Ireland Rejects London’s Request for Terror Suspect

In an extraordinary public announcement certain to severely strain Anglo-Irish relations, Ireland’s attorney general said Tuesday that he has rejected a British request to extradite a former Roman Catholic priest on terrorism charges because the accused could not get a fair trial here.

Irish Atty. Gen. John Murray said British newspaper articles and statements in the House of Commons had done “irredeemable” harm to prospects that any jury could deliver an unbiased judgment in the case of one-time cleric Patrick Ryan, who left his religious order in 1974.

Speaking in Parliament a few hours later, an angry Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the decision “a great insult to all the people of this country.” She said it only proves that existing Irish extradition practices are “inadequate” and need to be changed.

Murray invited Britain instead to examine its evidence with a view to allowing Ryan to be tried in Ireland on charges that he was a quartermaster for Irish Republican Army terrorists--a step Thatcher’s government is apparently loath to take.

“The charges which have been brought against Patrick Ryan are of a most serious kind, and they should be investigated by a court,” Murray said, noting that under the 1976 Criminal Law Jurisdiction Act, certain offenses committed in Britain can be tried in Ireland.

Under Irish law, such a case would be decided by a three-judge panel rather than a jury.

While not flatly excluding the possibility of an Irish trial, Thatcher told the House of Commons that “there will be problems about security of (British) witnesses.”

In a statement released at a press conference in Tipperary, Ryan called Murray’s decision “a first victory” but added that for Dublin to put him on trial would only mean that Ireland was agreeing to do Britain’s dirty work.

There have been at least 17 British extradition requests over the last year, in response to which the Irish have sent four suspects back to England.

Tuesday’s decision was seen here as perhaps the most serious threat to date to the three-year-old Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland, which was to have ushered in a new era of cooperation between the two nations.

That agreement, now under a statutory review, has failed to live up to the hopes of either side. But until the Ryan affair, at least, it had been seen as ending what was previously described derisively as the “megaphone diplomacy” between them.

The pact gave the predominantly Roman Catholic Republic of Ireland a voice for the first time in the governing of mostly Protestant Northern Ireland, which is administered by Britain. It also provided for closer cooperation between the two countries to combat terrorism and promised improved conditions in the north for the Catholic minority.

“We can’t scrap the Anglo-Irish agreement,” commented Ian Gow, a member of Parliament from Thatcher’s Conservative Party. “But it is possible for two governments, when they decide that an agreement which they entered into in good faith is not having its desired objectives . . . to make a new agreement. And I hope that is what will happen.”

Foe Blames Thatcher

Opposition leader Neil Kinnock, however, said Thatcher is to blame for Murray’s decision because of intemperate public statements that only angered the Irish. “You blew the possibility of extraditing Ryan,” he told her in Parliament on Tuesday.

Ryan, 58, was arrested in Brussels last June 30 at the request of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch. The aim was to keep him out of circulation during a planned visit to neighboring Holland a few days later by Queen Elizabeth II.

However, Belgian police found Ryan in possession of a false passport and assorted electronic devices, and so the British began extradition proceedings against him. They charged him with conspiracy to commit terrorist acts going back as far as 1975. In press leaks here, security sources accused him specifically of involvement in a 1982 Hyde Park bombing that killed four soldiers.

Ryan denies any ties to the IRA and says he has never been involved in terrorism. But as an acknowledged Irish nationalist, he rejects the right of any English court to try him and has pledged that he will never be brought here alive.

The former priest went on a 22-day hunger strike while Belgian authorities pondered his fate this fall. In the end, Brussels branded Britain’s extradition request legally flawed and quietly put Ryan on a military aircraft to Dublin on Nov. 25.

Notified only after the plane was already in the air, British officials were outraged and accused the Belgians in barely camouflaged press leaks of cowardice. They were doubly upset when Ryan was freed in Dublin and took refuge with an unspecified religious community pending a new British attempt to extradite him.

“Although the government of the Republic of Ireland make fine-sounding speeches and statements, they do not always seem to be backed up by appropriate deeds,” an icy Thatcher told Parliament. In retribution, Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey snubbed her at a European Communities summit earlier this month.

The controversy, Murray noted Tuesday, made the Ryan extradition case “quite unique,” and as a result he said he was breaking the normal rule of maintaining public silence over his rulings in such matters.