claims that they are doing it on a lesser scale will give them immunity from the consequences.”
Letters in Derry and Donegal newspapers contrasted the decisive action of the IRA with the alleged unconcern of gardaí and the RUC.
A Derry bus driver accused of allowing drugs to be sold on his vehicle was told he’d be killed if he didn’t stop running buses to the Point Inn at weekends. A union official spoke to the IRA, pleading that, even if this were true, the man couldn’t be expected to police a bus full of passengers. A message came back that the threat was in earnest and wouldn’t be withdrawn.
Sinn Fein produced a 17-year-old at a press conference in Derry, who claimed that British soldiers and RUC officers at border check-points were turning a blind eye to drugs being transported to the Point.
In the same period, Sinn Fein spokespersons issued warnings about a “drugs epidemic” in the north west. In November 1992, a senior party figure cautioned that a “major drugs crisis” had suddenly escalated through the introduction of heroin and cocaine and “a new super-drug, dubbed Super-K....Very little is known about it, but purportedly it can leave people paralysed, comatose and sometimes result in heart failure. Some drug dealers in England consider it so dangerous that they are refusing to handle it.”
(“Special K” is ketamine hydrochloride, a hallucinogen developed as an analgesic for the US army during the Vietnam War. It became a staple of the rave scene in the early 1990s. It is not especially dangerous.)
On bail awaiting trial, Shortt was threatened with death by the IRA if he didn’t close the Point Inn. He closed. The courts, on a Garda recommendation, withdrew his licence. Then somebody burned the premises down.
Lennon, McMahon and other gardaí will have felt emboldened, perhaps even justified, in perjuring the Point Inn and framing its owner by the public perception of a “drugs epidemic” across the north west and the manufactured reputation of the Point as a major source of the contagion. Garda statements emphasised that it was they, and not any paramilitary group, who would deal with the problem. “We want the message to go out loud and clear that we are going to take absolute control of these situations.”
There was little public concern expressed in the area about the raids or the charges. Donegal Fianna Fail and Fine Gael spokespersons explained that their parties were as committed as Sinn Fein to stamping out the drugs menace. Letterkenny councillor P. J. Blake (FG), “speaking as both a public representative and a parent,” welcomed the raids as “a major coup for the Gardaí” and called for a “county-wide clampdown” on “these rave-ups”.
It’s hardly surprising that little of this context has been included in coverage of the vindication of Frank Shortt. Drugs hysteria continues to be useful to politicians, policemen and others out to justify tough law-and-order action.
Commissioner Noel Conroy has “unreservedly” apologised for Garda misbehaviour in the case. There are others who might also appropriately apologise.