Human Rights: The disturbing story of the conviction of Nicky Kelly for a crime he didn't commit
The Nicky Kelly case was a sorry chapter in the history of the Irish courts and the Garda Síochána. The Special Criminal Court found as a fact that a judge who was plainly asleep for much of Kelly's trial for the 1976 Sallins mail train robbery was awake and alert throughout. The Supreme Court agreed and only the death of the sleeping judge in mid trial ended that judicial charade.
In a new trial Kelly and two co- accused were convicted on the basis of false confessions that were beaten out of them. The court explained their obvious injuries by saying that they must have beaten themselves up or beaten each other up. Nicky Kelly had not waited for the verdict, however. He jumped bail and fled to the US. He was convicted in his absence.
Thirty years on from the train robbery Patsy McGarry has written, in collaboration with Nicky Kelly, a disturbing account of Kelly's case, his time on the run in Europe and the US and his long struggle for his freedom and to clear his name.
Kelly came back to Ireland in 1980 after the convictions of his co-accused, Osgur Breathnach and Brian McNally, were overturned on appeal and after the Provisional IRA had admitted they had carried out the robbery and said Kelly and the others were innocent. But the courts rejected Kelly's appeal and he had to spend four years in prison and go on a 38-day hunger strike before he was released on "humanitarian grounds" in 1984.
It took another eight years before Nicky Kelly's conviction was finally erased by a Presidential pardon and he was awarded compensation. The courts have never acknowledged that they got it wrong and jailed an innocent man and there has never been an inquiry into how Kelly and his colleagues came to confess in detail to something they did not do.
Patsy McGarry details Nicky Kelly's account of the sustained beatings and brutality that led him to sign a confession at 5.15am after his second night in custody but it is worrying that it took McGarry 13 years to find a publisher prepared to go ahead with the book and that even then he had to delete the names of the gardaí allegedly involved.
McGarry pays well-earned tribute to earlier books on the case by Gene Kerrigan and the late Derek Dunne and by Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh, but as well as introducing the case to a new generation, he has the advantage of two new elements. He includes an interview with a member of the IRA gang who actually robbed the train and who confirms that Kelly and his colleagues had nothing to do with it; and he gives an account of the long campaign to vindicate Kelly.
Familiar names turn up in the campaign, like Christy Moore, whose song about the case, The Wicklow Boy, was banned from the airwaves, and the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four. Indeed it is possible the campaign would not have succeeded if it had not coincided with the mass protests over the miscarriages of justice involving Irish prisoners in England. Irish governments could not be seen to ignore their own miscarriage of justice while protesting about injustices to the Irish in England.
McGarry also puts the Kelly case in the context of more recent events and stresses its contemporary relevance. Pointing to the damning criticism of Garda conduct in the Dean Lyons, Abbeylara and McBrearty cases, he argues that if there had been an independent inquiry into the Nicky Kelly case it might have stopped the growth of a culture in the Garda of taking short cuts, breaking rules and turning a blind eye to misconduct that has led to the abuses chronicled by the Morris Tribunal.
As another spate of gangland killings sparks angry demands for new draconian measures to combat crime, this book is a timely reminder that taking short cuts and undermining hard-won rights can result in serious injustice to innocent people.
Michael Farrell is a solicitor with Free Legal Advice Centres. He is a former journalist and was actively involved in the campaigns for the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and Judith Ward. He is a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission
While Justice Slept: The True Story of Nicky Kelly and the Sallins Train Robbery By Patsy McGarry The Liffey Press, 251pp. €16.95