Sir, – I would like to echo the sentiments of Eamonn Annraoi Blaney’s recent letter (March 28th) concerning the impugning of their father the late Neil Blaney by Des O’Malley (March 26th). I agree with Mr Blaney that it is unfair to excoriate his father in this way, particularly as not all of the information and files around the time have been released into the public domain. I would reiterate Mr Blaney’s call for an inquiry into the period, for it is my belief that the Arms Trial was precipitated by the killing of my father, who in April 1970 was murdered by bank robbers in a laneway in Dublin city centre while on duty as an unarmed Garda.
There remains in the Department of Justice a file from the period that has been retained on foot of a certificate from former taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s department which is yet to be released for public review. As a former Justice Minister Mr O’Malley would have access to this file, while I do not.
Incredibly many years prior to the file being retained, Mr Ahern’s father had been questioned in connection with my father’s death, a fact that was shared in a more recent biography of our former taoiseach. While not wishing to damage the reputation of Mr Ahern’s father, I would ask how appropriate it was for Mr Ahern to have been connected with the retention of this file while historically he had such a potentially personal connection with the issue?
While I now doubt the provenance and completeness of this file, I believe that it may well contain information which is further damaging to the Fianna Fáil regime of the time.
In 2001 while Mr O’Malley was participating in a Dáil debate about the Arms Trial he is recorded as having said, “Yet there is some reason to believe Garda Fallon may have been murdered in April 1970 with a weapon which had been part of earlier illegal arms shipments into the State.”
It remains to be seen exactly when Mr O’Malley became aware of this possibility and what he did about it. Despite my efforts to clarify this issue with Mr O’Malley some years ago, I did not receive a clear response. He has also described the work that was being done then as a fire-fighting exercise. Mr O’Malley is also on the Oireachtas record as suggesting that as part of an extradition process around 1972 seeking to bring a man home for trial concerning the murder of my father, there had been an agreement with the British authorities that the death penalty would not be imposed. If true, such an arrangement would be revelatory in what it might say about the influence of the government of the day on the judicial process.
In my opinion there are many unanswered questions about the period which still have resonance and relevance to what is being experienced in Ireland today. It is a pity that Mr O’Malley should have written in this way on a subject about which he has privileged information not freely available to us all and in connection with people who are not around to defend their actions. Such statements would be better made in the more formal arena of an inquiry.
The late Mr Blaney is also on record as alleging that the murder of my father was witnessed by members of Special Branch, a scenario which poses a myriad of questions that remain to this day. – Yours, etc,