FF Councillors condemn Garda raids: “This is to send a message”

Councillor Noel Thomas was in his bed, he says, when the Gardaí came to his house at 6am, “banging on the doors and shining lights in the windows”. In the house were his wife and children. Gardaí entered the house, and proceeded to “search every room, and every drawer in every room. They turned the place upside down”.

The Garda Operation, launched on Saturday morning, was, the force says, part of an effort to gather evidence that might aid their investigation into the alleged arson attack on Ross Lake Hotel on December 16th last. The hotel had been set to become a home for up to 70 male international protection applicants, or asylum seekers, before the fire forced those plans to be abandoned for now.

“It was like being burgled or held up in your own home”, Councillor Thomas told this reporter. “That’s the only way I can describe it. I would consider myself a good judge of people and I could tell most of these Gardaí didn’t want to be there, going into the kids bedrooms and going through the drawers”.

Councillor Thomas is particularly outraged because, he says, he does not understand why there could possibly be any need to come to his home to seize his devices. “On not one, but two occasions in recent weeks, I arranged to meet Gardaí voluntarily so they could download anything they wanted from my phone. Both appointments were cancelled by the Guards. I gave them a full and voluntary statement confirming that I know nothing about the fire”. He had, he says, nothing to do with the blaze whatsoever.

Councillor Thomas says that, in his opinion, the purpose of the raid on his home was “To send a political message” in relation to his speaking out in support of the protests against the proposed accommodation centre which preceded the fire on December 16th. He fears, he says, that such raids may become more commonplace as the Gardaí seek to discourage political protest around immigration. “If this is what they can do to me, as a sitting councillor”, he said, “then God help anyone else if this hate speech bill is ever passed and they have the power to come into people’s homes and seize devices based on next to nothing”.

At roughly the same time as Councillor Thomas’s home was being raided on Saturday morning, an identical scene was playing out at three other homes in the locality. Four homes in total were hit at dawn. 

This reporter understands that in at least one other case, a person who had voluntarily surrendered their phone to the Gardaí in the days before the raid then had the new phone that they had purchased over Christmas to replace the surrendered phone seized. In another case, children’s devices were temporarily seized.

Speaking to Gript Media yesterday, another Fianna Fáil Councillor involved in supporting the protests, Seamus Walsh, whose home was not raided, told this publication that he regarded the raids as “intimidatory” and openly speculated that the initiative for them may have originated at “Leinster House, Mount Street (referring to Fianna Fáil headquarters) and whoever else”.

Councillor Walsh – who alongside Councillor Thomas, faces disciplinary action from Fianna Fáil for supporting the protests, told Gript Media that he had been clear with the Gardaí from day one that he did not know who was responsible for the arson attack on the proposed accommodation centre.

 He also said that, like Councillor Thomas, he did not condone in any way the burning of the hotel – which he has publicly condemned – but said that the fire reflected “the extent to which Fianna Fáil in Dublin is out of touch with the feelings of local people on the ground here in Connemara”. He said that he felt that the unknown person or persons who may have set the fire would have been acting out of a sense, however misguided, that their actions were necessary to protect their community.

Councillor Walsh told this reporter that when he told the Irish Independent over the weekend that on foot of the weekend raids “he would never co-operate with the Gardaí again”, he was speaking “in anger” out of a sense of deep frustration at the dawn raids on Saturday morning, but wanted to make clear that his personal interaction with the Gardai was perfectly cordial and that he appreciated that local Gardai in particular had been placed in a difficult position.

When this reporter contacted An Garda Síochána to seek comment on the statements made by the two councillors, the Garda Press office issued a statement saying that the force does not comment on third party remarks, or “comment on interactions with any third parties carried out as part of an ongoing criminal investigation”. The Gardaí referred back to their statement on the raids issued on Saturday, which confirmed that “searches were conducted at four properties in the Roscahill area of Oughterard, Co. Galway. The searches were conducted by members attached to Galway Divisional Crime unit supported by the National Bureau of Crime Investigation. The searches conducted were focused on gathering evidence in relation to the arson of Ross Lake House Hotel on the 16th of December 2023.”

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In a story like this, some caution is warranted: We only have the side of the story told by the two councillors and others targeted in the raids, and we are not likely to get the Garda side of the story since any enquiry will, as ever, be met with that old flat-batted forward defensive shot: An Garda Síochána does not comment on third party remarks.

Nevertheless those events as described have the potential to raise, I think, pretty serious questions for An Garda Síochána: If, as is alleged, the purpose of the searches was purely to acquire electronic devices in the possession of those targeted, then a dawn raid approach seems on its face entirely excessive, especially since one of those people had already voluntarily surrendered their device.

The thinking behind dawn raids by police forces the world over is well established: Police forces do them – usually with careful planning in advance – with the explicit aim of taking the targets of the raids by surprise and making sure that they have no time to flee, or to destroy or conceal any evidence. It is highly unlikely, we can safely conclude, that a sitting councillor would flee or evade the Gardaí. Indeed, to the contrary: Gript understands that Councillor Thomas had previously co-operated with the Gardaí and voluntarily been interviewed.

We may therefore surmise that the Gardaí, to justify such extreme action, must have a reasonable belief that those targeted possess evidence in relation to the crime (the arson attack) that they were investigating. An operation like this, given the political sensitivity involved, would also require signing off by somebody pretty senior.

Obviously and self-evidently, in a Republic, nobody – not even an elected official – is above the law. The Gardaí are obligated to try to unveil, and bring to justice, those responsible for an arson attack. That said, the Gardaí themselves in a case like this have not earned the benefit of the doubt. And in this case, the doubts in any reasonable mind should be grave.

First, implied in any dawn raid – certainly in the public mind – is a presumption that the Gardaí believe that the targets of those raids would not simply co-operate with the Gardaí if approached to do so.

But in at least two of the cases, based on information provided to this reporter, it seems at face value that this is not the case.

Second, when one of the targets of those raids is an elected councillor, in an election year, then the raids are essentially a siren blast from the state’s police force telling the public that they suspect the councillor of, at minimum, an unwillingness to co-operate in the bringing of criminals to justice. The raids are an explicitly political intervention, in terms of their impact, by the state’s security arm, which have the net effect of casting doubt on the personal integrity of at least one sitting councillor who has not been charged with or implicated in any crime at all – notwithstanding any blather about innocent until proven guilty.

Third, the breadth of the devices taken in the raids smacks more than a little of a fishing expedition: Do the Gardaí really have reason to believe that information about the perpetrators of an arson incident is stored on a child’s electronic device? Or was the seizure of such devices just the over-exuberant execution of a warrant?

Certainly, we can conclude quite reasonably that other elected councillors around the country will be watching these scenes, and being quite incentivised to make sure that their homes are not the target of such raids. One might call that, in effect if not yet unambiguously in intent, pour encourager les autres.

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Nor are the suspicions of political motivation entirely meritless: We know, for a fact, that Fianna Fáil has sought to discipline the two councillors who were involved in supporting the protests, and Gript Media understands that an eight week suspension for both is likely to end up being the only possible negotiated outcome that keeps them both in the party. A previous suggestion mooted within Fianna Fáil was that both would then have to re-apply for membership. However, at least one of the two councillors made it quite clear that they would not re-apply if that was a requirement.

The sight of a sitting politician having his door rapped at 6am in the morning will, self-evidently, send a message to other sitting politicians, not to mention ordinary members of the public, and nobody should be naive enough to believe that such messages are not sent quite consciously by the Gardaí from time to time. Councillor Walsh told this reporter yesterday that he firmly believes the raids this weekend had a political motive. Looking at the scale of them, the facts surrounding them, and the timing, one might forgive him for that suspicion, regardless of how accurate it finally turns out to be.