Almost all of the main players in the Arms Trial are deceased or retired from active public life. However, the events produced a division within Fianna Fáil, and reflected a division in society in the Republic over how to respond to the renewed violence in the North that persisted through three decades.
The two sides of the division within Fianna Fáil were personified in subsequent years by Mr Charles Haughey and Mr Desmond O'Malley.
Sectarian violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s. In 1970 a shipment of arms intended for newly formed defence committees in the North was intercepted at Dublin Airport.
An army intelligence officer, Capt James Kelly; two Cabinet ministers, Mr Charles Haughey and Mr Niall Blaney; Belfast Republican, Mr John Kelly; and arms dealer Mr Albert Luykx were charged with plotting to import arms illegally.
The prosecution case was that Capt Kelly and the two ministers had acted in concert and in secret to arm Northern nationalists, and that they had done so without government approval.
The defence case, argued passionately by Capt Kelly for the past 32 years, was that he was acting under proper orders with the approval of the then minister for defence, Mr Jim Gibbons, the only person who could lawfully approve such action.
The defendants were acquitted. Jurors located by an RTÉ Prime Time programme in 2000 indicated they had acquitted them precisely because they believed the operation had broader government approval. The existence of such approval was always denied by the late Mr Gibbons, a key prosecution witness, and the then minister for justice, Mr O'Malley.
Unanswered questions remain, and documents to emerge in the coming few years may provide at least some answers.