Life

TV Review: The Good Republican, the Six Nations

Billy Foley

Billy Foley

Billy has almost 30 years’ experience in journalism after leaving DCU with a BAJ. He has worked at the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and Sunday Independent in Dublin, the Cork-based Evening Echo and the New Zealand Herald. He joined the Irish News in 2000, working as a reporter and then Deputy News Editor. He has been News Editor since 2007

Thomas Murphy outside Dundalk court in 2007
Thomas Murphy outside Dundalk court in 2007 Thomas Murphy outside Dundalk court in 2007

Spotlight: The Good Republican, BBC 1, Tuesday at 10.45pm

Former assistant chief constable Alan McQuillan made the most important contribution to this programme about IRA leader Tom ‘Slab’ Murphy.

McQuillan, who has retired from both the PSNI and the leadership of the Assets Recovery Agency, dispensed with all nuance when he described the British government’s approach to republicans in the years after the Good Friday Agreement.

"There was a great desire by the government to play down these things, to not admit that the IRA were still active in crime, or active at all.

"We (the Assets Recovery Agency) can only take cases on referral from other law enforcement agencies … we got lots and lots of cases of loyalist crime .. but what we would not get was the really hard core entry into dealing with the criminality of republican paramilitaries.

".. I think the decisions were political and not operational. I think the issue here was the management of the peace process and nothing must be done which would disturb the politics of the situation."

Fair enough, McQuillan only confirmed what we all knew to be the case - that until the Northern Bank robbery of 2004, the IRA could do what it wanted as long as it didn’t blow things up or kill members of the security forces. And that included the Irish government as well as the British.

But even after the bank robbery the British government was continuing the help the IRA to escape the law. After a 2006 plan to grant amnesties was shelved because it would not pass through Westminster, the British government just arranged its own scheme with Sinn Féin in private.

The British government deny it, but people were excused from murder and justice was denied to victims.

So it was no surprise; but to hear it told so plainly by a man in a position to know that the British government had taken a decision to turn a blind eye to organised crime was disturbing.

Reporter Jennifer O’Leary interviewed McQuillan in the context of the conviction of Tom Murphy, who awaits sentence in the Republic for tax evasion.

She never got to ask whether Murphy was one of the protected ones (perhaps McQuillan had said he wouldn’t discuss the case) but the implication was clear - how had Murphy continued with his activities for so long without the attention of the forces of law and order on either side of the border?

***

Six Nations, BBC NI and RTE from Saturday

Enjoy live sport on the two national broadcasters this weekend, because it might not last for too much longer.

Despite the BBC announcement of a new contract for live coverage of the Olympics, the trend of public service broadcasters is strongly away from sport.

As mentioned in this column many times before, there is virtually no live sport left on the BBC with a whole swathe of sports abandoned as the price of coverage got greater.

So desperate is the BBC to get out of sports coverage that it even gave up the rights to broadcast this year's British Open golf coverage.

There is a valid argument that the BBC should reduce in size and return to its core values but there doesn't seem to be any corresponding reduction in the entertainment programming the BBC produces for our licence fee.

Sports fans would start to feel a whole lot better if the BBC was to announce that Eastenders was ending its run because soap is done very well by commercial stations and the state broadcaster wants to focus on its key objectives.