POPULAR DONEGAL COUNCILLOR ASSASSINATED BY UDA | TWENTY YEARS ON, THE QUEST FOR ANSWERS CONTINUES

Who was behind the murder of Eddie Fullerton?

The family of murdered Donegal Sinn Féin Councillor Eddie Fullerton: Marina McLaughlin, Amanda Fullerton, Johnny Fullerton, wife Diana Fullerton, Eddie Fullerton and Anita Fullerton outside Government Buildings for a meeting with Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in 2006

ON MAY 25th, the 20th anniversary of the UDA murder in his Donegal home of Councillor Eddie Fullerton, Eddie’s family are expected to make a major statement in their quest to uncover the truth about who was behind the assassination of one of the most prominent and popular Sinn Féin figures of the 1970s and 1980s.
This is how events unfolded the night Eddie Fullerton was murdered.
At approximately 1am on the morning of Saturday 25th May 1991, Eddie returned from meetings and a social event to his home in Buncrana, where he lived with his wife, Diana. He and his wife had been living alone for the previous seven weeks as their youngest son, Edward Junior, had gone to work in England.
Diana made some supper for her husband and went to bed at about 1:15am. She fell asleep and it would appear that Eddie went up afterwards.
At about 2:10am, Diana Fullerton was awoken by her husband shouting, “What’s that, what’s that?” and she heard very loud banging noises coming from downstairs (this was the attackers breaking in through the hall door with a sledgehammer). She saw her husband putting on his trousers and going to the door of the bedroom, out on to the landing. She had gone to a wardrobe to get a coat.
She remembers hearing three cracking noises and a young male voice saying, “Come on, come on!” and then two more cracking noises and then the noise of more than one person running on the stairs.
Mrs Fullerton found the body of her husband lying in the landing outside the bedroom door, his feet lying towards the bedroom door opposite their bedroom. He had been fatally shot six times.
Diana raised the alarm. She went to the house of a neighbour and they phoned the Garda, who arrived within minutes.
Pádraig Mac Lochlainn, as a Donegal councillor following in Eddie’s footsteps, and others, including Aengus Ó Snodaigh TD, over the years since have highlighted a number of issues about the killing of Eddie Fullerton..
Pádraig noted: “Like virtually all attacks claimed or carried out by unionist paramilitaries in this jurisdiction, the murder of Eddie Fullerton could not have been carried out without collusion from British forces.”
And there are other circumstances that require a full investigation and answers:

44    The UFF gang certainly had detailed local knowledge - did they have local assistance?
44    The assassins felt comfortable enough to hold a family in their house, one mile from Eddie’s home, for three hours in advance of the attack
44    The assassins entered and left the Fullerton home in the early hours of the morning with ease.
44    They were obviously thoroughly familiar with the complex rural road network in the area and made their getaway without a hitch.

So who was behind this ruthlessly efficient and confident UDA gang?
Since Eddie’s death, there have been serious questions raised about collusion between British military and intelligence agencies with the UDA in the cross-border attack, the role of the Garda beforehand and the flawed investigation that followed.
It was not until 2009– 18 years after the murder of the Buncrana councillor– that two suspects were questioned by the PSNI. They were later released without charge.
Revelations about corrupt practices among gardaí in Donegal, highlighted by the Morris Tribunal, have added to campaigners’ concerns about the case. One of the gardaí who faced very serious allegations at the Morris Tribunal was centrally involved in the investigation of the murder of Eddie Fullerton.
The Fullerton family has long called for an independent public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Eddie’s death.
They are still waiting for a satisfactory conclusion.

TV probe revealed ‘shocking new evidence’

ON February 19th 2005, a TG4 TV investigation into the murder of Eddie Fullerton revealed “shocking new evidence”, the Daily Ireland newspaper reported.
Daily Ireland wrote:

"Councillor Fullerton (56), a highly-respected and popular figure throughout Donegal, was gunned down by a loyalist death squad in his home on May 25th 1991.
Many serious questions have never been answered about how the loyalist killers managed to infiltrate and subsequently flee the sleepy seaside area around Buncrana before easily making their escape back across the border and into the North.
However, tonight’s documentary discloses a range of information including the existence of a compelling new witness, the concerns of Councillor Fullerton’s family about the nature of the Garda investigation, the seizure by the Garda of some of Councillor Fullerton’s private papers just hours after the killing, and the discovery of Councillor Fullerton’s details on security montages leaked by the British Crown forces.
All of the new evidence - which has prompted a top-level Garda review of the original investigation - calls into question the role of the Donegal Garda and their RUC counterparts in Derry in relation to the incident.
It has emerged that a previously unknown witness in the Culmore area of Derry saw three men getting into an RUC vehicle shortly after the assassination.
The significance of this sighting is that previous official accounts suggested the killers had travelled to Culmore before making their way by motorised-dinghy across Lough Foyle to Magilligan in north Derry.
The allegation that the RUC had any involvement in assisting the death squad once again raises the prospect of collusion in the killing.
The new witness is described by programme-makers as “very credible and highly reputable”. He was so concerned about the incident that he made a formal statement to the RUC.
It is claimed that two days later - in a highly unusual step - the RUC called to the witness’s home and invited him outside to sit in a squad car that contained a member of the Garda and a member of the RUC.
According to the witness, both officers only seemed interested in whether or not he could identify the three people who had got into the RUC car on the night of Councillor Fullerton’s assassination.
Following the well-documented discovery of high level corruption within the Donegal Garda, these latest allegations around Councillor Fullerton’s killing will heap more pressure on the force.
Although the belief that the RUC had a hand in the assassination is widely held throughout nationalist areas in Derry and Donegal, the revelations of the new witness are bound to strengthen calls by Councillor Fullerton’s family for a full inquiry.
Tonight’s documentary has been produced by Scun Scan films in co-operation with the family of Eddie Fullerton, and the research was conducted by one of Ireland’s leading investigative journalists, Frank Connolly.
Speaking to Daily Ireland yesterday, producer/director Dónal Ó Maolfabhail described Councillor Fullerton’s killing as “the political assassination of an elected representative”.
He said that the documentary, entitled ‘Fullerton’, exposes “alarming new evidence about the case”.

Eddie Fullerton: What a man – What a legacy

BY PÁDRAIG Mac LOCHLAINN
TD for Donegal North-East

ON WEDNESDAY 25th May, 20 years will have passed since the assassination of Sinn Féin Councillor Eddie Fullerton.
He was killed as part of a campaign of targeted assassinations in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the British state in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries of Sinn Féin elected representatives, Sinn Féin members, unarmed IRA Volunteers, human rights lawyers, and GAA officials.
This campaign had the clear objective of sapping the morale of the nationalist and republican community. What it actually achieved was an emboldening of the determination of those of us seeking change and confronting injustice.
Every funeral served to strengthen our resolve.
In Donegal, after we buried Eddie, we dedicated ourselves to build on the foundations of his work and the lessons he had taught us.
He had demonstrated that in order to build republicanism within our communities, we had to first work hard on their behalf in order to get their attention. Where this approach has been followed across the island, Sinn Féin has advanced.
Today, Sinn Féin is the largest political party in Donegal with two TDs, ten councillors, and an Udarás member. When we won the Dáil seat in Donegal North-East, we dedicated our victory to Eddie.
Eddie was a remarkable human being. He was a real people’s person with great charisma and natural empathy. He was also very intelligent and an advocate for those with ideas ‘outside the box’. I have learned in my time as a public representative that one of our most important responsibilities is to listen and Eddie, the consummate conversationalist, always left people feeling that their opinions were valued.
He would sell An Phoblachts in the pubs of Inishowen and outside the local Masses and bingo halls every Saturday night and Sunday morning to be amongst his people but also deliberately to break the censorship agenda of Section 31. How many public representatives would make that type of personal sacrifice?
Many years after his death, I was privileged to look through one of his notebooks and marvelled at the detail and professionalism of the representation notes taken while on one of his An Phoblacht rounds.
But he wasn’t just about the minutiae of the local. Eddie was a visionary who saw the bigger picture too. Long before Rio and Copenhagen, Eddie campaigned on environmental issues and called for a global conference.
His biggest achievement, though, is the Eddie Fullerton Dam and Reservoir, five miles from Buncrana. The supply of water to Inishowen and “the Lagan Desert” area of east Donegal was a major problem that required a solution and Eddie’s ability to listen and then advocate led to the solution.
After consulting with local farmers, he championed the construction of a dam at the remote illies area to capture the water from a network of streams snaking their way from nearby hills and been lost to the sea after joining the Crana River.
When he first raised the idea, it was laughed at by some of the local political opponents and cynics. Nobody is laughing today and there can be no prouder legacy than the provision of sustainable, safe, clean water to so many of his people.
Eddie Fullerton, the listener, the warm-hearted advocate, the deeply courageous fighter, the tireless worker, the visionary.
What a man. What a legacy.