Sore festers 50 years after Arms Crisis
By Damian McCarney
A woman whose father’s reputation was tarnished in the fall out from the Arms Trial of 1970 believes the State must restore his good name to achieve closure.
This October marks 50 years since arguably the most significant trial held in the Republic in the 20th Century, and one of the figures at its centre was Captain James Kelly.
The Bailieborough man had been charged with the attempted illegal importation of arms, along with others, most notably ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney.
Although the arms trial established that Captain James Kelly was not guilty, his family insist that he was wrongly blamed and vilified by the Fianna Fáil government in the years that followed.
A new book ‘The Arms Crisis of 1970: The Plot That Never Was’ by Dr. Michael Heney supports the Kelly family’s claims by outlining how Captain Kelly accepted that he had attempted to bring in weapons, but said he was only following his superior’s orders in his actions.
“My father’s defence always was, he was only an army officer who did what he was told,” said Suzanne Kelly.
“He had a boss, called Colonel Hefferon...and he gave evidence in the trial that everything my father did, he was fully informed of, and that he knew everything that was going on.
“The point I make is that he should never have been charged. It came very close - he was nearly convicted and nearly spent 15 or 20 years in jail, so it was quite serious for our family.”
Suzanne acknowledges that what happened during the conflict has distorted the lens through which some may perceive the events of 1970.
Defenceless nationalist communities had come under attack by loyalists, aided by British security forces in summer 1969.
As such, there was a move to support newly established ‘Nationalist Defence Committees’, and provide arms that could be used to defend themselves; not wage war.
“It was very respectable," she says of the ‘Nationalist Defence Committees’.
“Contrary to the image, which is to say ‘oh it was all the Provos - you brought in money for the Provos’. It wasn’t. These were representative members from the northern community.”
Suzanne has a list compiled by her father of the Defence Committee members, and the trustees of the Defence Fund.
She estimates that maybe three subsequently joined the Provisional IRA, a similar number subsequently joined the Official IRA, and “in the middle were just a morass of ordinary people who were just worried and concerned."
Suzanne actually attended the trial, along with her younger sister Jackie, to watch her father under cross-examination.
"All our uncles and aunts were there as well,” recalls Suzanne, who would later become a tax lawyer, and the first lady president of the Institute of Taxation.
While the trial almost sounded like a day out, and Captain Kelly appeared to take the grilling in court in his stride, Suzanne says that the Arms Crisis was a stressful time for the Kellys.
Warned that trouble imminent, her father resigned from the army in April 1970 to ensure prosecution in court with a jury, rather than a military court martial.
“They were under terrible stress,” she said of her parents. “I would hear them at night, worried, talking about it in the bathroom.
“At night they would be discussing it and you would hear them discussing it, and they would say, ‘God I wonder what’s going to happen today? I wonder, who’s going to say what?
"I wonder will so and so tell the truth?’ And because everything was coming at such a rate at them, they weren’t able to read it, they were only able to respond to it at the time."
While the jury found in favour of Captain Kelly and his co-accused, given the media furore and the high political stakes at risk, the blemish of the accusation could not be cleansed.
Dr. Heney describes Captain Kelly as “collateral damag."
“We thought that when the trial was over, that that would be then end of it and life would go on as normal - like COVID, it would be an episode in your life - it would be shut and you would go back to normal,” said Suzanne.
“But unfortunately it wasn’t good enough for the Fianna Fáil government at the time that we would go back to normal and so they interfered with our lives all the time.
“It wasn’t enough that he was found not guilty at the trial - then they decided to say well the trial wasn’t correct and he really was an evil person - and they set about following us and haunting us and passing around rumours about us.”
She suspects that they undermined his attempts to rebuild his life.
“Every time he got a job a phonecall would come and he would be removed from his job.”
Captain Kelly gave his personal accounts of the events of the Arms Crisis in a book ‘Orders for the Captain?’ published in 1971, and proceeded to return home to Bailieborough to run the West End Bar, which incidentally his father had previously owned.
In an interview in 2007 for ‘The Detail’ website, the late Sheila Kelly told journalist Steven McCaffrey that after the trial they had people come to the house, whispering through the letterbox.
“If I went out to the supermarket, they would follow me. At night we used to have phone calls and you’d get these fellas threatening us that they would do all sorts of things to us if we didn’t stop giving out about Jack Lynch.
"Then another man came and he said I’d keep track of the car if I were you, an attempt might be made to interfere with the steering of the car. This was the kind of terror they were instilling into you.”
Despite the harassment, Captain Kelly continued to vehemently deny he did anything wrong and campaigned for official recognition of this.
But it never came. Ultimately lung cancer claimed his life in 2003.
“Even when he was on his deathbed, he wanted the State to do something and to acknowledge that they had done him wrong.
"I pretended that a letter had come and told him the clearance had come. And he died then, because he was happy then that he thought he had got clearance in the end.
“What could I do? He was there hanging on, looking for it. I thought he wasn’t going to go peacefully to his end unless he got a reassurance.”
In light of his passing, Bertie Ahern, then Taoiseach issued a statement asserting that Captain Kelly had acted on “what he believed were he proper orders of his superiors.
"Historians will make their own judgements about the events of that era. I have never found any reason to doubt his integrity.”
It fell somewhat short of the Kelly family’s expectations.
“That wasn’t really enough - you want something more formal. My mother always said he should have been made posthumously an honorary colonel, so as the State would acknowledge that they didn’t treat him right. The government needs to do something towards closure.”
She shares her mother’s assertion that elevation in rank is a more appropriate way for the official Ireland to atone.
Suzanne insists she doesn’t need closure having lived with the episode for 50 years, but the Republic does.
“I think the State needs to close the matter because what the State did was really wrong - they decided to trump up charges and drag people who were absolutely guilty of nothing through a trial in order to achieve a political objective of getting rid of their enemies in Fianna Fáil, so that they would be safe in the party.
"I think if you have a stain in a government like that, if it’s not dealt with, it sends out the message that you can treat citizens badly and there’s no accountability.”
The ‘Arms Crisis’ book has injected much-needed impetus to the family’s campaign to posthumously promote Captain Kelly to rank of honorary colonel.
Suzanne regards Dr. Heney’s book as “terrific”.
“He was able to pull out the records and look at what the truth was - not based on believing what my father wrote - but in actual fact, finding the documentation. And he spent years at it. It’s a real detective novel.”
Asked if she is holding her breath that the new government will act accordingly, Suzanne notes that Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s idol is Jack Lynch.
“If I meet Micheál, I’m going to say ‘Micheál, sometimes idols have feet of clay. Read this book by Michael Heney and come back to me and let’s have a chat’.”
However, with the anniversary approaching, it’s not too late for this government to act.
“It would also say to other people: Don’t give up. Even if it is 50 years, you still can get justice.”