The murder of senior Portlaoise Prison officer Brian Stack 42 years ago had three consequences of utmost seriousness, his son Austin asserts: family devastation; inadequate Garda investigations; and an IRA admission of responsibility after repeatedly denying involvement.
An inter-county GAA referee and boxing club supremo, Brian Stack survived for 18 months after being shot in the back on South Circular Road in Dublin on March 25th, 1983, but he was paralysed from the neck down, brain-damaged and intermittently comatose in hospital or at home with his wife Sheila and three young sons.
The inquest verdict was that death was due to the injuries sustained in the shooting. This authorised a murder hunt, but the initial Garda investigation was slipshod, dilatory and possibly subverted from within. Subsequent “cold case” reviews were practically fruitless, Stack writes. The “standard excuse” offered was: “It was the 1980s – things are done differently today,” he adds.
The IRA admission came after Stack approached Sinn Féin president and Louth TD Gerry Adams following an emphatic public assertion by the then Portlaoise-based Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley during a general election campaign that “the IRA had nothing to do with the murder of Brian Stack”. Adams escorted Stack and one of his brothers in a blacked-out van to a secret rendezvous close to the Border where a friend of Adams who described himself as a former senior IRA figure read a statement that “IRA volunteers shot your father”.
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Errors aside (Jack Lynch sacked Charlie Haughey before, not after, the arms trials; the Civil War came after, not before, the Treaty split; the 1982-87 minister for agriculture was Austin, not John, Deasy), this account of 40 years of tenacious, relentless probing by Stack and his family is an important and bleak retrospective on Ireland during the Troubles.
[ From the archive: Adams 'found out in 2013' that IRA killed Brian StackOpens in new window ]
Stack dedicates the book to his mother Sheila “and the other widows of the Irish security forces that the IRA left behind”. He says that “they suffered the most but gained the least from the Irish Peace Process”.
He adds: “They grieved for their husbands, raised their families and watched the terrorists go free all at the same time ... the country owes them a great debt.”
