Dublin to investigate Garda links to RUC officers' deaths

The Irish government announced a public inquiry yesterday into the possibility that members of the Republic's police force might have helped the IRA to kill two senior Northern Ireland police officers in 1989.

Other inquiries are expected to be established later by the British Government into controversial killings in Northern Ireland, including the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor.

The Republic's Justice Minister, Michael McDowell, challenged "the so-called republican movement" to co-operate fully with the inquiry into the killings of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Robert Buchanan. They were killed in a border ambush in 1989.

The inquiry was recommended by Peter Cory, a retired Canadian Supreme Court judge who was appointed to review six cases in which collusion was suspected. The judge did not conclude unequivocally that there had been collusion in the deaths of the two RUC officers, who were killed by an IRA gang while returning north after a meeting with southern police in Dundalk.

But he found intelligence reports, of varying degrees of reliability, which he said warranted further investigation. These alleged that one and possibly two officers in Dundalk may have been passing information to the IRA.

One agent said the IRA had been telephoned by a southern policeman with a tip-off that two RUC officers were in Dundalk Garda station.

On the other hand, the judge pointed out that the IRA had been capable of carrying out the murders without assistance. He noted that Superintendent Buchanan was well known to the IRA and regularly visited Dundalk Garda station, travelling unarmed in his own car and using the same border crossing for most journeys.

Judge Cory did not recommend a public inquiry into the 1987 IRA killing of a senior judge, Lord Justice Gibson, who died with his wife in a border bomb attack.

The British Government has four reports by Judge Cory. These concern the death of Pat Finucane, the killing of a Catholic man, Robert Hamill, in Portadown in 1997, the murder of the Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright in 1997, and the murder of a Lurgan solicitor Rosemary Nelson in 1999. Judge Cory is believed to have recommended public inquiries in each case.