Pat Daly was the prime prosecution witness at the trial of two Irish National Liberation Army men at the Old Bailey in 1993. They were accused of conspiracy to steal explosives, conspiracy to cause explosions and possession of firearms with intent to endanger life. Daly lived in Bristol at Southmead from 1969 to 1989. Before this he lived in Highbury Villas, Kingsdown, with an IRA leader known as Jim Flyn.
He admitted to having been an informer in Bristol since the mid-seventies – which some of us had guessed – and after 1989 his handling had been taken over by MI5. Apparently he then returned to Belfast under instructions and then moved to Galway, where he again was running a driving school. When he took over an established driving school in Bristol, and moved from being a bus-man, he explained his sudden wealth – his friends wondered how he could have bought the established school – with a story about a friend having emigrated to Australia and left him to run it!
Peter Jordan
Peter Jordan first achieved local fame when he spread tin-tacks on the pitch of the Bristol rugby ground at half-time on the afternoon of New Year’s eve 1969. The West of England regional team were playing the touring South Africans and this was the culmination of a campaign against the tour run by Anti-Apartheid. We gave a night’s accommodation to students sent to us by Peter Hain (then a Young Liberal) and all elements of ‘the left’ combined in a massive demonstration. Peter Jordan was allowed to leave the rugby ground after spreading the tin-tacks and was half-way down Gloucester Road when an irate police Inspector berated the underling who had released Jordan and sent him off to locate him. This Gilbertian situation was capped by Peter’s arrest, strolling down the road, a long way from the scene of the crime. I had a phone call from Danny Ryan at about 11 pm asking me to try and bail Jordan at the Bridewell police station.
Ryan and Daly were rather vague characters to me, who lived in a political twilight world on the fringe of the trade union and labour movement. I met Ryan and we went to the Bridewell. Jordan emerged looking dishevelled and complained that he had retired for the night, only to be awakened for his release. We came out at exactly midnight, with the ships’ sirens all welcoming-in the New Year.
When I arrived at the Bridewell I had parked my car almost at the front door and Danny Ryan had asked if he could leave a parcel in the boot. I agreed. When Jordan was released I ran them both home (they had no transport) and Ryan collected his parcel from me en route. He then flung it in the river and, somewhat aghast, I asked him what was in it it. ‘Smoke bombs. They can’t ignite when wet,’ he replied. This parcel had been standing outside the Bridewell in my car. I then made a lasting judgement on Ryan: he was either a liar or he would endanger any innocent person to further his own ends.
The Peter Jordan conspiracy case.
Jordan was arrested on Christmas Eve 1984 outside a Liverpool pub, The Farmer’s Arms. He was then 60 and a retired teacher. A police squad was waiting to grab him with a parcel which he had collected from a seaman, Patrick Brazil. It contained two kilos of Italian gelignite and a detonator, wrapped in Christmas gift paper. The target of the explosives was to have been Lieutenant Colonel Brian Baty who had been liaison officer for the SAS when they were in Ireland. He lived in retirement in King’s Pryon, near Hereford.
Jordan collected information on members of the establishment (particularly those on the Army list), and when the police raided Jordan’s home in Headley Park, Bristol, ‘tea-chests’ of data were found. His information was not always very accurate. I remember a civil liberties group meeting where Jordan turned up and berated the chair, David Roberts, a solicitor with an impeccable civil liberties pedigree. Jordan alleged that David was both a Freemason and a retired Territorial Army officer. Neither charge was true: he had researched the wrong David Roberts.
Jordan used Jim Little, who lived nearby, as an accommodation address for his letters. Jim was a saintly character who could easily be persuaded to help anyone. In his evidence he said he had known Jordan for over twenty years through Bristol Trades Council, that the letters came from Ireland, but he never opened them and knew nothing of their contents.
The case and the role of Pat Daly were described at the time of Jordan’s trial by the Bristol Evening Post:
‘Mystery still surrounds a meeting in a Bristol pub between Jordan and Grimes [an unemployed builder and the INLA field officer for the case] and a man called Pat Daly. The Manchester jury heard that Jordan and Grimes probably met in The Swan With Two Necks in St. Judes before moving on to another pub to link with Daly. Daly said he had a gun. The three walked to waste ground where Grimes tested the weapon which would not fire. He gave the gun back to Daly and told him to go to Liverpool. Daly, according to Grimes, refused. The men did not know that Special Branch detectives had uncovered the plot and launched Operation Condor to catch them.’ (1)
Special Branch had been told of the plan by Daly. In his 1993 evidence at the Old Bailey, Daly said he had been an informant in this entire Bristol period, and had driven Jordan on his reconnaissance expeditions to the home of Colonel Baty, while the security services in one guise or another paid for the petrol and his time off work.(2) Jordan pleaded guilty at his trial. Patrick Brazil, the seaman and unwitting courier of the explosives, was acquitted of conspiracy. Dr. Maire O’Shea, a Birmingham consultant psychiatirst, was also acquitted on a charge of conspiracy and was granted costs estimated at 40,000. Daly was not tried and Peter Jordan was the only person jailed. He got 14 years.
In his well-documented account of the background to the trial at the time, Nick Davies in the Observer went so far as he dare in pointing the finger at Pat Daly as an informer.(3) Ryan and Jordan in their coded correspondence referred to Daly as ‘Romeo’. Davies made it quite clear that ‘the conspirators were defeated by a tip-off from within their own ranks….. It was Romeo who usually drove Jordan on his reconnaissance trips. He received expenses from Ryan for his trouble. In 1983 he visited Ryan in Dublin and brought back messages for Jordan. In 1984, on Ryan’s instructions, Jordan collected a gun and six bullets from a contact in London and passed them to Romeo for safe keeping.’ (4)
There could be no possible doubt that Daly was the informer. The INLA must have been totally devoid of common sense to have continued to use and trust him. The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, James Anderton, complained that the Jordan bomb-plot trial had cost 400,000 in police marksmen, outriders, helicopters, catering, overtime and travelling allowances incurred by the security operations.(5) A wry smile is permitted at any idea that the kind of people concerned in the case could ever have mounted an escape operation.
It was in 1985 that I first took up the case of the imprisoned Peter Jordan. Hardly a voice had been raised locally about the case. It was as if everyone was scared to discuss it. A notable exception was Ron Thomas, an Avon County Councillor who had been MP for East Bristol. He described the sentence as ‘brutal and vindictive’ and that said the Manchester trial had been a ‘sham political show trial’.(6)
Peter Jordan had been knocked about a lot in Liverpool and Armley goals. He and his aged mother who was then in her mid-eighties, asked me to try and get him moved to somewhere nearer Bristol. In my files are letters to Mrs Jordan, Peter’s sister Peggy, his MP Mike Cocks and later Dawn Primarolo, who succeeded him. (Mike Cocks then became Baron Cocks of Hartcliffe and he continued to try and help.) In all my letters to these people in that period I expressed my doubts about Pat Daly, his reliability, and possible role as an informer.
Peter Jordan had been a delegate to the Trades Council (of which I was an officer) and the Council was under some obligation to take up his case. Mike Cocks, then an MP, helped me with this and saw the Home Secretary. After a time Jordan was moved to Long Lartin, a maximum security prison about 70 miles from Bristol. It was then that I applied to visit him. The Special Branch sent a pleasant enough officer to interview me. In due course I was allowed in…. and so was Pat Daly.
In Long Lartin he was well treated and comfortable. He was in the cell next to Geoffrey Prime, the GCHQ Soviet spy. Prime had a copy of Soviet Weekly delivered to him, often by a nun! His divorced wife (who, after her conversion to a fundamentalist sect, wrote an appalling book on the Prime case), also visited him. Each unit had freedom of association and during the day the men wandered in and out of each others’ cells. Peter Jordan was beyond the age where he would be expected to work. Our conversations were affable. I took him fresh fruit which he was allowed to eat only during the visit (in case they were impregnated with drugs!) He showed sincerity and loyalty to his own beliefs — which I did not share — and did not try to help himself into an early release. In 1988 he sent a long letter to The Starry Plough, the paper of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of INLA, which he signed ‘In comradeship, Pete Jordan, Republican Socialist P.O.W., Long Lartin'(7)
Danny Ryan
The letters for Peter Jordan sent to Jim Little’s house as an accommodation address were from Danny Ryan, who had been expelled from Britain in 1975 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974. They were written in an elaborate code based upon Masefield’s poem ‘Cargoes’. In an excellent piece of investigative journalism in the Observer of 9 February, 1986, Nick Davies suggested that Ryan ‘slowly drew Jordan along the road to military action and became the dominant figure in the bomb plot, the recipient of Jordan’s meticulous intelligence.’
Ryan was originally a member of the Communist Party (as was Jordan) and became a Maoist, whereupon he was expelled from the CP in the 1960s. He was always suspected by them of having burgled the CP offices in Lawford St. after his expulsion and collected lists of addresses. Bryan Underwood tells a good story of speaking, over thirty years ago, at a CP outdoor meeting one Sunday on the Downs. Ryan was newly-arrived in England and in the audience. He introduced himself to Bryan, told him he always carried ‘a shooter’ in his belt and pulled out a large revolver! He became a very active CP member in Bristol. I always thought him devious and extremely dubious in many of his activities.
Danny Ryan had a reputation in Trades Council circles for carrying large wads of bank notes in his pocket. He made no attempt to hide them and used them as an insignia of importance. He was a collector of money for INLA and its forerunner. He took a rake-off from acting as some kind of agent for Irish labour, with sub-contracting companies who hired workers from him. Whether this was cash for non-existent workers on company payrolls or, as the local press suggested, some kind of extortion racket, we are not likely to discover. But he had a powerful role as a quartermaster.(8)
At the time of Jordan’s trial, the Bristol Evening Post actually labelled Ryan, who was then living in Ireland, as ‘the real organiser of the crime’, but the police did not apply for his extradition.(9) When he was being deported, Bridie, his wife, rang me up at breakfast time to tell me the police were in the house and ‘wanted action’ by the Trades Council. I regret to say that I continued with my breakfast and did nothing.
Pat Daly
After my first visits to Peter Jordan in Long Lartin, Daly (whom I never actually met) telephoned me at home. He said that as we were both visiting Peter it might be a good idea for us to get together. I told him I could see no advantage from our meeting. Sounding rather embarrassed he limply replied that he ‘might drop in you some time anyway’, to which I retorted that I did not think he would be welcome. Daly never came to see us.
I had warned Peter Jordan, his sister and his mother that I did not trust Daly.(10) His sister and mother shared my views and wished they could prevent Daly from visiting. I do not claim any second sight or special intelligence on this score. It was so very obvious that he as an informer. He was to have collected the packet at Liverpool and at the last minute he cried off. Jordan went in his place and was arrested. Delegates to the Trades Council who were interested in the Irish situation told stories of Daly attending demonstrations and disappearing in the middle of them. He gave as an excuse that ‘Special Branch picked me up, questioned me and released me.’
Daly had been arrested and taken to Liverpool at the time of the Jordan case and, although all the evidence presented showed that he had a gun, he was never charged with anything. The Bristol Evening Post at the time portrayed him as a kindred spirit of Peter Jordan’s and a member of his group. Although I had to be interviewed and grilled by Special Branch before being allowed to visit Jordan, Daly, with his high political profile, was still allowed in.(11)
In April 1986 there was an attempt to form a Peter Jordan Support Group and to involve the Trades Council in it. An A4 duplicated leaflet was published with a Box Number at the Full Marks Bookshop, Bristol, which asked interested people to send in their names and addresses.(12) The leaflet was unsigned but I was told by the Full Marks people that Pat Daly was the instigator. I construed this at the time to be a Special Branch name-and-address collecting operation and wrote such a comment upon the copy I filed. The old maxim still holds good: you find potential terrorists by offering them something to join.
Daly seems to have begun his career as an informer when a member of the old Clann-Na h’Eirann, and probably left that organisation under instructions from his controllers — perhaps because the Clann turned out to be political and not terrorist-based. He is said by a friend of mine to have left September 1981 after attending a Clann conference at the Star Club in Birmingham. In the evening there was an almighty argument, stimulated by Daly, who accused members there of being all talk and no action. When he received no support for his demands for direct action he left and migrated into the Irish Republican Socialist Party with its military arm the INLA.(13)
The Old Bailey trial revealed Daly in his role as an ‘agitator’, setting up a branch of the Irish Representation in Great Britain, carrying banners at demonstrations and so on. Photographs show him, with Peter Jordan, manning a ‘Troops Out’ stall in Bristol in 1982. At 6’5″ and 17 stone he stuck out like a sore thumb.
The key defence witness, Kevin McQuillan, said he knew Daly for a number of years, socially and politically, through the Irish Republican Socialist Party. He described Daly as ‘a hard-liner on violence…. He came across as a person who espoused the maximum use of violence….. He used to create the impression he was active in the military sense.'(14)
Daly’s cover was finally blown when he gave evidence (behind a screen) at the Old Bailey trial of the INLA men, McMonagle and Hefferman. He is now being fitted-out with a new identity for his family and a handsome cash reward — ‘substantial financial compensation’ was the description on the first day of the trial. Daly admitted that he would receive 400,000 from the British state to enable him to resettle.(15)
The crowning irony was that in his evidence Daly said he was invited to join the Army Council of the INLA but declined on the grounds that his face was too well known in political circles.(16) We are entitled to question the competence of an organisation willing to use people such as Daly.
Notes
- Bristol Evening Post, 6 February, 1986, p. 54.
- The Guardian, 4 December, 1993.
- Nick Davies, the Observer, 9 February, 1986.
- Ibid.
- The Guardian, 5 December, 1993.
- The Guardian, 7 February, 1986.
- The Starry Plough, Belfast, July 1988, p. 2.
- Julie Harding, Bristol Evening Post, 17 December, 1993, p.3
- Bristol Evening Post, 6 February 1986, p. 54.
- Copies of letters held by author.
- In his evidence at the Old Bailey, Daly said he had written over fifty letters to Jordan when he was in prison and admitted having tried to ‘maintain [his] cover by offering to lead a campaign for him.’
- Leaflet in possession of the author. Published from ‘Box No. 45, Full Marks Bookshop, Stokes Croft, Bristol 1’. Undated. The leaflet, headed ‘The Peter Jordan Support Campaign’, did not mention that he had pleaded guilty but concentrated upon the severity of the sentence. It included this.
‘His unsatiable (sic) and altruistic effort to expose mans (sic) inhumanity to man, nationally and internationally was rewarded by the State in 1984, by his arrest under the PTA, an Act which has disrupted and destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people who dare to question Britain’s role in Ireland and which the Labour Party are committed to repeal.
‘Under the arbritary system of the PTA where some people are framed and others walk free, the ailing Peter Jordan, defender of human rights and personal freedom was subjected to intensive interrogation methods resulting in severe physical and mental pressure to sign a “confession”.’
Although Peter Jordan was obviously subjected to ‘intensive interrogation methods’ and heavy treatment when first arrested, he never subsequently complained that his confession was false and admitted privately that it was ‘a fair cop’.
Friends of Daly have assured me that his standard of literacy was so low that he could not have written this leaflet unaided. Words such as ‘arbitary’ and ‘altruistic’ would be unknown to him, and ‘unsatiable’ may have been put in as a literary cover.
- Evidence is held by the author, given to him by an attendee at the meeting.
- The Guardian, 16 December, 1993.
- The Guardian, 3 December 1993 p. 3. Cross-examined by counsel for the defence, Daly said that when he first began his career as an informer Special Branch began paying him ‘a pittance of 80 to 100 a month to cover travelling expenses and time he had to take off from work.’ In his witness statement, dated 19 May 1993, he wrote on page 1, ‘In the past I have received a salary from the Security Service for the work I have done.’ (Emphasis added.)
- The Guardian, 30 November, 1993.