HOWZAT

If he did have advance warning, he did not share it with his brothers Francis and Patrick, or with Francis’s wife Judy, all of whom were caught in the dragnet. They were intercepted attempting to leave the secured area in a 4x4 and arrested on suspicion of revenue offences but released without charge.

The operation against the Murphy family’s financial interests has been dogged by problems. Last year the swoops in Manchester, directed at companies linked to Judy and Francis, had to be moved forward by several months because of leaks to the media.

It will take months of careful sifting to determine whether any evidence can be put before a court, and whether laptop computers found in Murphy’s barn contain financial secrets of the IRA.

This game is being played for high stakes. Noel Conroy, the garda commissioner, and Sir Hugh Orde, the PSNI chief constable, the next day promoted the raid as a showcase for a coming era of cross-border co-operation. In briefings afterwards the CAB, gardai and PSNI all scrambled for the honour of being portrayed as the lead agency in the operation.

Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, said he expected nothing would be proved against Murphy, who he embraced as one of his key supporters.

“Tom Murphy is not a criminal, he is a good republican,” said Adams. “He is also, very importantly, a key supporter of the Sinn Fein peace strategy and has been for a very long time.” Asked if he believed Murphy was just a farmer, Adams said: “If he denies being a member of the IRA, then I have to accept that.”

THE Sinn Fein leader’s endorsement of Murphy could come back to haunt him. Far from being an innocent man who made whatever few shillings he has from farming, as Adams claimed, Murphy is a rich smuggler who led the IRA in south Armagh throughout the Troubles but never served a jail sentence. Murphy’s unsavoury past was laid bare in a series of court cases that he took against The Sunday Times after this newspaper accused him of vetting terrorists to take part in a bombing campaign in Britain in the 1980s. A Dublin jury found him to be a man of worthless reputation who had plotted murder and other terrorist acts and was involved in smuggling and criminality.

Sean O’Callaghan, a former garda agent within the IRA, testified at one trial that he attended IRA meetings at which both Adams and Murphy were present. One was a Revolutionary Council meeting in 1983 and the second was an Army Council meeting in 1984 or 1985.

Eamon Collins, a former IRA intelligence officer from Newry, told a 1998 hearing that his unit had murdered a Catholic civilian in mistake for a police officer. After an IRA internal inquiry carried out by Freddie Scappaticci, who was himself a British agent, Collins was sent to meet Murphy who exonerated him. “He introduced himself,” Collins testified. “He said, ‘I am Tom Murphy and I am here as a representative of the Army Council’.”

Collins added that after hearing his explanation of the fatal mistake, Murphy “accepted that. He told me that I had been fully exonerated and I was fully reinstated. I was very impressed by his manner”.

Immediately after the libel case, a campaign of intimidation started against Collins, culminating in his murder on January 27, 1999. It was a frenzied attack in which he was beaten, stabbed and had a crowbar pushed through his face.

Despite his high-ranking role in the IRA, and Adams’s description of him as “no criminal and a good republican”, Murphy denounced IRA violence in an attempt to win the libel case against The Sunday Times. At one stage he claimed that he did not know where the Maze prison was or what an IRA funeral was like.

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