Gardaí keep awatchon dissidents ahead of royal visit
ARMED gardaí, combined with royal security personnel, will be protecting Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their visit to Dublin this week.
Gardaí will be taking no chances after a dissident republican bomb plot to kill Prince Charles during his 2015 visit was foiled.
While there is no known specific threat to the royals, a major security operation will be in place for the visit on Tuesday and Wednesday, with security sources saying that both “overt and covert” protection will be in place at all times and that armed gardaí will form part of that security detail.
Gardaí organising the protection for the event will be very conscious of the bomb plot against Prince Charles in 2015.
Part of the prince’s trip on that occasion included a visit to Mullaghmore in Co Sligo, where his godfather, Earl Louis Mountbatten, was killed in an IRA attack on his boat in August 1979.
A successful Garda operation prior to Prince Charles’s 2015 visit led to dissident republican leader Séamus McGrane (63) being jailed for 11-and-a-half years.
In a similar operation, prominent dissidents have been monitored, both physically and electronically, in the past number of weeks in a stepping-up of surveillance as news of the royal visit was announced.
Worrying areas for security officers will be where the royal couple are appearing in public places, such as outside Croke Park and at the Famine Memorial on Dublin’s quays.
Armed detectives will mix with the public. The areas being visited, and the routes to and from them, will be subject to security sweeps prior to the arrival of Harry and Meghan.
The increased surveillance and security would be regarded as standard protocol, as was evidenced by the operation in which McGrane was convicted and eventually jailed in 2017.
McGrane (63), of Little Road, Dromiskin, Co Louth, was convicted by the non-jury Special Criminal Court of directing the activities of an unlawful organisation, styling itself the Irish Republican Army, between April 19 and May 13, 2015.
The court heard evidence from two audio recordings, from April and May 2015, of McGrane and Donal O’Coisdealbha, who later pleaded guilty to membership of the IRA, in conversation in The Coachman’s Inn on the Airport Road in Dublin. The pub had been bugged by Garda detectives.
McGrane issued instructions to O’Coisdealbha to contact a person he referred to as the “motorbike man” to collect ingredients required to make explosives. He also made statements about providing bomb-making material for others.
McGrane was arrested six days before the planned attack.
Searches were conducted at his home in Dromiskin, at a house at Harbour Court in Courtown, Co Wexford, and a locker at Maynooth University.
A significant amount of explosive material was found.