Witness indebted to IRA informer, tribunal hears
A witness at the Morris tribunal today revealed the deep debt of gratitude she owed a key figure in the inquiry.
Ciara McLaughlin, a former neighbour of alleged IRA informer Adrienne McGlinchey, described in detail the drugs and drinking problems she encountered years after the events now being investigated.
And when she met Adrienne again, Ms McGlinchey got her a job in her family’s sweet shop and helped her find a new home.
At one point before that she had been forced to live in a St John of God’s hostel because her husband had been battering her.
Earlier, Ms McLoughlin reported to the garda corruption tribunal headed by former High Court President Mr Justice Frederick Morris, she had often been “as high as a kite” on cannabis, and was also drinking heavily.
She recalled being “stoned out of my mind” when giving a series of three statements to an internal garda investigation into the Co Donegal allegations of improper garda activity in 1999.
At the time she had been taking cannabis regularly, during a period when she lived in Derry, and using the drug “like it was cigarettes”.
Responding to lawyer Brian Murphy, representing Noel McMahon, a detective at the heart of the tribunal’s current investigation, she also said she had been “away in la-la land and with the fairies,” when she made that statement.
Pressed about what that meant, she said to the lawyer: “Would you like me to get a doctor’s report?”
Ms McLaughlin also said she had been battered by her husband at the time of the statements, and this had made her “shaky, nervous and agitated,” as well as “as high as a kite”.
She agreed she could have made things up in the statement, adding: “I could have said anything, but there are bits in the statement that I did not say.”
The tribunal, now in its ninth week, is looking into claims about garda actions in a number of areas in Co Donegal during the 1990s.
The present, Dublin-based phase of the inquiry is concentrating on allegations that two currently-suspended garda officers, Superintendent Kevin Lennon and Detective McMahon, prepared explosives, together with Ms McGlinchey, at the McMahon home in Buncrana, Co Donegal, that were later planted and then found in bogus garda strikes against terrorism.
Both Superintendent Lennon and Detective McMahon have denied the allegations, and when she gave evidence to the inquiry over a period of days last month, Ms McGlinchey repeatedly insisted she had never been a member of the IRA or passed on information about that organisation to the gardai.
Ms McLaughlin told the tribunal earlier this week how she saw bags of fertiliser, cartridge shells and other materials in the flat then lived in by Ms McGlinchey and her friend Yvonne Devine, as well as of metal-grinding activities that went on there.
She also reported seeing a man Ms McGlinchey had said was her “Provo boyfriend” from Derry entering the flat from time to time.
Ms McLaughlin said she believed that man to be Noel McMahon, but his lawyers have claimed it was another person, who has not been named in public hearings at the inquiry.
Mr Murphy put it to Ms McLaughlin that it was one and the same man. She answered: “That is a lie. I know it was Noel McMahon – I am not stupid.”
She reported, as well, watching from a window of her second storey flat as Superintendent Lennon and Detective Garda McMahon carried full black plastic bags into a house nearby that was occupied by Mr McMahon’s wife’s grandmother.
The start of today’s tribunal proceedings were marked by a friendly exchange between the judge chairman and Ms McLaughlin over her accent.
Mr Justice Morris requested the witness to speak more slowly.
He pointed out that Ms McLaughlin’s “lovely Donegal accent” had been causing problems for stenographers and other officials at the proceedings.
