[5] When Gardaí Paul Firth and Richard Fallon arrived, without firearms to defend themselves, on the scene in their patrol car, the police had been alerted that something was wrong at the location by the gang's cutting off the bank branch's telephone wires.
Fallon's body was accorded by the Irish Government a state funeral, with up to 1000 Garda officers attending its course, and was buried at the Saints Peter & Paul Cemetery, at Balgriffin in North Dublin.
The rumours further stated that this was carried out in order to cover up collusion between highly placed people within the Government, and the Dublin political class, who were involved in facilitating the illegal passage of fire-arms through the Irish Republic into Ulster to equip Irish Republican paramilitary groups that were forming there in the midst of the communal violence that had broken out in 1969, and that the firearms used in the murder of Garda Fallon could potentially be traced to an origin that would reveal such activity.
[11] Three alleged members of Saor Éire, Patrick Francis Keane (arrested and extradited to the Republic of Ireland for the trial from Ulster by the British Government), and John ("Sean") Morrissey and Joseph Dillon (both apprehended in Dublin by the Garda using automatic fire from a Tommy Gun to capture them), were subsequently charged with the murder and bank robbery, standing trial before a jury in 1971 and 1972 at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin, but they were found not guilty.
[14] The sons of Garda Fallon in later years also raised concerns that there had been some government involvement in assisting the men who murdered their father to elude justice, and politically campaigned on the issue through the media.
[15][16] In July 2001 Des O'Malley publicly stated in the Dail that there were grounds to believe that the gun that was used to murder Garda Fallon in 1970 had been part of an arms shipment that had been previously illegally passed through Irish state territory, and that senior Garda officers were of the view that a prominent political figure in the Dublin political order was associated with the movement of arms in question.