IF you use Google Earth to look at Ballybinaby and its environs in south Armagh where the "good republican" (as Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams described Thomas 'Slab' Murphy) lives, you will see a countryside dotted with large sheds, many with a dozen or more trucks parked in their yards.

Once the home of small farmers scraping a living on the poor soil of south Armagh, the area has now become the personal fiefdom of Murphy, who has overseen its growth into a revenue black hole where wholesale smuggling and fuel laundering has created a part of Ireland which now deserves its once derided Fleet Street tag of "bandit country".

Ask the family or friends of the young local man, Paul Quinn, who was beaten to death with iron bars in October last year, how they feel about living under the weight of the south Armagh IRA.

He was murdered because he had the temerity to confront one of Murphy's lieutenants who had insulted Quinn's younger sister.

No independent witness has come forward to further the case against the 12 main suspects who cornered Quinn and two friends in a shed near Hackballscross and beat him to death.

They are too afraid.

The oppression of people living in south Armagh is the same as that felt by Neopolitan Italians living under the yoke of the Camorra mafiosi. Stand up to them and they will kill you, or one of your family.

The south Armagh "brigade" who remained loyal to Murphy have become millionaires through the sharing of the millions of euros and sterling earned through the illicit trade that passes through the area. Beside the big sheds or on sites bought for their hillside views the local "good republicans" have built mansions -- many with the gauche neo-classical ornamenture. Their wives drive top-of-the range 4X4s to do their shopping in that very English retail institution, Sainsburys in Newry, as every good Irish republican should.

In what may yet turn out to be an important moment in modern Irish history, last Friday, the High Court in Dublin and Manchester Crown Court found that the Good Republican was, in fact, a common criminal.

In Manchester, lawyers for Slab Murphy informed the court that he has agreed to hand over nine houses in the Trafford and Stretford areas of the city as part payment of a settlement of £1m (€1.28m), having agreed that the properties were criminal assets. The court heard the houses, in somewhat undesirable areas of Manchester, are worth in total only around £445,000 (€572,000).

The houses in Manchester were identified during two years of investigation involving the Criminal Assets Bureau and its counterpart, the Assets Recovery Agency in the UK, prior to raids at Murphy's farm (along with its large sheds and busy yard) at Ballybinaby, straddling the Louth-Armagh border in March 2006.

The discoveries during the raid on Murphy's farm surprised investigators from both the gardai and PSNI. They had expected to find relatively little evidence or assets of crime about the place. Instead they found some 20 bin bags containing cash, cheques, documents, two laptops and contraband. The sterling and euro cash, cheques and money orders totalled €630,000. For a non-smoking teetotaller, Murphy may have found it hard to explain why he had 30,000 cigarettes in one of his sheds. The bachelor could also have had no explanations as to why he needed 8,000 litres of diesel to run the machinery on his 70-acre farm.

The hearings in Dublin and Manchester last Friday were limited to deciding whether or not the assets seized in the simultaneous raids in England and Ireland were criminal assets under the terms of the 1997 Proceeds of Crime Act and its legal counterpart in the UK. Both courts so found. Murphy still faces trial for tax evasion.

At the time of the raids, RTE's Tommy Gorman asked the Sinn Fein president what he thought of Slab Murphy and the various claims about his involvement in smuggling and crime. Adams replied: "Tom Murphy is not a criminal. He's a good republican. I read his statement after the Manchester raids. I believe what he says. He's also, and very importantly, a key supporter of the Sinn Fein peace strategy and has been for a very long time." The property, cash and other items referred to in Friday's hearings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the earnings made by the IRA in south Armagh, gardai and English police believe.

The English are understood to be looking at somewhere in the region of 250 properties across England, including apartments in top addresses in London. The residential properties were long-term, low-key investments. The Manchester properties are low-value but reasonably solid long-term investments.

An apartment identified in Knightsbridge in London was typical of the unobtrusive type of investments being made. Its market value was low because it had a long-term ageing tenant on a fixed rent. The buyer would have to wait for the woman's death to recoup a profit on its re-sale or a new lease. The property investments in England were not for profit but good, safe way of laundering tens of millions of euros/pounds made from crime in south Armagh.

The core of the south Armagh business is cigarette and fuel smuggling. The actual IRA members themselves are no longer hands-on, hiring desperate eastern Europeans to drive lorries and do the heavy work. Most of the diesel entering the area is now bought legitimately from suppliers in Dublin Port and elsewhere with VAT paid.

The dye in the agricultural diesel bought in the Republic is "washed" using highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals and then resold in the North and Britain. The by-product toxic sludge is dumped on their side of the Border, creating an environmental nightmare for local councils who are spending millions a year shipping the waste out to specialist processing plants in Germany.

The comparisons with the Camorra in Italy are sometimes striking. They too have turned part of the Naples regions into an ecological disaster by dumping toxic waste, including the same chemicals used to wash the diesel in south Armagh.

Over the past two decades Sinn Fein and other politicians in the Border area have fulminated about clusters of cancers which they have attributed to the Sellafield nuclear plant across the Irish Sea. The real cause may be closer to home, closer to the work of the good republicans around Slab Murphy.

Despite his reputation as a major IRA figure, Murphy has actually been low down in interest levels of the garda Special Branch. One former senior figure described him as having a purely "fund-raising" role in the organisation. He was, however, highly capable in this role and, with no obvious sign of self-enrichment, created the wealth which helped fuel the IRA's terrorism into the mid-1990s.

He was never prosecuted for any serious offence. He was found to have visited Greece, former Yugoslavia and the US on at least one false passport. That passport, in the name of an unwitting elderly neighbour and stolen from the Embassy in London was signed by a corrupt garda who was subsequently prosecuted and sacked.

Murphy blew his own low profile in the early 1990s when he took a failed libel action, one of a series he had intended to pursue against newspapers that had named him as a senior IRA man. One of the witnesses that gave testimony about his position and role in the IRA subsequently turned up dead on a road outside Newry, Co Down in 1999.

Eamon Collins, himself a former IRA killer, was so badly beaten that one of the police officers who examined the scene commented to colleagues that his remains looked as though they had fallen from an airplane.

- Jim Cusack