Fuel smuggling among IRA criminality that funded Sinn Fein growth, archives claim

Prime Minister Blair raised issue in call with President Bush, and NI Secretary Mandelson sent a secret memo to Chancellor Brown

THE growth of Sinn Fein was funded by massive criminality, including fuel smuggling which trashed the environment, according to previously secret Government assessments of the party.

Money from the IRA was funding Sinn Fein’s political activities as recently as 2001, the Government believed, with Tony Blair telling George W Bush that Sinn Fein was “financed by the IRA from the proceeds of crime”.

More recent Government files have not yet been declassified.

Among files discovered by the Belfast Telegraph in The National Archives in Kew is a secret memo from Secretary of State Peter Mandelson to Chancellor Gordon Brown.

In the September 2000 memo, Mr Mandelson said that the fuel protests ongoing at the time — which by then were a national crisis — had made him consider the impact of fuel duty on cross-border smuggling.

“The results of an initial examination of the problem are disturbing,” he said.

Mr Mandelson said there was a price differential of about 30% before considering the favourable currency difference, which made the gap even larger.

“Quite apart from the substantial loss of revenue to the Exchequer, I am concerned about the implications of this level of smuggling for the financing of terrorist organisations.

“The largest terrorist group in Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA, gets almost three-quarters of its funding from smuggling fuel into Northern Ireland.”

Fuel smuggling had a devastating impact on the environment, with toxic sludge from the dye-removal process being dumped on land or in waterways.

Mr Mandelson continued: “The ‘Real’ IRA, the perpetrators of the Omagh bomb outrage, also raise hundreds of thousands of pounds from this source, while other criminal elements use the system to defraud the Exchequer of enormous sums.”

Mr Mandelson asked the Chancellor to support him by allocating greater resources from customs to target those responsible.

Throughout the files, the Government’s most senior figures refer interchangeably to Sinn Fein and the IRA, at some points even referring to the need for “Sinn Fein to decommission”.

In a phone call between Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W Bush on June 29, 2001, the Prime Minister said: “We had reached the point where Sinn FEIN/IRA really had to take action on decommissioning.

“The unionists were asking why HMG was prepared to tolerate a political party which was financed by the IRA from the proceeds of crime.”

A Downing Street note of the call recorded: “President Bush said he was keen to help: the Prime Minister should just say if he wanted him to do anything.”

A document from less than a month later shows that First Minister David Trimble told Mr Blair that the IRA had been smuggling in handguns to assassinate political and commercial rivals.

In a meeting with the Prime Minister on July 10, 2001, Mr Trimble said that “some form of reassurances would be needed on recently imported arms (especially handguns)”.

“Ever since the Miami case, many handguns had been imported for one-off use to eliminate political and commercial rivals.

“Sinn FEIN/IRA knew that the unionists were aware of this: if the issue was not surfaced, they would assume the unionists were ready to turn a blind eye.”

Almost three months later, on October 2, 2001, Mr Trimble told the Prime Minister that he needed to be tougher on racketeering and paramilitary financing, “including where it spilled over into otherwise legitimate activity”.

He continued: “One of the Irish party leaders had told him yesterday in Dublin that Sinn Fein had spent more in one constituency than the whole budget of his party. We had to get a grip on this.”

Mr Blair said that “the wider racketeering issue would have to be faced”.

After the IRA robbed the Northern Bank of £26.5m in December 2004 — the largest of a series of major robberies which had been going on for years — Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said that the two governments had effectively turned a blind eye to IRA criminality, but that it had gone too far and needed to stop.

He told the Dail that both the PSNI and An Garda Siochana had told him they believed “that a number of operations which took place during 2004, not just the Northern Bank robbery, were the work of the Provisional IRA and would have had the sanction of the Army Council and be known to the political leadership”.

US diplomatic cables exposed on Wikileaks later showed that, around the same time, Mr Ahern and other senior Irish Government figures were privately telling the US that they had “rock-solid evidence” Gerry Adams and Martin Mcguinness were members of “the IRA military command” and so would have been aware of the robbery in advance — something they denied.

In 2015, senior IRA figure and major smuggler Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy was found guilty of tax evasion and sentenced by a Dublin court to 18 months in jail.

Sinn Fein had repeatedly defended him. In 2006, Gerry Adams said, “Tom Murphy is not a criminal,” while, in 2015, Mary Lou Mcdonald described Murphy as “very nice” and “a very typical rural man”.