Credentials questioned of tribunal witness
The republican credentials of key Morris Tribunal witness Adrienne McGlinchey were called into question at today’s session of the garda corruption probe.
Former detective Tom Sreenan considered Ms McGlinchey and her friend Yvonne Devine were mere “attention-seekers” when they lived in a flat together at Bucrana, Co Donegal in the 1990s – the period under examination by the inquiry.
But he agreed he had prepared a document that listed the two women as active Provisional IRA sympathisers at that time.
Today he said there should have been separate classifications for those seen as sympathisers and others put down as activists.
Ex-Detective Sergeant Sreenan, who retired from the Garda Siochana eight years ago, was giving evidence for the second successive day at the tribunal headed by former High Court President Mr Justice Frederick Morris.
The current, Dublin-based phase of the investigation is looking into allegations that two at-present suspended garda officers, Superintendent Kevin Lennon and Detective Noel McMahon, together with Ms McGlinchey, prepared explosives that were later planted and then found in bogus garda strikes against terrorism.
Both men have denied the allegations.
And in evidence to the tribunal Ms McGlinchey last month rejected suggestions that she had ever been in the IRA or relayed information about that organisation to the gardai.
Today Mr Sreenan said he regarded sympathisers as people who might have “attended meetings in a minor role,” but not been involved in a military role.
He added of Ms McGlinchey and Ms Devine that he “would have put them down more or less reluctantly as being sympathisers – that is as far as I would put it, and that would be stretching it”.
He agreed that he had been forced to mark down the two women as not only sympathisers, but active as “there was only one column, and they were all in the one category”.
Mr Sreenan commented: “You could class in some places as much as a half of the population as sympathisers, but I would not put all of them down.
“You would want to have more intelligence available on these two, and I did not.”
