Lord Laird and the government witchhunt against the Centre for Public Inquiry

Friday, 12 July 2013 00:00

Lord Laird and the government witchhunt against the Centre for Public Inquiry

By Niall Meehan

A recent Spinwatch article considered the credibility of Lord Laird in the wake of allegations that Laird 'broke rules by offering to carry out parliamentary work for cash'. Niall Meehan reflects on his own reasons to doubt Laird's credibility.

In 2005, Lord Laird gave a speech in the British House of Lords in which he accused me and RTE broadcasters of burrowing deep on behalf of Sinn Fein and the IRA into the recesses of the Irish state and Irish media.

This nonsensical rubbish was peripheral fallout from a bigger story Laird mentioned: a government drive to close down the independent Centre for Public Inquiry in Ireland through targeting its head, investigative journalist Frank Connolly (now Head of Communications for the trade union, SIPTU). The Centre investigated corruption in Irish public life. It had reported on a Shell gas pipeline distribution facility in Mayo. In late 2005 the Centre was planning further inquiries into the buying of land in North Dublin for a proposed new prison and into the sale of a former glass bottling factory to developers in the Dublin docks area.

A major part of the campaign against Connolly and the Centre consisted of information from a garda (police) file leaked anonymously by Minister for Justice Michael McDowell to an Irish Independent journalist. The minister also released police information to the Centre’s main funder, US based Irish–American billionaire Chuck Feeney of Atlantic Philanthropies. It was alleged that Connolly used a false passport in an April 2001 trip to Colombia as part of an Irish republican mission to meet anti-government FARC guerrillas. Three months afterwards Frank Connolly's brother Niall and two other Irish republicans were arrested with false passports in Colombia.

The gardaí investigated the allegation and sent a file to the DPP. The latter decided not to prosecute. A possibly frustrated McDowell arranged for trial by media. Connolly emphatically refuted all of the allegations made against him (and can be heard doing do on the audio below).

I thought this series of events remarkable and wrote the lead letter in the Irish Times on Saturday 17 December 2005. The letter was read out that morning on RTE Radio One’s daily, ’It says in the Papers’ segment. That may have caught someone’s attention who possibly brought me to Laird’s in London. The letter said:

I note that the Justice Minister Michael McDowell revealed to Chuck Feeney that the Chief Executive of the Centre for Public Inquiry, Frank Connolly, was in a group called 'Revolutionary Struggle' in his youth (Irish Times, December 16th). Has the Minister plans to continue in this vein, revealing to selected individuals intelligence tittle-tattle contained in moldering Special Branch files? What members of the Oireachtas, the judiciary, the civil service, the trade unions, academia and business are currently quaking in their shoes at the thought of the Minister carefully sifting through the files to discover what they were up to as students? Is any formerly revolting student safe from this revolting Minister?

The Minister ensured through legislation passed this year, a right to peruse any Garda file on any individual. Now we know why.

Let us not be parochial, there is a potential European dimension. Manuel Barroso, current President of the European Commission, was a Maoist in his foolish youth. Minister McDowell could propose extending his surveillance of the past to the continent. There is a world to be won and careers are out there to be ruined.

The following Tuesday, 20 December, Laird made his comments that were subsequently reported in the 25 December Sunday Independent (published 24 Dec), which at the time was attacking Connolly enthusiastically. In a recent piece on Laird in Village Magazine, Frank Connolly noted:

His elevation to the House of Lords in 1999 provided [Laird] with a unique platform on which to ply his particular brand of politically loaded propaganda which also happened to coincide with the interests of some of his clients.... [Laird's claims were] a matter of considerable interest to the Sunday Independent which then ran lengthy and ‘exclusive’ extracts from Lord Laird’s ‘privileged’ speeches. It is also coincidental that Lord Laird acted as a paid PR consultant to the newspaper. In 2002, he provoked the ire of the late Inez McCormack who complained to the UN over Laird’s ‘misuse’ of parliamentary privilege to attack the human rights group, the Belfast based Committee for the Administration of Justice, which had a strong track record of revealing abuses by the British security forces in the North.

In 2005... he found himself in hot water when it was emerged that while chairman of the Ulster-Scots agency, Laird had spent in excess of £2500 of public money on taxis between Belfast and Dublin.... Laird [later] defended his client and US businessman, Christopher Knight, against allegations of child sexual abuse. Knight did not contest charges in Florida that he had sexually assaulted a victim, then 12 to 15 years old, in 2003. Laird described the allegations as a “minor misdemeanour” although he later apologised for his remarks after being rebuked by UUP leader, Mike Nesbitt. He said the ill-advised comments arose from his ‘professional association’ with Knight who was seeking to invest in the Belfast Giants hockey team.

The campaign against Connolly and the Centre for Public Inquiry in 2005 was successful. Chuck Feeney reported that with their incessant demands Irish government officials including McDowell were interfering with his ongoing charitable work. For that reason Feeney pulled the financial plug on the Centre for Public Inquiry. Laird played his part and I got a bit-part in this sordid witch-hunt that was possibly a distraction from his Lordship’s lucrative lobbying activities.

For further information on this story and as a flavour of the time, interviews are listed below from RTE Radio One and Newstalk with:

Frank Connolly
Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Mary Harney
Finian McGrath TD
Professor Dermot Walsh
Justice Minister Michael McDowell (stating, ‘read [Irish Times columnist] Kevin Myers' who wrote, ‘I do not regard Frank Connolly as a fellow journalist. He is my enemy’)
Irish Voice Editor, Niall O’Dowd (on Chuck Feeney)
Eamon Dunphy interviewing Sam Smyth (Irish Independent) and Paul Cullen (Irish Times)
Discussion on 'Tonight with Vincent Browne', with Michael Clifford (Sunday Tribune), Aisling Ready (ICCL), Colm Mac Eochaidh, then Senior Counsel, Nora Owen (former Minister for Justice)

They speak for themselves.

NOTE: Irish Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly, who was elected European Ombudsman on 3 July 2013 by the European Parliament, spoke about Frank Connolly and the Centre for Public Inquiry at the launch of the Mary Raftery Investigative Journalism Fund.