Bernard Lynch serves as assistant to his junior minister wife, but also served a year behind bars: The minister, the husband in a State job and a murder conviction that  was quashed on appeal

By Michael O'farrell
Updated: 20:00 EST, 18 June 2011

She is the flame-haired Labour minister who – as well as being responsible for our under-fire care system – has courted controversy by appointing her husband as her personal assistant, with his wages paid by the taxpayer.

However, an even more extraordinary ­controversy lurks in the background of the wife-and-husband team of Kathleen and Bernard Lynch: one which led to Mr Lynch being jailed for a year for a machine-gun murder during a republican feud, before being acquitted on appeal.

And while Mrs Lynch has dominated our screens in her role as Minister of State for Disability, we can reveal how the family of 25-year-old murder victim Larry White were shocked to see the name of Bernard Lynch back in the national news some 35 years after he walked free from jail when his murder conviction was quashed.

The extraordinary saga began in 1975, when Larry White was a member of republican splinter group Saor Éire. He fell out with Official Sinn Féin – one of many splits between republican factions that occurred during the period.

He did not suspect, however, that his position would cost him his life.
Mr White was killed in a hail of bullets as he was walking home at midnight on June 10, 1975, in Cork city. The 25-year-old didn’t stand a chance: he had been hit 12 times, mostly in the head.

‘You can take that,’ the gunman was heard to say before he made his getaway.

Mr White’s sister Mary remembers him as a popular and friendly character who stood up for the underdog, spoke Irish and played the accordion and bodhrán.

‘He had a great sense of justice, a great sense of fairness,’ she said. ‘He was a great and dependable voluntary worker. His motivation was always to do something just, to benefit others and to help people. He wasn’t motivated by any sense of materialism at all. I would say that was absent from him.

‘I would say he was the complete antithesis of the people who surrounded him that night and took his life in such an appalling and cowardly manner.
‘He was alone that night,’ she explained. ‘He had parted from some friends and neighbours and when he turned into Mount Eden Road there was a gang skulking there in the dark. They surrounded him.’

In the Garda investigation that followed, four men were arrested and charged.

Apart from Bernard Lynch, they were David O’Donnell, 21, of Rosewood Estate, Ballincollig, Co. Cork and Leeson Street, Belfast; Cornelius Finbar Doyle, 25, Nun’s Walk, Co. Cork; and Bartholomew Madden, 34, Owenacurra Court, Togher, Co. Cork.

During the trial, three statements – admitted as evidence by the Special Criminal Court – were crucial. Between them the statements put Bernard Lynch at the heart of the murder plot, and at one point even identified him as the gunman.

The most critical of those statements, both in the trial and the appeal, was given by co-accused Bartholomew Madden.

‘I want to tell the truth about what I know about the killing of Larry White,’ the statement reads.

It claimed that Madden met Lynch and another of the four accused men, David O’Donnell, on the night of the murder.

‘I knew they were going to get the gun and do the job on Larry White,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know where the gun was but it was an M3 “grease” sub­machine gun.’

Madden stated that he knew O’Donnell was the driver and that Lynch was the gunman.

Madden’s statement recounts a discussion after the shooting with Lynch, who he said described to him what had happened: ‘He saw Larry White coming. He let White come close. White saw him and threw something at Lynch, either a bottle or a can.’

According to the statement, Lynch then fired on Mr White and his body half turned and fell on the footpath with his head on the road. Lynch told Madden that he reckoned he fired 17 or 18 rounds but that he missed with some of them, the statement said.

The evidence was controversial from the start. All four men claimed their statements were made as a result of being beaten and badly treated by gardaí during their 48 hours in custody, claims rejected by the court.

After Madden’s statement, a second was read out in court that portrayed Lynch as being involved in the murder.

It was given by another of the four suspects, Cornelius Finbar Doyle, while in Garda custody.

Doyle confirmed that he was a member of Official Sinn Féin, and described how Lynch had asked him to acquire the car used in the murder.

‘His actual words were, could I knock a car for him and have it in Cork for the weekend,’ his statement said.

Doyle stole the car, a white Cortina, and drove it to Bernard Lynch’s workplace, where Lynch told him he had fake licence plates for it. He also said he later heard Madden and O’Donnell discuss the feasibility of ‘getting’ Larry White. Whatever was going to happen it was going to be ‘something of consequence and serious’ for the Whites, the statement said.

The court was told that Madden handed him a book of parking discs, telling him to wipe the fingerprints from them, but he failed to do so. When gardaí found the car, they recovered seven fingerprints belonging to O’Donnell and three belonging to Doyle.

A third statement that implicated Lynch was given to gardaí by a man named Philip Dorney.

But when it came to giving evidence in court, Dorney refused to repeat his testimony, saying he feared for the safety of his family.

‘I’m not saying yes or no,’ he repeated in answer to all questions about it during the trial.

But the statement was read out by gardaí to the court. It said that on the night of the murder, Dorney was approached by Lynch and O’Donnell. They told him that they were going to teach Larry White a lesson.

Dorney’s statement claimed he was recruited to be the getaway driver. He was instructed to drive to a location and pick up Lynch and O’Donnell in his van.

He did, and found them in a white Cortina, he told gardaí. The court heard that he saw Lynch throw a duffel bag into the front of the van. He was wearing a wig, which he removed with plastic gloves and put into the bag, telling Dorney to get rid of it.

Dorney said that at this time he saw something that looked like a gun in the bag and then realised that something more than a beating had taken place. He also stated that Lynch had told him: ‘We (either) got him or fixed him.’

In addition to this statement, Dorney led gardaí to a silencer allegedly used in the killing, which was hidden beside a stretch of road.

A Garda Technical Bureau officer told the court that the silencer had been used to fire the rounds recovered from the murder scene.

After 32 days, the Special Criminal Court found all four men guilty. It ruled that ‘all four had played a part in the secret conspiracy which led to the murder of Larry White’.

But in a dramatic twist, two of the men were later acquitted. The key statement that led to the conviction of Lynch – that made by Bartholomew Madden – had been taken after his legal detention period had expired.
Gardaí began taking the voluntary statement under caution at 6.40am, just 35 minutes before the 48-hour legal period of detention was due to elapse.

By the time they’d finished it was 9am – an hour and three quarters after it had expired.

The appeal judge ruled that the statement was inadmissable. And while there were grounds for suspecting that Lynch knew a stolen car was going to be used for a crime of serious violence, the judge decided this was not proof of ­participation in the crime, or of murder.

Acknowledging the decision might be controversial, the judge said: ‘It is much better that a guilty individual should escape punishment than that a court of justice should put aside a vital, fundamental principle of law to secure his conviction.’

Madden and Lynch were duly released on November 16, 1976.

The Whites did not expect to see him in the public eye again, so were shocked to hear that he is Mrs Lynch’s assistant. While the courts have declared that he is entirely innocent of the murder of Larry White, it would not be hard to understand why they would be upset at the notion that his wife appointed him to such a plum role, for which they, like every other taxpayer, are footing the bill.

‘It’s really outrageous,’ Mary White said of the nepotism.

‘It wouldn’t be tolerated in South America. The position we are faced with is that politicians are able to appoint people to top-level positions. This type of thing is embedded in the institutions in Ireland, These people are appointed because of political patronage and cronyism.’

Mr and Mrs Lynch declined to comment on his appointment, the events of 1975 or the comments of the White family.