Irish government warned but failed to make joining the Islamic State a criminal offence
Lisa Smith, a Muslim convert and suspected supporter of ISIS who travelled to Syria with her husband says she wants to come home now that ISIS are defeated. In an interview with the Irish Mail on Sunday's Norma Costello, the Dundalk mother of a two year old child says she made a mistake travelling to the Islamic State and that she didn't fight for ISIS.
Two weeks ago, the Tánaiste Simon Coveney said Ireland has a responsibility towards its citizens and will try to bring her home.
Michael C. Murphy a retired Lieutenant Colonel and former Deputy Director of Military Intelligence talked to RTÉ's Morning Ireland about the news. He read the interview with Lisa Smith and believed it revealed some very interesting things.
"One of them, it says she ran with the crowd. Who are the crowd? Are there other people in Ireland who left at the same time or did she leave individually at that time? It is like as if somebody has done something wrong and is trying to get out of the fact that they did something wrong and it would be very difficult to prove what they did wrong."
"This government was advised to bring in a law to make it illegal to travel to ISIS territory because you could have conducted any atrocity in Syria and we wouldn't have anybody there to give evidence in a court so therefor you could conduct some of the most vile attacks against human beings and come home here and the state can do nothing against you and that was a failure of the government to bring proper laws in place to make sure that something like this couldn't happen."
"We have no choice in allowing Lisa Smith back into this country. She found her way there. I'm sure she can find her way back here. Where's her passport? She never said what happened to her passport...because I believe when you went to an ISIS territory, you handed over your passport. You took out citizenship of the caliphate...so there's a lot of questions here."
"When the government says they are going to carry out a threat assessment — a threat assesment should be carried out before anybody comes back into this country, not after. So it's a bit late."
Morning Ireland's Gavin Jennings put it to Murphy that by travelling to Syria Lisa Smith hadn't comitted anything illegal.
Murphy agreed but said that the government were advised to make it illegal.
"In fact there was a European directive in 2017 which saying [sic] travelling to ISIS controlled territory should be made a crime, but it's not. We never went down that road and it's like as if they're trying to make a security policy on the back of an envelope. At some state it's going to come back and hit you."
"We have know this problem going back to 2013. Where was the plan for stopping Irish people from — you see people in the United Kingdom being convicted for wanting to travel to ISIS controlled territory and actually you're imprisoned — we had no law to do the exact same thing here and then they go there and we have no law to convict them when they come back."
Murphy was asked what will happen once Lisa returns to Ireland:
"It's possibly she will be interviewed by the guards, and unless she says something incriminating against herself, it's unlikely anything will happen to her and she'll be released onto our streets as will anybody else who might come back and then they have to be kept under surveillance."
"The 7/7 bombings happened because MI5 just missed one meeting and discarded somebody and as a result they ended up with 7/7. To do surveillance on somebody, it's a 24/7 job, seven days week, 360 days a year."
Asked whether this meant someone from the gardaí or the army had to follow her all the time, he replied that if they want to keep the citizens of this country safe, then it did.
"In the cases in France, they took off the surveillance of people who said had been deradicalised, and then went back and gave us the Bataclan."
Broadcast: Morning Ireland | RTÉ | 08 Apr 2019
https://www.invidio.us/channel/UCgzyycFR6PEv-B90rAiFsQg
