Thomas Murphy (Irish Republican) - IRA Career

IRA Career

Murphy was allegedly involved with the South Armagh Brigade of the IRA before becoming Chief of Staff of the IRA Army Council. Toby Harnden (ex-correspondent for the Daily Telegraph) has named him as planning the Warrenpoint ambush of 1979, in which 18 British soldiers were killed, and was also allegedly implicated in the Mullaghmore bombing the same day, which killed four people including Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma. As early as 1985, he was identified in a veiled way by the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Sir John Hermon, when in 1985 he claimed that a "wealthy pig smuggler" living on the border with the Republic of Ireland was behind an IRA bombing that killed four RUC officers close to the border in May, earlier that year. Murphy was involved in smuggling in huge stockpiles of weapons from Libya in the 1980s and was part of the IRA army council that decided to end its first ceasefire with the London Canary Wharf Docklands bomb in 1996 that killed two men.

Accused by the Sunday Times of directing an IRA bombing campaign in Britain, in 1987 Murphy unsuccessfully sued the paper for libel in Dublin. The original verdict was overturned by the court of appeal because of omissions in the judge's summing up and there was a retrial which he also lost. At this retrial both Sean O'Callaghan and Eamon Collins, former members of the IRA testified against him, as did members of the Gardaí, Irish Customs, British Army and his local TD. Collins, who also had written a book about his experiences entitled Killing Rage, was beaten and killed by having a spike driven through his face near his home in Newry eight months later. In 1998, an Irish court dismissed Murphy's case after a high-profile trial during which Murphy stated that he had: "Never been a member of the IRA, no way" and claimed not to know where the Maze prison was. The Irish jury ruled, however, that he was an IRA commander and a smuggler.

The Sunday Times subsequently published statements given by Adrian Hopkins, the skipper of the boats which ferried weapons from Libya to the IRA, to the French authorities who intercepted the fifth and final Eksund shipment. Hopkins told how Murphy had met a named Libyan agent in Greece, paid for the weapons importation and helped unload them when they arrived in Ireland.

According to Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA, Murphy has been the IRA Army Council's Chief of Staff since 1997. Toby Harnden's Bandit Country: the IRA and South Armagh also details Murphy's IRA involvement.