ALLEGATIONS THAT the Provisional IRA tapped a private telephone link between Dundalk Garda station and Newry police over a three-year period, gaining crucial information to enable them to ambush RUC officers, was discounted at the Smithwick Tribunal yesterday.
The allegations, published this summer in the current affairs magazine Phoenix,were put to telecommunications engineer Tom Roddy by counsel for the tribunal Dara Hayes.
The allegations essentially claimed that the IRA was able to monitor the arrangements for visits of RUC personnel to the Garda station in Dundalk and had used the phone tap to enable them to ambush and kill two senior members of the RUC in March 1989.
Chief supt Harry Breen, who was among the most wanted RUC officers on the IRA target list, and supt Bob Buchanan were killed in an ambush on the Edenappa Road in south Armagh minutes after leaving a meeting in Dundalk Garda station.
The Smithwick Tribunal is investigating suspicions that members of the Garda in Dundalk or other employees of the State colluded with the IRA in the killings of the RUC officers.
In the Phoenixmagazine article it was claimed the telephone interception took place at Dundalk telephone exchange.
However, when the scenario was put to Mr Roddy, who spent 37 years of his working life in Dundalk, he said “the evidence would be still there today” if the allegations were true.
He told Mr Hayes that claims the tapping had been carried out by individuals trained by British telecoms companies were unlikely.
Mr Roddy said that he could not recall meeting such personnel in the Dundalk exchange in those years and there was a recruitment embargo in place by Telecom Éireann at the time.
Mr Roddy told Mr Hayes a tap placed on the wires in the cable chamber would have been a complex operation involving pressurised air seals as lines were protected from flooding by pumped air.
When the seal was broken an alarm would sound.
He said interception would involve the opening of the chamber, the opening of an 800 wire cable, the identification of the correct wires, the identification of the exchange’s own “jumper wires” as well as heating to seal the air lock. This would have required testing equipment, a gas cylinder and a blow torch.
While it was clearly technically possible to carry out such work, he said it would have resulted in a “box” being visible in the cable chamber which he claimed would have been discovered.
Mr Roddy said that this was particularly the case if the interception had been in place for three years.
Work on an interception in the main distribution framework section instead of the cable chamber would have been on the higher level and would have been even more obvious, he added.
The tribunal continues tomorrow and is expected to examine allegations made in The Irish Timesin an article by its former columnist, Kevin Myers.
