Provo contact tried to warn reporter ceasefire was ending, however he couldn’t take his name
The RTE reporter died final Monday aged 74 after being recognized with motor neurone illness in 2021.
Knowing he confronted sure loss of life, he set about recording important moments in his life, turning his recollections into his Time and Tide memoir.
During his time as a reporter, Charlie constructed robust working relationships together with his sources, together with with an IRA contact identified solely as ‘Brendan’.
So trusted was the reporter that he was one of many few instructed forward of time of the IRA’s 1994 ceasefire, however when the identical man tried to ship him advance warning of the London bomb, issues went flawed.
Damage brought on by the Canary Wharf bomb
Charlie wrote: “The collapse of the ceasefire just 18 months later was one of the worst days of my reporting career.
“It was Friday, February 9, 1996, and I had left the newsroom unusually early to go home to try to fight a heavy head cold. My mobile phone battery had gone down.
“I had been the IRA’s sole contact in RTE since 1993. It was RTE’s future northern editor Tommie Gorman who did the dangerous and risky work of setting up my contact with Brendan.
“But on that Friday evening in February 1996, vital time was lost as my newsroom bosses tried to contact me to say that Brendan had rung my office extension and had said that he needed me to ring him urgently because the IRA had decided ‘with great reluctance’ to end its ceasefire.
“I had no quick way of contacting Brendan when my bosses alerted me on my home landline and said that he had used a codename, Eksund, that I knew to be authentic.
“I wasted more time trying to reach senior Sinn Fein members before I drove in panic to the house of a leading republican figure in Dublin.
“Just as I arrived at the house, Brendan got through on my recharged mobile phone.
“He asked me why RTE had not broadcast the IRA statement. I said my bosses could not be sure that it was authentic. ‘It’s for real, Charlie’, he said. ‘You can go with it’.
“I raced back to RTE and was ushered into the broadcast studio where the Six-One News was coming to a close. I told the programme anchor Bryan Dobson on air that the IRA ceasefire was over.
“A few minutes later, a huge IRA bomb exploded at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands, killing two men, Inan Bashir and John Jeffries, and causing millions of pounds worth of damage to surrounding buildings.
“I’m still haunted by the thought that those men might still be alive had I been at my desk and had my mobile phone been even five per cent charged when my IRA contact tried to talk to me more than an hour earlier.
“I had been the only person that the IRA had sought to contact to announce the end of the ceasefire.”
Charlie Bird (Photo by Maxwells)
Charlie stated one in all “the most significant and symbolic broadcasts of my career” was from the Garden of Remembrance when “800 years of Anglo-Irish conflicts gave way to reconciliation and mutual recognition when Queen Elizabeth spoke there in May 2011”.
He continued: “It was close to the Garden of Remembrance in August 1994 that my first IRA contact, a man calling himself ‘Brendan’, gave me, through an intermediary, who I still dare not name, a small piece of paper and a miniature dictaphone cassette recording of the IRA’s announcement of its first historic ceasefire of the era called the Troubles.
“Even though the IRA statement was typewritten, my contact, had demanded that both it and the cassette tape should be destroyed after use.
“The statement, one of only three, had been written in Long Kesh prison and smuggled out.
“The whereabouts of the other two copies are unknown.
“The tape recording was of a woman’s voice reciting the statement against the background noise of a hairdryer — an IRA precaution to make it harder to trace where or when the tape had been recorded.
“I quietly defied Brendan and held onto the statement and the audio tape because I recognised their historic significance.
“They are among the items relating to the peace process that I have donated to the National Museum of Ireland.”
Charlie Bird, his spouse Claire Mould and their canine Tiger (Photo by Colin Keegan/Collins Dublin)
