Who Were The “Household Names” Who Were The IRA’s Money Launderers?

In August of 2015, one of Ireland’s former Ministers for Justice – Michael McDowell – wrote in The Irish Times about the Irish government’s largely secret dealings with some of the IRA’s Army Council then members – Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Martin Ferris and others – in relation to decommissioning of the IRA’s arsenal of weapons and explosives.

Michael McDowell wrote that he had to be the “hard man” of the negotiations – apparently because the Fianna Fáil Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Bertie Ahern and the British Prime Minister Tony Blair were liable to be more accommodating to the IRA than he would tolerate.

McDowell has painted himself as someone who had to go along with the ultimate Secret Amnesty granted to the IRA by Bertie Ahern – a Secret Amnesty which Bertie Ahern warned Tony Blair about and which he pressed Blair to also grant to the IRA.

Blair later did so by means of equally Secret Letters of Comfort to wanted IRA terrorists – which came to be known as the “On The Run” letters.

Ahern’s letter to Tony Blair begging him to go along with the grant of the Secret Amnesty has been in the public domain for years.

In reading Bertie Ahern’s unprecedented letter begging the Brits to grant a secret amnesty to IRA terrorists to mirror his own, you have to wonder why Ahern was so eager to serve the IRA’s Army Council in this manner.

Michael McDowell threw himself wholly into the Secret Amnesty process – even writing an unsolicited letter to the British Attorney General with advice about the potential grant of Royal Prerogatives of Mercy to wanted IRA terrorists [such as IRA volunteer and Maze escaper Gerry Kelly had already been granted and had accepted while on the run and under arrest in Holland].

Far from being dragged unwillingly along in Bertie Ahern’s Secret Amnesty grant to the IRA and its leadership, McDowell became in effect Bertie Ahern’s legal fixer for the process.

In the course of his Irish Times revelations, McDowell dropped a hardly noticed reference to information he had seen regarding the IRA’s illegal “war chest” of MILLIONS of pounds and euros which had been laundered variously in properties and businesses.

A Department of Justice report into the IRA’s “war chest” of illegally accrued wealth (by robberies, extortion and even deals with Colombia’s FARC narco-terrorists) had been leaked to journalists – and Northern Ireland commentator and former SDLP activist Brian Feeney had thundered about this report also in The Irish Times claiming that the IRA had “not gone away” – contrary to Sinn Fein’s claims – and that the IRA movement’s wealth exceeded €400M.

Feeney’s Irish Times article appeared only 3 days after McDowell’s Irish Times article – clearly there was a move to pressure Sinn Féin/IRA in the wake of the murder days before of Kevin McGuigan in Belfast – with weaponry supposedly decommissioned years before and with IRA ranks supposedly disbanded years before also…

Michael McDowell wrote that those who fronted the IRA’s money laundering operation were “household names”:

Finally, money-laundering is a crime. Nobody has yet been implicated in the control or disposal of the Provo accumulated war chest of hundreds of millions of euro and pounds.

That remains a challenge for the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Northern Ireland Assets Recovery Agency and the security services – a challenge made no easier by the involvement of not a few household names as fronts for the laundering of those monies.

McDowell had evidently seen the “household names” of those who fronted the IRA’s criminal and terrorist money laundering operation.

So had Bertie Ahern – unfortunately no stranger to accepting wads of money from those he described as his “friends”.

Presumably so had other members of both the Ahern’s Fianna Fáil government and of Tony Blair’s Labour government.

For all of Michael McDowell’s claimed “hard man” stance toward the IRA, he kept quiet for years about the Secret Amnesty grant to the murderous IRA and its well known Army Council leadership, as he also kept quiet about the “household names” who were the IRA’s money launderers of blood money.

There were other ways to bring the IRA to decommissioning its weaponry and explosives and to disband its ranks – and to dispose of its illegal “war chest”.

However, neither Bertie Ahern nor Tony Blair nor Michael McDowell ever chose a different path that might have led to different outcomes.

The questions remain – who were the “household names” who fronted the IRA’s money laundering operation and why weren’t they unmasked and prosecuted?

Were any of them well known leading members of the Fianna Fáil party?