Stacking Up - Village Magazine

December - January 2017 1 1

ERTIE AHERN made a sensible and probably decisive

intervention in the controversy surrounding Gerry

Adams and the killing of senior prison officer, Brian

Stack, which dominated the headlines and political

discourse during the first week of December.

The resurrection of a story involving the shooting of Stack as

he left a boxing match in Dublin’s National Stadium in 1983 was

prompted by the leak of an email sent by Adams to the Garda

Commissioner, NóirIn O Sullivan, during the final days of the

general election earlier this year. The email included the names

of four people, including Sinn Féin TDs Martin Ferris and Dessie

Ellis, said to have possibly useful information pertaining to the

death of Stack eighteen months after the attack.

The names, according to Adams, were given to him by Brian’s

son, Austin Stack, during his encounters in 2013 with the Sinn

Féin leader which culminated in a trip in a van with blacked-out

windows to a rendezvous with a senior IRA figure in a house

north of the border in August of that year. During the meeting

Stack and his brother, Oliver, were given a written statement

confirming that members of the IRA had carried out the “unau-

thorised action” and that one person had been “disciplined” for

his role in the attack.

The Stack family said that they were satisfied

that the meeting had led to some closure in their

30-year-long quest for the truth about their

father’s murder. That was until the general elec-

tion campaign when Austin Stack said that two

senior Sinn Féin politicians were among those

involved in his father’s killing. He had provided

the information to Fianna Fáil leader, Micheál

Martin, who did not waste the opportunity to

damage Sinn Féin and its leader during the latter

stages of the campaign.

This prompted Adams to write the email to the

Garda Commissioner with the names he claims had been given

to him by Austin Stack during their discussions between 2011

and 2013. He did not describe them as suspects and discussed

the fact that he was sending on the names with three of those

named before posting the email. The fourth was not contactable,

Unrehabilitated Bertie Ahern

understands Gerry Adams’

obligations of conﬁdentiality

prevent him going further

with family of prison ofﬁcer

killed by IRA

by Frank Connolly

The Stack family were

satisﬁed that the

meeting had led to

some closure about

their father’s murder.

That was until the

general election

Stacking Up

1 2 December - January 2017

he said. Stack has denied providing the names

to Adams which in turn raises the bizarre spec

tacle of a party leader hanging two prominent

allies out to dry for no logical reason.

After Adams made a statement in the Dáil on

Wednesday 7 December, Fine Gael TD, Alan Far

rell used a point of order request to name Ferris

and Ellis based on a copy of the email provided

to him by sources whom he did not disclose. He

claimed, somewhat puzzlingly and after being

accused of breaching Dáil privilege, that he only

revealed the names in order to allow his parlia

mentary colleagues the option of clearing their

names of any association with the Stack

killing.

Ferris and Ellis were quickly on their feet to do

just that and denied any involvement while the

Kerry TD confirmed that he had been questioned

by gardai in 2013, presumably on the back of the

information Garda sources discussed with

Stack, and had nothing to answer for.

As the story moved along, a full Claire Byrne

RTE radio show on a Saturday was devoted to the

controversy with Independent Newspapers

reporter, Niall O’Connor, robustly denying that

he had fed the leaked emailed information to Far-

rell. Instead he focused, as many others hostile

to Sinn Féin have done, on getting Adams to

name the driver of the van in which the Stacks

were transported and the IRA man they had met.

On the same programme Sinn Féin TD, Peadar

Tóibín, warned that the manner in which the

issue had been politicised by some politicians

and media outlets would make it more difficult

for other victims of the conflict in the North to get

information concerning their deceased loved

ones from Republican ‘combatants’ using Sinn

Féin mediators like Adams.

He also noted that he had sought meetings

with Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, on behalf of con-

stituents whose family were killed in County

Armagh during the 1970s by the notorious Glen-

nane gang which is now known to have included

and been directed by agents of the British army

and other state security forces. He pointed out

that neither Fine Gael nor Fianna Fáil have been

exercised over the search for closure by many

victims of British state and loyalist forces during

the conflict and had done little or nothing to

pursue the information-retrieval and truth pro-

cess negotiated in the Stormont House and Fresh

Start agreements signed up to by both last year.

As Ahern pointed out, it is understandable

why Adams could not go any further than the

assistance he gave the Stack family, and many

others over the years, and claimed that he had

proposed a peace and truth commission “16 or

17 years ago” but that “the kite fell flat”.

Like the constituency motion by his friends in

Dublin North Central to bring him back into the

party fold (without his knowledge of course),

Ahern’s recent attempts to rehabilitate himself

is as welcome as Christmas is to turkeys for

Micheál Martin, who immediately threw a bucket

of cold water on the proposal.

Ahern did himself no favours when he told a

Sindo reporter whom he just happened to

encounter in the Skylon hotel that he still refuses

to accept the findings of the Mahon report, which

led to his leaving the party in 2012. He intimated

that friends of his, including so called ‘dig out’

merchants Des Richardson who was with him in

the hotel, and publican Charlie Chawke had

since been vindicated with findings against them

removed from the tribunal’s record.

In fact, a finding against Richardson was

removed after the tribunal conceded that he had

not been given the opportunity to rebut details

of a questionable transaction made through a

bank account under his control in the late 1990s,

while Chawke also successfully challenged the

tribunal on a different matter.

The High Court quashed a finding of non coop-

eration agaist Chawke on the basis that he had

not been provided in advance of publication with

the tribunal's adverse findings against him.

However, the tribunal stands over its claim

that the so-called “dig outs” never happened

and are not an acceptable explanation for the

movement of large amounts of money into vari-

ous accounts controlled by Ahern between 1993

and 1995 when he was finance minister, or the

circumstances surrounding his acquisition of a

house, or indeed the substantial amounts of

Sterling found in his accounts, some of which he

said was won on the horses.

Sometimes, for some people, the less said the

better.

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