Northern Bank robbery
Having taken family members of two bank officials hostage, an armed gang forced the workers to help them steal both used and unused pound sterling banknotes.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), the British government and the Taoiseach all claimed the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) was responsible.
[1] On the night of Sunday 19 December 2004, groups of armed men arrived at the homes of two employees of Northern Bank, one in Downpatrick, County Down, the other in Poleglass, west Belfast.
[2] Chris Ward was taken from his house in County Down and driven to Poleglass, where Kevin McMullan (his supervisor at the bank) had been tied up by men disguised as officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
[2] Having told the security staff they would be wheeling out rubbish for collection, they made four trips to move the trolleys from the basement to the bullion bay, where money was normally picked up and dropped off.
After Ward called the gang, a white van came to the headquarters and was permitted by security to enter the bay, where it took the two bank employees 15 minutes to load everything in.
[6] Although the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) initially refused to be drawn as to who might be involved, several commentators, including journalist Kevin Myers writing in The Daily Telegraph, quickly blamed the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).
[7] One senior police officer quoted in The Guardian newspaper said: "This operation required great expertise and coordination, probably more than the loyalist gangs possess".
[14] Commentators in the UK mainstream media speculated that the heist had been intended either to secure a pension fund for IRA active service members or to support Sinn Féin's electoral campaign.
[11] On 10 February 2005 (the day that the IMC report was released), houses near Beragh, County Tyrone, belonging to two brothers were searched in connection with the robbery but nothing was found.
[17]: 47 [18] In the Republic of Ireland, the Garda Síochána announced on 17 February that it had arrested seven people and recovered over £2 million, including £60,000 in Northern Bank notes, during raids in the Cork and Dublin areas, as part of investigations into money laundering.
[22] The financial adviser Ted Cunningham and his wife were arrested at their house in Farran, County Cork, after £2.3 million[b] was discovered hidden in compost.
[21][20] Phil Flynn, who was chairman of the Bank of Scotland (Ireland), a former Sinn Féin vice-president and an advisor to the Taoiseach, told the police that he was a non-executive director of Chesterton Finance, a company owned by Cunningham.
[3]: 162 The next day (18 February), Gardaí in Passage West, Cork, arrested a man who had been reported to be burning sterling banknotes in his back garden; he was released without charge then eventually convicted in 2009 regarding 200 rounds of ammunition for a Kalashnikov rifle which were found in his loft when the house was raided.
[28] On 12 October, Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy told a law enforcement conference in Dublin he was satisfied that the money recovered in Cork in February came from the Northern Bank robbery.
Hugh Orde defended the police action as "proportionate"; Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew claimed the raids were "part of a political stunt".
[31] The man from Coalisland was charged with making false statements to police in relation to a white Ford Transit van allegedly used in the robbery.
[35] On 2 December, the police raided Casement Park, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) stadium and social club in west Belfast, because Ward worked there part-time.
The prosecution case was based on his actions in the days preceding and during the raid, a suspicious work rota and discrepancies in his original statements to police.
By the end of 2004, the different parties in the Northern Ireland peace process were reaching agreement, but at a meeting on 8 December at which Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were present, the Sinn Féin representatives refused to promise that the Provisional IRA would stop its criminal activity.
Less than two weeks later, the Northern Bank robbery again inflamed tensions since despite the denials of Sinn Féin, the IRA was blamed by Ahern and Blair for the heist.
[9][47] In 2005, the UK Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Paul Murphy remarked "I cannot hide my own judgment that the impact is deeply damaging".
[49] Alongside the murder of Robert McCartney in January 2005, the robbery caused the US government to block fund-raising for Sinn Féin in the United States (the ban was dropped in November 2005).
[17] When Adams denied that the IRA were involved in any way, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) announced it could not share power with Sinn Féin any longer and withdrew from the coalition governing Northern Ireland.
[50][51] The UUP Member of Parliament David Burnside accused Bobby Storey under parliamentary privilege in the House of Commons of being the IRA's intelligence chief and the planner of the Northern Bank robbery.
[55][56] The former head of the Assets Recovery Agency commented in 2014 that he believed the IRA were still struggling to launder some of the money taken in the heist owing to the size of the haul.
