A detective garda loaded a Garda surveillance van with explosives, collected a Garda inspector and then, with a woman also on board, drove to a disused shed near Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal, and placed the explosives there, the Court of Criminal Appeal was told yesterday.
Ms Adrienne McGlinchey said that on the way to Rossnowlagh Insp (now Supt) Kevin Lennon stopped at an off-licence in Donegal town and bought vodka for her. On the way back from Rossnowlagh, the van was stopped at a Garda checkpoint but wasn't searched after Det Garda Noel McMahon told the checkpoint members he was a garda, she said.
Mr Edward Comyn SC, for the DPP, told Ms McGlinchey that Supt Lennon would give a different account of what happened at Rossnowlagh on July 18th, 1994.
Supt Lennon and Det Garda McMahon would say they went to Rossnowlagh in Supt Lennon's Honda Civic car. Supt Lennon would say the purpose of the trip was for Ms McGlinchey to point out certain places where explosives were stored.
Ms McGlinchey replied: "No. We had the stuff to put it there." She described as a "lie" the suggestion that they travelled in Supt Lennon's car. She said Supt Lennon knew it was a "set-up".
She was being cross-examined at the continuing hearing of an application by Mr Frank Shortt, of Redcastle, Inishowen, for a certificate declaring a miscarriage of justice arising from his conviction in 1995 for knowingly allowing his nightclub, the Point Inn, Quigley's Point, Inishowen, to be used for the sale of drugs.
Mr Shortt served a three-year prison sentence. In November 2000 his conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal with no opposition from the DPP.
Yesterday, Ms McGlinchey denied she was a Garda informer but agreed she had given information to gardaí from 1990 on. She agreed she gave information to two named gardaí but disagreed they had been replaced as her "handlers" by Det McMahon and a Det Garda Kelly. She said her relationship with Det McMahon was different.
Mr Comyn said Supt Lennon would deny he was in Ms McGlinchey's flat "plastered drunk" and would say he was never in any flat of hers.
She replied he was "plastered drunk" on one occasion and was in her flat five or six times. He had carried "stuff" into her flat.
Mr Comyn said Supt Lennon would deny he had ever discussed the Point Inn or any Garda operation in her presence.
She replied that he had. She was also "100 per cent positive" Supt Lennon had asked her to go and see Ms Sheena McMahon (the estranged wife of Det McMahohon) and tell her to shut up.
Ms McGlinchey rejected suggestions that Det McMahon never asked her to buy drugs, never gave her money for drugs and never asked her to place them at the Point Inn.
However, she was never in the Point and never bought drugs. She had drawn a map of the place but that was based on her memory of a drawing shown to her by Det McMahon. She said Det McMahon had told her, over the years when he was drinking, that Mr Shortt was set up and that he (Det McMahon) had told lies.
Mr Justice Hardiman noted that an interview recorded Det McMahon as saying Ms McGlinchey was supposed to go to the Point Inn but did not.
Mr Comyn said his instructions were that Ms McGlinchey was never supposed to go to the Point.
When Mr Comyn put it to her that Det McMahon would say she was never given alcohol in Garda custody or in Garda cars, she said she would "disagree completely". On one occasion, Det McMahon was very drunk driving a patrol car and crashed it into a dyke near Malin.
She said she had asked on March 22nd, 2000, to withdraw a statement she made to the Carty inquiry into alleged corruption by gardaí in Co Donegal, but they had refused to allow her. They said they had proved 99 per cent of what was in the statement. She had signed the Carty statement on March 23rd, 2000.
Ms McGlinchey then produced a hand-written document which she said she had written on March 22nd, 2000. In that document she had said: "I hereby state that anything I have written in statements about members of the Gardaí in Donegal are false. I can't help myself for being such a liar and that everything I said about Noel McMahon and Kevin Lennon are false."
Ms McGlinchey said she had been very stressed at the time she wrote the document and did so because she wanted to withdraw her Carty statement. It was not true that everything she had said about gardaí in Donegal was false. To the best of her knowledge, everything in her statement to the Carty inquiry was true.
She said she had problems getting memos of her interviews with the Carty team and had not been shown the last page of a particular memo until the court hearing.
Earlier, Ms Sheena McMahon, said her husband had told her he committed perjury during Mr Shortt's trial around the time Supt Lennon received a Garda of the Year award. Mr Eoin McGonigal SC, for Mr Shortt, said that award was in 1997.
The hearing continues today.
